The Key Learning Points:

1. Workplace cultural challenges faced by women, ways to reclaim your power and the importance of doing so

2. Digital marketing approaches around life insurance and how they need to change as you move down the marketing funnel

3. The role of women in households today, the importance of recognising unpaid care and the use of targeted marketing messages to close the female protection gap

On this week's remote Risky Mix podcast, we're joined by Vickie Smith, now Chief Marketing Officer at Falling Rain, a global data privacy company, and a lady with lots of experience marketing life insurance in the US. Vickie calls herself an ‘international digital nomad’ and is speaking to us today from Barcelona. We’re looking forward to hearing more about her travels in this episode and diving into the world of marketing insurance.

Vickie started her career as a receptionist at an internet security company in Georgia and quickly moved into the marketing team. After a few years, Vickie moved to New York and secured a marketing job for a cable TV provider. In 2007, she moved back to Massachusetts, where she was born and raised, and joined a marketing agency which served non-profits. Eight years later she entered the world of insurance and joined a large corporation looking to launch a new direct-to-consumer offering. At the same time, she returned to school to get her MBA and recalls the learnings she gathered around D&I: “Schools, nowadays, are really aware of the struggles that diversity and gender and all these things - how they impact people in the workplace. They are teaching skills to develop a healthier work environment.” Vickie admits that her work environment was “tough culturally” and focused on applying techniques that she’d learnt in school to “take back her power.”

Vickie spent five years working in life insurance in the US and explains some of her marketing frustrations: “The biggest difference I noticed right away with marketing in insurance is that it was a little tougher to be really creative.” She adds that this was mainly due to the brands she worked with and a desire for these established brands to remain consistent, and while these approaches originally worked, Vickie questions whether a different approach may be needed to reach today’s consumers. 

We talk about the marketing funnel and the approaches Vickie has seen work, at each stage, when it comes to life insurance. She explains that to get people engaged in your brand, the creative is really important, especially on channels like social media. But as you move down the funnel to the point where a consumer is about to purchase, thinking becomes more practical, more product-focused, more price-led, and this is where things can get complicated: “You have to pay attention to which channel you are in the marketing funnel. Is it awareness, where you have to be more creative? Or are you now going to lower in the funnel where they’re aware and about to make a decision?” 

The conversion moves onto women and the need to get more women financially protected. Vickie explains that the makeup of households is very different today: “Never have we had a time when there are so many different types of roles in the household. We have stay at home mums, we have two mums, we have two working parents, we have households with multi-generational homes.” She adds that all of these groups need unique marketing messages. She has some experience of running a marketing campaign around life insurance for a targeted group of women but adds: “I don’t think we were risky enough in how we said it. What happened was that the messaging became bland and safe.” She wishes they’d gone a bit further and had more fun with it.