Recognising that small businesses are 10 percent more likely to be un-insured than larger businesses, IAG’s entry in the B2B Marketing Strategy category set about offering an insurance product for tradies that spoke their language.

Tradies on the tools

Identifying that 33 percent of the SME market is made up of SME construction businesses, it became apparent that targeting this audience would allow room for growth, so IAG launched the AMI Tradies Insurance campaign.

This campaign first needed to change the mindset of SMEs who believed they needed to purchase business insurance through an insurance broker while making insurance more relevant to this group– ultimately addressing the issue of un-insurance, and protecting the backbone of the economy.

Research showed that construction business owners often did not see themselves as traditional business owners at all, with many of them identifying more as tradies themselves, on the tools with their team. 

In response to this AMI focused on what would encourage the un-insured tradie, and those who prefer dealing with a broker, to consider choosing AMI.

This meant building a bespoke insurance package for the construction segment – one that spoke to them and avoided insurance jargon.

The campaign also had to overcome the perceived complexity of insurance, particularly business insurance.

In order to achieve this, the Tradies Bundle packaged up all the products tradies would most likely need in a way that made it simple to purchase and didn’t require lots of effort or research.

Consumer apathy was another challenge this campaign had to address as many people, especially business owners, are already busy with day-to-day tasks and insurance often becomes low on the priority list.

To beat this, the campaign needed to be extremely relevant to the audience. All communications, touchpoints and purchase journey needed to feel simple and seamless.

Many of the un-insured tradies were working from their homes or vans and incorrectly assumed their personal insurance would cover them if anything went wrong. Many did not see business insurance as relevant to them as they use the same tools, vehicles, phones, computers for work and in their home lives.

In order to properly understand the audience and build a proposition just for them, AMI underwent a much more robust customer testing process than usual.

This included showing Tradies the adverts and asking very specific questions about the tools they use, what they hear on site and the language they use. Although this is not uncommon, having this depth of customer feedback proved crucial to the campaigns success.

Creative for this package included real examples of what could potentially go wrong on site putting tools at the centre and utilising channels that made it likely tradies would see it, such as construction building site wraps.

The campaign also spoke in language tradies would be familiar with, such as calling a drop saw a droppy and made sure to cover many different types of trades such as drainlayers, sparkies and more.

With this campaign, AMI set out to achieve two goals; brand success and business success. It overachieved on both counts.

Not only did the Tradies campaign increase the customer count of tradies during the campaign period ensuring more Kiwis were protected, but it also contributed an overall lift in brand consideration across the whole market for AMI, resulting in the highest consideration score in 12 months.  

Categories
Excellence in B2B Marketing Strategy and Excellence in Financial & Banking Marketing Strategy

Company
IAG

Marketing Initiative
AMI Tradies

Judges’ Comments
“AMI demonstrate that they really understand the SME market and made strategic choices to focus on the tradies segment. They then packaged a product that was tailored specifically to this segment and used their language to deliver outstanding results.”

Finalists
(B2B) Lenovo New Zealand; Realcold New Zealand; Southern Cross Health Insurance; Spark IoT (Financial & Banking) ANZ; IAG (State Mistake Report); Unity Money

Enter the 2023 TVNZ-NZ Marketing Awards

Got a marketing strategy worthy of these awards? Enter them into 2023 TVNZ-NZ Marketing Awards today. Entries close at 5pm on April 28, 2023.

This article was originally published in the September/October 2022 issue of NZ Marketing. Click here to subscribe.