9 Insurance Marketing Strategies Every Agent Should Know
Most people have one form of insurance or the other - health, home, business, or life. Insurance agents seem to have many people interested in their services. However, the competition can get stiff.
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Large insurance agencies often have massive budgets, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get your customers with the right strategy. With a minimal budget and the right insurance marketing strategy in place, you can have a fair share of the market.
One good thing about marketing for insurance agencies is yearly renewals. You don’t have to spend on getting the same customers repeatedly. This dynamic makes up for your customer acquisition costs.
However, you need to get those new clients in the agency before you can relax. So, how do you get potential clients to trust your agency?
What can make your insurance agency attractive to the present-day insurance buyer? How do you get clients in insurance? Let’s find out!
The 9 Marketing Strategies Every Insurance Agent Should Know
The face of marketing today has changed. Where you might still get some traction with traditional media, even baby boomers and older have started to sign up for things online. While there are physically-involved strategies you should use, most of the best strategies are online.
Shortcuts:
- Write Your Goals
- Optimize Your Website
- Know Your Audience
- Create an Intuitive Customer Journey
- Allocate Budget
- Invest in Quality Content
- Do PPC Ads
- Encourage Positive Reviews
- Keep Track
Bonus: Capture warm leads instantly
1. Write Your Goals
It can be easy to think you won’t forget your marketing goals. However, you can get lost in all the activities of ensuring your agency grows. Goal setting is a prerequisite to achieving big feats in this industry.
For one, proper documentation helps for remembrance and gives you a sense of direction. Without proper goals, you might not know whether your marketing strategies are working or decipher your agency’s progress.
Make sure your goals are ambitious but also attainable. There is always the initial adrenaline rush to get started on growing your agency and trying to speedrun the general path of progression.
But you would have to be tactful in consideration of the market out there and the scope of competition you are bound to face.
Ensure your goals are SMART goals.
They should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Results-focused, and Time-bound.
This brings clarity to your work. Next, you have to create a plan of action. Plan everything; from your sales and prospecting to cross-selling and customer retention. It would help if you also wrote how you plan to achieve these goals.
Writing down a list of goals for the first, second, or third quarter precedes implementing them. You should have a primary idea of how the goals jotted down for your insurance agency will be implemented. A general rule of thumb is to create a scale of preference for attainable goals in the immediate while building up to attain futuristic ideas.
To get a better idea of goals to achieve, check out our post on goal setting for insurance agents.
2. Optimize Your Website
The vast majority of the human race is on the internet. With it, you have the best form of visibility you can ever give your agency. This is where having a standard website comes in. Your website is the first point of call whenever potential users seek to find your services.
Optimization has to do with the tweaking of your website in a way that it is at its best performance in terms of effectiveness and simplicity. A good way for insurance agencies to market their services is by creating good web aesthetics. It creates an impression in the minds of potential clients that your agency is ready for business.
Conditions like a poor user interface (UI) or slow loading web pages will discourage clients from seeking to find out more about your insurance services. Getting a good UI can significantly improve the quality of users’ experience on your website.
A good UI is a fantastic marketing strategy that can be implemented to draw in more clients. The best part of this is you do not need to go through the rigors of coding to implement.
A simple no-code/low-code design development can create great mobile applications and web platforms with an easy-to-use interface.
Since this is a solid idea for an insurance agency to up their marketing game, low code development accrues you the following benefits:
Speed of Concept
Without the rigors of learning code, you’re able to go from idea generation to final product at a quicker pace.
Low Cost
It is budget-friendly. It gives you the leverage to develop as many apps for your agency in less time.
Easy Maintenance
Modification to the software does not come at a premium. It can easily be managed.
3. Know Your Audience
Suffice to say that this strategy is a very important factor that cannot be mishandled when structuring your next move. There is no way to herald a successful entrance into the market space without planning for a target audience.
Many of your marketing decisions will depend on the audience you are targeting. As you’re aware, you cannot sell to everyone.
Therefore, it is essential to know the people you want to sell your insurance to from the start of your marketing plan. Baby boomers, for instance, won’t like the ads that appeal to millennials.
