With a focus on providing relevant and useful content to our partners, the marketing team face three interconnected challenges:
- Keeping abreast of our partners’ needs and keeping up-to-date with what’s happening in the market
- Ensuring we’re using the most relevant channels - with opportunities to meet face-to-face having been removed, this feels particularly important just now and networks have a crucial part to play
- How we engage with our partners, to cut through all the noise - delivering key messages via email, virtual events, webinars and video
Our Head of Marketing, Forbes Campbell, is committed to understanding our broker partners’ operating rhythms, the ways in which they engage their customers and to really get under the skin of any challenges that they encounter offering and understanding finance.
Marketing to the Networks
Fair exchange
Our relationship with networks isn’t transactional, but there’s a mutual benefit to working in close collaboration with key network contacts. Premium Credit can demystify premium finance, providing tools and knowledge to network members for an increasingly in-demand payment choice. Networks provide us with established communication channels via their newsletters, websites and member hubs – benefitting us with the trusted advisor status they’ve built with their member base.
Our aim is to become a true partner to networks. We are well equipped to deliver on this goal when taking the following into account:
- The breadth and depth of our industry relationships
- Our commitment to constantly refine our proposition
- Digital innovations to enhancing the customer journey
- Improving our customer outcomes
- Continually contributing to new partnerships
- Developing new 3rd party partnerships (in particular, software partners)
Modern approach
Knowing that our partners are hungry for rich content but short on time, we focus on the format of our marketing messages. We recently expanded our team to include a talented graphic and motion designer, who has opened new avenues of content presentation. Video and animation are everywhere right now and as consumers, we’ve become accustomed to consuming video as an engaging alternative to the written word. Other visual formats such as infographics also have disproportionately high appeal and answer the demands of the data-hungry audience.
Video is the #1 form of media used in content strategy, overtaking blogs and infographics (Source: HubSpot Research, North American Survey, Jan - Feb 2020)
Thinking of how else we can drive ‘bite sized’ information quickly and easily to our broker partners, we utilise social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter to drive our messages across our network. These contemporary methods complement our existing content distribution channels such as newsletters or brochures, events – all of which are consistently branded with our recently refreshed corporate branding which reflects a new chapter in our history.
Due to the advent of COVID-19 many of our events have either been cancelled out right or been converted to a virtual format. Although this may be a temporary solution, it does yield some interesting outcomes, which we may elect to continue doing after things return to ‘real’ normal. For example, when attending conferences and trade show, there is very limited opportunity to engage with speakers or specific industry peers or experts. While in a virtual format, the ‘chat box’ functionality enables the whole audience to benefit from a pertinent question. The irony is that the remote or virtual format brings a sense of inclusiveness, which one can experience quite the opposite in the face to face version. Another happy benefit of the virtual format is that one can participate as a presenter in a full road show and thereby increasing the opportunity for potential brokers to interact. This has certainly been a case in point for Christian Elson and Chris Emmanuel, who are presenting in BIBA’s Tour of the Regions virtual roadshow.
Future focus
We are proud of the large-scale digital innovations we launched to the market in recent years and as an extension of that work, coupled with the refined mode of our messages, we are focusing on developing material to demonstrate the benefits of these innovations, which are already available to them. Some of the benefits include:
- Paperless way of working
- Faster signature of Credit Agreements
- Confidence in a 100% compliant offer of finance
We want to make the offer of finance as simple as possible and the question of ‘how would you like to pay?’ shouldn’t feel like you’re launching into another long discussion. It should be as simple as ‘here are some options I’ve prepared for you, based on the premium we’ve discussed today’ – that’s what we’re working towards.
Ask your network for more information about how Premium Credit can help you make an offer of finance more confidently.
In 2020, more than ever, we've sought to engage our network partners, with whom we share a variety of goals. The networks are constantly refreshing and expanding the ways they add value to their members, and premium finance can be a part of that.
