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Every broker needs to market their business

Insurance & Risk Professional, October 2006

Every now and again it’s a good idea to take time off and just contemplate where your business is going. If you looked at the wider world of insurance broking to assess its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats – the famous SWOT analysis – you’d find insurance broking is looking something like this:

• Strengths: Brokers maintain an 80% hold on the commercial insurance market. They’re evolving into an even more professional, qualified and vital arm of business.
• Weaknesses: On the surface, very few, although I’d have to say that the value brokers bring to their clients – and potential clients – isn’t always well understood. We also risk being tarred by the same brush as other financial services intermediaries whose methods have attracted negative publicity.
  
  And we have to keep a close eye on our market penetration– are brokers “holding their own” in the commercial insurance market, or increasing their presence?
• Opportunities: Insurance and risk is an enormous sector, with many niches, specialties and new developments. There’s a great deal of room to move for entrepreneurial brokers with good ideas and determination.
• Threats: Where there’s opportunity and success, there’s going to be other groups trying to gain competitive advantage through price, product or service. We should remember direct insurers, lawyers and accountants have alternative ways of accessing the same market.

Of course, an analysis like this should take many pages and encompass a very wide range of factors. But it illustrates the point that insurance brokers can’t afford to rest on their laurels. If we want to keep our place in the sun, we have to keep working at it and evolving in line with market demand.

And we have to stay “up in front” of our clients and potential clients, reminding them why we’re so important to them. Our advice and claims expertise are what we’re good at.

It’s an issue that has been exercising our minds at NIBA, at Board and executive level. Earlier this year the Board approved a wide-ranging advertising campaign, using billboards and bus shelters in major cities and regional radio elsewhere, to make the point that brokers and business belong together.

At the NIBA Convention this month we’ve launched a three-month campaign urging people who may never before thought of having an insurance broker to find one through a new website, www.needabroker.com.au.

The campaign encourages all business owners and managers to contemplate how things would be if the broker wasn’t there to advise on the best ways to transfer risk, and to help sort out often-complex commercial claims.

There is a full explanation of the campaign beginning on page 32. What it makes obvious is that we want all brokers to get involved in the campaign by using the materials NIBA will deliver to you to promote your own brokerage.

It’s a terrific opportunity for brokers to “blow our own trumpet” – something I’m told brokers don’t do enough of.

Our marketing and PR consultants have often noted to me that most brokers need to promote themselves and the work they do for their clients. They say that applies just as much to the large corporates as it does to the small town or suburban brokers.

Immersed in their work, satisfied with their client base and the good feedback they get from clients, it’s all too easy for brokers to lose sight of the need to constantly “refresh” perceptions of their businesses.

That’s why NIBA has re-launched its Marketing Kit, which goes out in installments each month to member companies. The feedback from members to this initiative has been very positive, and I hope everyone is taking the point that promoting your business – big or small – is very important.

While it’s very easy to put aside the need to market our own services to our clients –and potential clients – we should consider the fact that many small business owners treat their insurance needs much the same way.

Concentrating on the day-to-day issues of their businesses, it’s all too easy for business people to shove their insurance requirements to the side because it’s not central to their overriding need to keep the business ticking over.

Small business owners may decide they’ll get insurance the most convenient way – via the telephone – because it takes the least time and requires the least effort. When things go wrong is far too late to discover how valuable the broker is.

Every business needs an insurance broker, true. But it’s equally true that every insurance broker needs to promote their services and their valuable place in the business world.