Movers & Shakers of Marketing: Trevor Lloyd-Jones

In our third edition of The Movers & Shakers of Marketing, we catch up with Trevor Lloyd-Jones, Senior Marketing Manager – Content at LexisNexis Risk Solutions. Trevor reflects on the impact of 2020 on his business and team, how his team use data to their advantage, and some of the biggest opportunities and challenges he foresees for marketers as we move into 2021.

So how has COVID-19 impacted your business and team?

Covid came very suddenly. Luckily, we already had a business resilience and continuity plan in place. This made us well equipped for home working and we were able to put that plan into place quickly and successfully.

From a marketing perspective, we worked hard to stay connected with the business. Our business is broken down into different verticals: home insurance, motor insurance, and commercial insurance. So we have a lot of meetings and some of the regular connections we would have had with colleagues in the office have also been formalized into meetings now.

From a personal point of view, I’ve been surprised how we’ve been able to continue all of our momentum as a marketing team. Even as little as one or two years ago, we may not have had the platforms to keep connected in the way that we can today.

How have you been positioning yourselves during the pandemic? Has that changed at all? Did you need to adapt your messaging?

In the beginning, in March and April, we were of course in the beginning of a very serious health crisis. So as people and as marketers, had to stay grounded. We tried to support our clients in that period, particularly when nobody knew what was going to happen.

Ultimately our messaging and core proposition hasn’t really changed. Having said that, it is a digital service that we deliver and that has definitely helped us in that respect. We’ve been looking at data to support insurers around cancellations and things they need to know to support policyholders in the current circumstances. It takes data, and connecting different types of databases, to make automation happen and to deliver an online experience. So these are the kinds of things that we have been communicating.

Speaking of data, how do you currently use data to create relationships with your target audience and position yourselves?

In terms of marketing processes, the digital world has brought the ability to measure everything. There’s so much data. But I think the difficult part for us is connecting up the different platforms and databases we use. Ultimately what we’re really trying to measure is the engagement and psychology of our clients. We’re still very much on a journey of connecting up our different sources of marketing data which ultimately will support our lead scoring, remarketing, and of course showing the right information to the right prospect at the right time.

We have been using some customized Turtl e-books for various clients and we get insights from those. For instance, what clients are reading, which sections they dwell on the most, and how they share that content. Our client engagement team loves having access to data like that. Not to mention of course the content visually looks really cool. Everyone likes it. It makes us faster and puts more of the content creation in our own hands rather than passing it backwards and forwards to an agency.

As a data services business, we work with data all the time. We look at our own proprietary data and often enrich it with external data sources, whether it’s around flood, building, fire, or crime data. As marketing team we work in the same culture, constantly innovating and looking to deliver marketing intelligence and support materials for the broader business.

What would you say are the biggest challenges in marketing at the moment?

Attention deficit is definitely a big one. It is true not only in consumer products but in B2B as well. There’s so much information, so much noise in the media. The key now is to communicate with a business prospect on their own terms, in the right place, and at the right time.

The other one I would say is connecting up the dots in data. It’s an issue everyone faces: connecting up all the different data silos.

And what would you say is the biggest opportunity for marketers?

It’s personalization. Going slowly towards the ‘market of one’ where you can really understand the media someone uses, their readiness to engage with a product, and their decision making capability. Once we get to that point, we can really deliver information that’s really personalized and really useful to someone.

So for our clients facing certain challenges around risk in their own business, we can really help them by delivering information in a way that is tailored to their needs. This will be far more useful to them than something more generic.

So yes, we’re still a way off getting this completely right, but it’s definitely the biggest opportunity for marketers looking ahead.