November 30, 2023/Coronation Insurance

The foundation of winning know-your-customer strategies

Winning in the competitive world of short-term insurance relies on understanding the precise profile of the person(s) that insurers should be delighting with excellent customer service.  

Fortunately, in a digital age with big data, “delivering tailored marketing and developing bespoke services for customers that you understand in detail is entirely possible,” says Nelson Madu, Head of Information Technology at Coronation Insurance.

In short, building a well-rounded buyer persona strategy is a critical enabler of outperformance in today’s highly competitive insurance sector. 

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of a company’s ideal customer. A buyer persona is based on market research, including actual data from existing and prospective customers.

Buyer persona helps companies focus their marketing effort on the most likely buyer by “painting a detailed picture of customer income, situations, motivations, challenges, information needs and preferred service formats,” explains Oluwafemi Badero, Head of corporate team.

While buyer personas are fictional concepts created through a conceptual blend of real customers, potential leads, market research and an organisation’s professional network, they can be highly instructive in providing perspectives beyond the immediate brand. 

“Existing customers are a great starting point to identify what customers want and what works for them. Potential leads help identify how products and services can evolve to appeal to broader customers. Research and an organisation’s professional network aid in developing a buyer persona aligned with the sector, market, or professional reality, explains Badero.

Coronation Insurance, for example, has seven buyer personas: ultra-high and high net worth, Upper and Mass Affluent, Middle and Floating Class Middle Class, and Emerging Clients. Clear and distinct profiles were developed for each persona. These profiles laid out the disposal income, population size, estimated savings, purchasing power, risk appetite, and purchase and investment behaviour of each persona.

Buyer persona is essential for building market and sales strategies as they highlight the most relevant traits of target customers. At Coronation Insurance, for example, our data showed that Middle Class and Emerging Client personas represented the most prominent groups and had the most tremendous saving potential. These savings represented a significant opportunity for the insurance sector to target these segments with insurance products tailored to protect their unique wealth and asset profiles. As such, these buyer personas were particularly useful in “helping craft strategies designed to educate these segments, to use insurance and to preserve and grow wealth in contexts that are immediate and personally relevant to them,” explains Badero.

More generally, embarking on a buyer persona process allows organisations to:

• Provide valuable behavioural insights focused on customers’ genuine needs and concerns. Brands that solve customers’ real needs and ambitions develop an immediate rapport and quickly build trust. 
• Leverage personal detail to develop clear, relevant and precisely targeted messages.
• Deepen consumer engagement by familiarising businesses with their customers’ real challenges and concerns. Customers who feel understood are more likely to continue to engage over the longer term. 
• Build loyalty as customers gravitate towards bands that consistently solve their pain points and can be relied upon to assist them in their daily struggles. 

You can only anticipate future customers’ needs by understanding who they are. Madu believes that identifying and laying out “ideal customer demographics, jobs, income, personal circumstances, ambitions, challenges, pain points and preferences makes it significantly easier to craft solutions and service formats your desired customers want.”

Organisations often use three conceptual frameworks to create a buyer persona: investigation, interview and visualisation. After that, specific factors to consider when developing buyer personas include: 

• Demographics include age, gender, location, income, education and family circumstances. 
• Psychographics like personality traits, values, interests, lifestyle and behaviour patterns.
• Pain points like problems, challenges, obstacles and frustrations. 
• Buying behaviour such as how, when, and why customers make purchasing decisions or prioritise the allocation of disposable and non-disposable income. 
• Goals and motivations like what customers hope to achieve, what drives them to purchase, and what they value most.

Accurate buyer personas inform the most effective marketing strategies. They also provide a matrix to measure the impact of marketing efforts accurately. 

By “providing real numbers on attraction, engagement and retention, a buyer persona can also be used to assess the effectiveness of strategies, tactics and even individual performance against sales and customer service targets”, explains Badero.

Coronation Insurance, for instance, uses its seven persona profiles to understand how the brand is received and understood by different categories of existing and potential customers. This analysis also allows Coronation to measure the return on investment marketing collateral and other brand-building elements. Finally, an articulated persona strategy enables the effectiveness of sales teams to be assessed by their ability to cover each target persona in addition to the revenue generated. 

Most importantly, a clearly researched and properly articulated buyer persona provides staff with a clear, human picture of their clients and what they need. This allows organisations to develop a personalised view of the client, inspiring truly client-led approaches to product development and service provision. 

The Accenture survey, titled ‘The Voice of the Customer: Identifying Disruptive Opportunities in Insurance Distribution’, categorises insurance customers into three groups based on their preferences and behaviours. These groups are Nomads, Hunters, and Quality Seekers.