Hard markets force insurance carriers to tighten their belts and lower their marketing spend. But even in a hard market, there are major opportunities to grow your customer base—as long as you’re doing so efficiently.

Our free P&C Hard Market Playbook offers a deep dive into the best practices you can use to maintain and build your book of business while growing your profitability in a hard market. As a taste of what you can expect to learn, here are three hard market customer acquisition principles we encourage carriers to use to optimize their performance.

Hard market customer acquisition principle #1: Every customer is profitable at the right price

Profitable hard market customer acquisition isn’t about reducing your investment in digital marketing, and it’s not about only acquiring the least expensive customers you can find—it’s about investing your digital marketing budget efficiently.

Because performance advertising gives you the ability to measure performance and adjust your bidding for each consumer, you can ensure that every new customer you acquire makes your business more profitable. So long as you’re paying the right price for each consumer, you’ll be earning more from your customer acquisition than you’re spending—and that means you’re in good shape.

Hard market customer acquisition principle #2: Make targeted spending cuts rather than across-the-board

One common mistake carriers sometimes make when they’re looking to become more profitable is to make across-the-board spending cuts. But while cutting every piece of your marketing budget by 10% might lower costs in the short run, it’s not the most efficient use of your remaining budget and it doesn’t help you acquire the customers you need to maintain or grow your book of business.

That’s why we always say to make cuts with a scalpel rather than a chainsaw. Analyze your marketing performance to identify what’s working and what isn’t, and go from there. Which segments of your target audience aren’t converting as often as you’d like? Which publishers aren’t delivering the return on investment you need? These are the best places to lower your bids or remove audience segments, publishers, or channels from your targeting parameters.

Hard market customer acquisition principle #3: Be flexible and adapt to changing conditions

One of the benefits of performance marketing is that it grants advertisers the ability to adjust their targeting and spending in real time. While other forms of media require you to set your price and budget ahead of time, the performance channel enables you to alter your media-buying strategy instantly.

Don’t be afraid to take advantage of this flexibility by adjusting your plan as necessary. By keeping a close eye on your performance, you’ll be able to see how different parts of your media plan are performing and make the right changes on the fly. By removing budget from the channels and audience segments that aren’t working and doubling down on the ones that are, you’ll be able to continuously optimize your performance for maximum profitability.

Want more insight? Download our free Hard Market Playbook.

Our free Hard Market Playbook tells you everything you need to know about maximizing performance during the hard market. From adopting the right measurement tools to implementing the right bidding strategies, you’ll be fully equipped to weather the storm during the hard market—as well as to ramp up growth once the market corrects itself.

LEARN MORE OUR FREE HARD MARKET PLAYBOOK HERE ->