As an insurance brokerage in 2022, you have a lot on your plate: market changes, new coverages, hiring for today and the future… and integrating technology into your business including marketing platforms.  The question often arises, should you build and manage your own marketing tech stack? Or should you work with an agency who has expertise in implementing, managing and driving value from these tools? 

Like most big-picture decisions with your business, there’s no single right answer. Depending on the resources and expertise within your brokerage you may be able to manage your marketing technology in house. Still, you should consider this: to meet your business growth objectives does re-allocating your already busy insurance resources to manage your marketing technology make the most sense? 

At Goose Digital, we work with a lot of Insurance providers and found that we’ve consistently helped maximize their marketing technology investments. This notion rings true for clients with in-house marketing teams where we support as an extension of this team and for those who have no marketing resources at all.

Managing Your Own Tech Stack

The challenge with managing your tech stack is that it pulls insurance brokers away from their primary roles. Whether your marketing tech and automation needs are highly complicated or a bit more simplified, they still require understanding of multiple marketing platforms. To get the most out of them, you will need a dedicated resource to learn and manage them.

You could hire an in-house marketing team, but this can be expensive and challenging. To be successful, you will need not only a seasoned marketing resource but one that understands the automation and digital landscape and the insurance industry.

And if you want to go even further in-house, there’s also the option of building your own custom technology. This option, though, requires even more specialized resources and significant investment both to build and then to update to incorporate new features and functionality. You’ve also got to keep up with security and customer expectations, planning 18 to 24 months ahead. If you don’t stay vigilant with your DIY tech stack, you’ll quickly see gaps and limitations.. While it might initially seem appealing to have a platform custom built for your business needs, the cost benefit of doing so when there are so many best of breed platforms in the market doesn’t make this a worthwhile option for most insurance brokers. And If you haven’t noticed, none of this leverages the core value that insurance providers present of managing and mitigating risk.

Partnering With An Agency

The right agency will be able to help develop your insurance growth strategy and then introduce and align automation and digitization where it presents the greatest opportunities. These include  sourcing and driving new revenue, optimizing  retention and finding efficiencies. This can only occur when the agency has knowledge and expertise of the both MarTech landscape and an understanding of the insurance industry.

Many brokerages have hyper specific approaches to drive new business and engage existing customers. While there are many platforms and vendors out there, it’s not always obvious how to marry the tech with these industry specific use cases. We’ve seen vendors who try to squeeze the proverbial square peg into the round hole and force an insurance marketing process or journey follow a route that doesn’t make sense.

Unsurprisingly, this results in frustration and reduced confidence in the role that marketing technology can play in your business development.

At Goose, we have leveraged our expertise with platforms such as Salesforce, HubSpot and Act-On to build 20 out of the box insurance specific use cases. In working with brokers, carriers and MGAs for the last 5 years we have learned how to manage these platforms to marry best of breed technology with automated processes that resonate and drive value for the Insurance industry. 

We’ve become expert partners for insurance brokerages like yours. 

Making The Right Choice for Your Brokerage

Whether you go the route of building and managing your own tech stack, or working with a partner keep this in mind: having a marketing tech stack in place won’t automatically drive value. It’s critical to ensure that you have the right platforms to support your business and clients. Your options are to invest in in-house resources that can manage all of this, taking away resources that could be put towards insurance expertise or working with an agency who understands digital and market automation platforms and the insurance industry.

Need help deciding which direction to go? We can help. Contact us today to find out more.