A Hard Market: The Intersection of COVID and Rising Rates
Like all industries and businesses, Commercial Insurance has taken a beating over the last couple years. From the pandemic and civil unrest to economic uncertainty and an abundance of disastrous weather events, the past year has seen a change in the way we live, work, and conduct business.
No longer could our producers rely on golf course conversations or business lunches that ran into happy hour. Not only did COVID impact our ability for face-to-face meetings, but the commercial insurance industry had been "hardening" (meaning increased rates) for the past 18 months, with double digit increases for many insurance lines.
Suddenly, marketing was at the forefront of everyone's mind. Our sales team and leadership were looking to the marketing team to answer their burning questions. How do we keep our clients and prospects up to date on the latest COVID-related news? How do we prepare our clients for rough renewals? How do we continue to be heard and relavent? How do we get prospects to talk to us (and how do we even get a pipeline)?
My team quickly regrouped and made a plan. First and foremost, our clients and prospects were no longer "just P&C's", they were businesses with complex issues that needed comprehensive, wholistic solutions. As a wholistic marketing team (corporate and business lines), we stood up over 75 webinars throughout 2020 on topics ranging from mental health and vaccine implications to PPP loans, tax credits and impacts to insurance policies. We created a COVID (now Accelerated Recovery) hub with articles, webinars and content all intended to help a business survive these unprecedented times. We launched client and prospect nurture campaigns, producer campaigns (focused on niche industries) and all CBIZ client/prospect campaigns with the intention of sending leads to our sales team. Our team generated 3000 leads specifically for our P&C sales team that led to $1.4M worth of opened oppportunity in 2020. We have created numerous "lead magnets" on topics that are top of mind for our clients and prospects. We use content syndication platforms to ensure our content is in front of the right people. By integrating into saleforce, we are able to have a seamless flow of leads from all marketing channels, whether its email, content syndication, social media or our website.
Link to our Commercial blogs (of which my team is solely responsible): https://www.cbiz.com/insurance-hr/services/property-casualty/news-info
Examples of some of the content pieces that I personally have developed:
CBIZIns_Loss_Control_Auto Dealership_Checklist_final.pdf
CBIZIns_Loss_Control_Prop_Managers_Checklist_final 1.pdf
CBIZIns_D&O Scorecard March 2021 FINAL.pdf
CBIZIns_COVID19_Vaccine Workplace Checklist_AR.pdf
Link to an ondemand webinar that I created the presentation for and "ran" the webcast: Vaccines & the Return to the Office – a Workplace Outlook - cbiz (wistia.com) (over 900 registrants and 525 attendees for live webcast.)