Attendees at the Professional Insurance Marketing Association (PIMA) Summer Conference were warned that offline direct marketing strategies are no longer viable for marketing to affinity groups and that companies must modify strategies and adapt to online marketing or else become extinct.
Membership rosters of trade associations and professional societies are generally shrinking, as social networking groups and other online communities expand to create new kinds of affinity groups, according to Samuel Fleet, CEO of AmWINS Group Benefits, a wholesale broker of group insurance programs
“The prospects we target today gather in Google groups or on MySpace pages,” Fleet said in a statement. “People are joining groups and participating in a different way than in the past.”
Fleet said affinity marketing must be reinvented to target more diverse market niches online. Web-based competition for business is increasing in insurance markets, while opportunities for affinity marketing programs targeted to association members are in decline, according to him.
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