I recently got to engage with John Swigart, CMO at Esurance (recently acquired by Allstate), who will be keynoting at our Marketing Leadership Forum in Los Angeles on April 18. Here are some words of wisdom from him about how to take new marketing tactics and put them into action. 

1. What was your approach and justification for investing in new marketing tactics that are still in their development phase?

I’m pretty consistent in pushing my teams to explore new avenues that may yield better results for us. I want us to make informed decisions but take risks, whatever the application might be. We’re a company borne of the Internet, so I think we are a little more forward-leaning than some of our competitors in some ways. We push pretty aggressively — how can we improve, gain more mindshare, and sell more policies — things like paid search, cost per clicks are all very much a part of the online environment we grew up in, as is social media, so it made sense for us to explore making a tighter connection between our offline advertising and our social media presence online. The average Facebook user spends about 6 hours a month on the platform, so we certainly see the value of having a conversation with some of the 200 million Facebook users in the US.