Insurtech, especially in B2B space, is getting extremely competitive: Shreyas Achar

Established in the year 2019, Plum is a leading B2B insurtech brand offering employee wellness solutions to 3,000+ corporations across the country. The company provides business insurance products, business group health policies for employees, as well as telehealth consultation offering. Over the years, Plum has undertaken out of the box, innovative marketing strategies and initiatives, moving beyond the traditional ones, for instance advertisements, celebrity endorsements, etc. Some of the notable initiatives of Plum include – Cards Against Work, which is an enthralling card game inspired by the popular ‘Cards Against Humanity’ and has the objective of transforming workplace discussions and team engagement. By offering a platform for open conversations about workplace experiences, this game encourages employees to share stories, bond and even challenge practices commonly encountered in workplaces and considered as not so good.

Humanise by Plum is an editorial property, covering conversations about the working world while keeping the human at the centre. These conversations resonate with many, enlighten some, and challenge others. Through this product, Plum intends to humanise workplaces so that they speak of 'happiness, dignity, and respect' more often.

In conversation with Adgully, Shreyas Achar, Head of Marketing, Plum, speaks about how marketers can build a brand on budget by in-house innovation, creating differentiated brands through innovative marketing, rise of video-based storytelling, and more.

What are the marketing trends observed in the insurtech space?

Insurtech, especially in the B2B space, is constantly getting extremely competitive. With everyone building their marketing strategies on similar proven and established playbooks, there is a growing need for building differentiated brands through creative and clever strategies and campaigns.

While standard practices like direct-response marketing, social media promotions, whitepapers, etc., are great for driving persistent and predictable growth, taking a big leap warrants intelligent investments in well-thought-through and creative campaigns.

We’re also seeing healthy engagement and traction from in-person events and low-touch video-based efforts like content series or webinars.

To summarise, the three evolving trends we see are:

Creating differentiated brands through innovative/ quirky marketing
Frugal in-house campaigns with high ROI
The rise of video-based storytelling/ engagement

What is Plum’s marketing strategy?

As described above, having a fixed strategy does not work – this is a space of continuous evolution, innovation and creativity.

That said, there are a couple of things that define how we look at marketing:

We’re very conscious of investing in marketing for growth. We exercise very high prudence with our marketing spend and then track the results diligently.
A lot of what we do is building for repeatable, predictable, and scalable growth. Our primary responsibility, given the financial macro-environment, is to enable top-line growth and bottom-line improvements.
We index very heavily on in-house creative efforts instead of leaning on a ton of external support.
We’re bullish on Generative AI. Tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney have helped us improve our speed and scale considerably.
We don’t shy away from taking unconventional bets. From efforts like Humanise and using pop-culture references to discussing even uninteresting aspects of insurance, to creating a card game, we’re proudly building our own playbook for B2B marketing that is as far from boring as possible.

How has consumer behaviour changed in the insurtech industry in the post-pandemic period?

There’s a significant increase in how much value people ascribe to insurance. Leaders and employees no longer look at insurance as a perk or benefit, but as a definitive need. Additionally, insurance isn’t the only element of an employee health benefits stack; most companies have started to find a lot of value in benefits that can help employees stay healthy throughout the year – that includes mental wellness programs, online consultations, gym memberships, etc.

What marketing activities has Plum undertaken in the first half of the year 2023?

Report launches:

The State of Employee Benefits - A Plum proprietary report with insights from 2500+ employee benefits plans
Whitepaper on Inclusion - What does it take to build equitable workplaces - a conversation with 15 experts
Cards Against Work - A card game about work. Something you want to experience yourself.

What are the responses and outcomes of the marketing campaigns undertaken by Plum this year?

While we cannot share exact metrics for confidentiality purposes, we can share some of the testimonials and media love we have received.

Only 5% of Indian organisations offer comprehensive insurance coverage; survey reveals
Plum’s whitepaper reveals healthcare gaps, and insurance access faced by underrepresented groups in the workplace
Love for Cards Against Work - found in one thread.

Could you share some of the clients of Plum?

Swiggy, Zomato, Urban Company, CoinDCX, WhatFix, and many others. Plum works with 26 Unicorns.

What benefits are offered by Plum’s products and services?

Plum is built for companies that care. While we started by redefining ‘insurance’ and ‘benefits’, we now cover the entire gamut of employee health and wellbeing.

We have three lines of business:

Insurance products like Group Health, Group Term life, Group Personal Accident policy for companies
Telehealth and employee wellbeing
Plum Business - our new suite of insurance products that help companies safeguard their revenues, reserves, and runways.

What is Plum’s unique selling proposition (USP), and how is it creating differentiation in the market?

They say a brand is successful when its product becomes a verb. Similarly, when people think insurance/ benefits, they think Plum, which shows that in 4 years, we have been able to shift the spotlight to ‘employee health and wellbeing’ and will continue doing so.

How has Plum adopted Generative AI in its marketing strategy and execution?

We have used ChatGPT to generate our blogs – we wrote close to 100 blogs with ChatGPT, which drove over 1 lakh of search impressions; this gave us a 10% increase in monthly traffic and added close to 1,000 new keywords on search.

Examples of our top-ranking blogs:

We have used Midjourney to illustrate images for Humanise. We continue to play around with GenAI for our tweets and any other content. On our product front, we launched PolicyGPT earlier this year.

How can marketers build a brand on a budget?

The simple answer is in-house innovation – building teams that are fearless, curious and also have high ownership. And most importantly, by letting them fail.