Insurance marketing lessons from outdoor adventuring

I’m not an outdoorsy person; I call myself “an indoor girl.”

But here I am, planning my annual 50-mile hike with my husband and my twin sister. Once again this year, we plan to conquer the world-famous Appalachian Trail (known as “The AT”). Once complete, I’ll hit the 300-mile marker for AT miles hiked.

Getting to this point has been a difficult yet joyful journey. When I started hiking, a few miles at a time, I fell in love with the sights and the rigor. As my hikes got longer, my sister and I came up with the “two-car shuffle” (parking a car at the start point and another at the end point to shuttle back and forth).

Before our 50th birthday, I dared my sister to join me on a 50-mile AT hike. We hiked 16 to 18 miles each day, successfully finishing our 50th birthday adventure.

Now the trip has become a ritual. Each year, we set out to hike a different 50-mile segment. Sometimes we don’t quite make it 50 miles, but we still consider every step a success.

Adventuring through hiking has proven to be a metaphor for my field of insurance branding and marketing. Here are three similarities:

1. Hiking and marketing are both adventures;
2. Like my work, hiking takes guts and planning; and
3. No two adventures are the same.

Insights gleaned from the trail

Below are some other insights into insurance marketing that I’ve taken away from my hiking adventures.

Look up. When hiking on a rocky trail, I constantly look down because obstacles can trip me up at any moment. The path switches direction and changes from rocks to dirt to mud, quickly, and I really have to pay attention.

However, I have come to realize that I miss a lot if I am constantly looking down. This is like being caught up in the urgent to-dos associated with marketing projects. Without looking up, I might miss something crucial, long-term and strategic.

Looking up means being open to gratification where I find it, whether in hiking or marketing. Marketing provides instant gratification when, for instance, I see results from email campaigns.

Hiking is a great time to develop creative ideas. The fresh air and getting out of my element opens up my mind.

Wear the right shoes. Hiking 40,000 steps a day requires the right shoes. They can’t be new ones, either. They must be seasoned through break-in activity before hitting the trail.

One of the most embarrassing moments in my marketing career was showing up with the wrong shoes for a TV commercial shoot in a railway car manufacturing facility. I was wearing open-toed sandals. While they seemed comfortable, that was a bad footwear decision given the assignment. The client asked me to leave the shoot. While I felt humiliated, the client was right. It was too dangerous to have me walking around in open-toed shoes.

The learnings here are: Ask for advice from someone with experience. Think ahead. Anticipate needs. Choose the right equipment, and test things out before you use them under pressure.

Catch your breath. It’s critical when hiking to frequently take a moment to slow down and catch my breath. It’s up to me to take the healthy approach of breathing properly. It’s OK to stop to regroup and absorb what I am purposefully putting myself through.

Similarly, why not do this when working? I can get so bogged down in projects that I forget to stop. Stopping means reading an industry blog or article, checking in with peers, taking my team to lunch, or even walking around the building for a moment.

Seek out inspiration

To catch my breath at work, I often attend marketing events. I started attending HubSpot’s INBOUND marketing user conference in Boston early on in that marketing system’s evolution. There were about 2,500 marketers at the first convention I went to; now it’s 25,000. They share ideas, energy and techniques. I use this conference, along with the Insurance Marketing and Communications Association (IMCA) conference, to reenergize my work.

Don’t take on too much. The scariest moment I’ve had on The AT was when my husband and I were attempting to hike 17 miles in a day. It was steaming hot, much hotter than we were expecting, with difficult terrain and many elevation changes.

We ran out of water with four hours still to go in the hike, and then out of daylight two hours before the end. We each had only a tiny headlamp. We were so spent and dehydrated that we didn’t think we were going to make it. We could barely see the trail as we trudged on in the dark. Somehow, that day’s hike unpredictably turned into 26 miles.

Treacherous terrain can add on miles, and anyone who has hiked The AT will confirm that mile markers and maps are not always accurate. Neither is the weather forecast.

The marketing lesson is, it’s OK to say no to something in order to set realistic expectations.

Pack the right things. Before I started hiking, I had none of the necessary equipment, and I wasn’t in good physical shape. Since being outside when I was a kid simply meant going to the backyard to play, it was intimidating as an adult to be out on a trail. I didn’t know what I needed. So I went to an outdoor retailer and bought everything: the backpack, bear spray, tarps, tents, sleeping bags, and even a mat to sit on for eating lunch.

However, I didn’t know that the key to backpacking is to carry as little weight as possible!

I’m reminded of my first job in marketing in the late 1980s. Back then, we didn’t have design software. It was desktop publishing at its best. We created documents on paper.

But I had to learn digital skills, then learn the World Wide Web, then learn and relearn various digital marketing software tools. It has been 30-plus years of retooling. I have come to learn and accept that it is a must and it is constant.

The analogy: Both on the trail and in marketing, you don’t always know what’s around the corner. For example, in my career, I’ve run into a recession a couple of times and had to adjust our strategy and approach. Even in good economic times, you sometimes have to pull back spending and adjust strategy.

Celebrate success. Part of our plan for every hike is to stash a cooler in the trunk of our car with ice cold beer and water. This is sometimes what motivates us to finish. We clank bottles together and thank God for another successful day.

Since we are hiking, not backpacking, we don’t sleep in tents on the trail, but rather choose conveniently located hotels near the trail heads. We sit together and recount the day, look at our photos and congratulate ourselves. We do this for hours! After every trip, I create a photobook that memorializes our hike: the laughter, tears, vistas and accomplishments.

I also do this with my marketing team. I collect accolades and share them. I treat them to the occasional long lunch. I make a montage of project accomplishments from the past year and sharing that with executives.

The more exposure for the team, the better it is for everyone. During this process, I talk about what I’ve learned and ask others how they’d do things differently next time.

Hiking the Appalachian Trail has not only improved my personal health and well-being. It has also heightened my awareness of my professional capabilities and opportunities. It made me realize that most challenges can be overcome with the right preparation, mindset and partners.

Traci Catalano is senior vice president of marketing at Old Republic Surety. She can be reached at tcatalano@orsurety.com.

Any opinions expressed here are the author’s own.

See also:

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• Developing an impactful insurance content-marketing strategies
• Simple insurance marketing strategies you can start today