And here is the third part of our Back To School series, in which we seek valuable insights from our senior leadership team on the things they’ve learned, both in the current roles and along the way.
Next up, is Gavin Peters, Genasys’ Chief Marketing Officer. In this short article he offers his thoughts on how customer centricity and brand strategy can help insurance businesses grab the upper hand.
Customer-Centric Insurance Marketing: How do you ensure that Genasys’ marketing strategies are truly customer-centric, and what have you learned about aligning marketing efforts with customer needs and expectations?
It’s absolutely ‘Marketing 101’, but understanding your customers must be the foundation of everything you do in a marketing strategy—yet it is probably less prioritised than ever before. With so much information available and vying for your time (product data, industry thought leadership, new martech platforms, wider trends to follow, etc.), it’s easy to become overwhelmed and forget that your best source of knowledge is simply to sit down with your customers and actually listen.
A well-planned hour with your current customers and target prospects will do far more to validate your thinking, offer fresh insights, and challenge previous assumptions than any number of hours spent reading industry reports and watching webinars. As marketers, we need to maintain a full perspective and keep abreast of all of the above, but regular one-to-one meetings with the right personas are absolute gold dust.
Brand Strategy: What have been the most important lessons you’ve learned about building and maintaining a strong brand in the insurance technology space?
Having moved from B2C to B2B marketing in my career, I’ve gained some really valuable insights from both sides that I try to bring to Genasys. I believe that any brand can learn a lot from successful B2C marketing: being distinctive, human, and engaging are crucial no matter what product or service you’re selling. At the end of the day, we’re all talking to people. The key thing I think the best brands do well is have absolute clarity and consistency in everything they do. It should always feel like you are engaging with the same company, whether it’s an ad or a call from a Customer Success Manager.
But there are also things that the best B2B brands do well that wouldn’t work in B2C, and vice versa. When communicating about insurance technology, we have a significant educational role to play, and we understand that this isn’t a simple purchase. One of the key learnings for me is that at each stage we’re talking to (often different) people in a specific place and frame of mind over a very long sales cycle. The key to getting it right is truly understanding the purchase journey so we can add genuine value at every stage, in the most familiar and appropriate way, whilst remaining true to our overall brand values.
Digital Transformation: With the ongoing digital transformation in marketing, what key insights have you gained about leveraging digital channels to reach and engage with your target audience effectively?
Sticking with the theme of consistency, we apply our brand principles to how we approach our marketing planning and execution. As a business, Genasys helps make technology simpler for our customers by focusing on a few core things, doing them really well, and making it as easy as possible. When it comes to digital marketing, we follow that same philosophy.
There are so many channels available and new innovations to consider, but we know we’re always going to get 80% of the benefit from 20% of the output, so we focus fully on those that give us the best engagement with our target market. We certainly could reach a few extra prospects by being on every channel, but our quality would drop. For me, it’s about doing more with less: mastering the right channels and testing and learning what works within a clear framework. By understanding what works for you and doing it really well, you can innovate without spreading yourself too thin, and add more as you scale without negatively impacting quality elsewhere.
Measuring Success: How do you measure the success of your insurance marketing campaigns, and what have you learned about adapting strategies based on performance data and market feedback?
As with most modern marketing teams, we rely heavily on analysis and data—it’s crucial to helping you grow and evolve. With all the metrics available, if you’re not tracking your key information, you’re likely to miss valuable insights. However, I strongly believe you can quickly get sucked into ‘analysis paralysis’—being so focused on analysing data that your output suffers—or, perhaps worse, making poor decisions based on over-reliance on the wrong ‘insight’.
Having come from a market research background, I am very aware of how important good-quality data is, and I have regularly seen the impact of misunderstanding valid sample sizes or confusing cause and correlation effects. At Genasys, our approach is to measure as much as we can, but always consider the bigger picture rather than taking any data at face value—for example, using both quantitative and qualitative information when devising and adapting our strategy and campaigns.
If you could offer your younger self one piece of advice when starting a career in marketing, what would it be?
Where possible, keep it simple. You can’t do everything, so just choose what works well for you and do it well. Which feels like an appropriately short answer to end on!
Thank you for joining us for this insightful conversation and be sure to tay tuned for more expert perspectives in our Back to School series, where we continue to explore the strategies shaping the future of our industry.