There are several platforms to run ads on. This depends on where you feel your audience is likely to be stationed.
Ads could include:
- Magazine ads
- TV and radio ads
- Social media ads
The factors to consider before seeking out your audience:
Analyze the Competition
Take a stroll around social media to see what your competitors are up to. Study their posts and find what platforms they are using to generate the most traffic. Platforms like Facebook, and Instagram generate the most traffic. You can gain some insight to help you develop your strategies.
Tailor your Ads Accordingly
If you have studied the first point thoroughly, you will realize that some of your target audiences are currently patronizing your competitors.
From your intel, you can try to win over clients from the other side by developing ad strategies that are specifically tailored to the kind of insurance services you offer.
The kind of insurance you’re providing will play a role in knowing your target audience. While the slightly older generation might be more interested in life insurance, you can sell business insurance to younger people. Relate with your target audience with messages that will catch their attention.
4. Create an Intuitive Customer Journey
Customer journey experience refers to stages passed through by the customers in relation to your insurance agency. It deals from customer acquisition to the very final event — which is a purchase.
Every aspect of your marketing strategy should guide your potential clients towards one goal – buying insurance from you. Your website should have every detail they need to make a favorable choice.
There should be several calls to action, easy-to-find contact information, testimonials, and other essential information.
If you’re targeting businesses, you want to show them how you can add value to their business while asking them to join you. You don’t have to rob your bank to create a digital customer journey.
You can consult a B2B marketing agency to create a functional website for you. Once you get leads on the site, it will intuitively guide them to buy insurance.
The marketing agency can also guide you on retaining visitors from the site even when they don’t buy immediately.
5. Allocate Budget
A budget enables you to place a hedge on your spending capabilities over a given period. We cannot overstress the importance of a budget.
Usually, a budget can indicate the financial strength of an insurance agency. It is the total summation of expenditure set to be carried out over a given period. It could involve reimbursement of staff and other miscellaneous expenses.
While it is okay to invest in acquiring customers, you might run into huge losses without a budget. Not all your resources should go into marketing.
However, a good lead generation strategy should take a sizable chunk of the budget. After all, you are not in business if your agency cannot generate enough leads that might be able to buy your services.
Set a budget for each marketing channel you want to try. It would help you know the productive marketing channels and what is not working. You can cut out what is not working and try new channels.
6. Invest in Quality Content
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Information is power, and providing the right information to your client will help you capture their attention. Before most people take out an insurance plan, they want to know more about it. If you provide this information, they will most likely buy from you.
Studies conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reveal an expected 5% increase in the demand for the services of insurance agencies. It is an indication of more clients looking to find qualitative insurance services. This makes content marketing a viable idea for putting out the word about the services offered by your agency.
Invest in content creation. There are a number of ways through which this can be done. Begin by realizing you have to push information about your agency out there. So, leave no stone unturned in your efforts to sell your brand.
Content marketing has its focus on addressing pain points. It is one of the best ways to promote your agency’s solution-driven services.
It is a way to put out valuable contents that address concerns the clients might be looking to find out about. You can invest in blog posts or featured articles. If you are not good at writing, you can outsource the writing to your agency.
It is important to make your investment in content marketing count. You can gain visibility by developing popular blog posts. Here are a few helpful tips alongside:
Use Targeted Keywords for your Content
Whether you are looking to write or outsource the writing to an agency, ensure that adequate research and SEO tactics are applied to make your content rank.
People seeking insurance services type certain keywords into search engines. Understanding what a client might be looking for can help your SEO tactics. You have to discover those keywords by performing some research. See our article about SEO for insurance agents.
Create Good Contents Regularly
Be consistent with your posts. You can publish articles at least once a week. Regular contents inform the search engines that your blog is active and receiving fair traction of visitors. The algorithm will love you for this consistency.
Post your insurance contents regularly to stay in the mind of clients.
Write How-to Articles
As part of your research efforts, you must have discovered several “how-to” articles on blogs. You can incorporate it into your blog content. This strategy is a creative way to share instructions and pass information.
All you have to think of is what questions your client might be asking. Proceed to answer them on your blog. Make sure to keep it succinct and you can use an online paraphrase tool to ensure you keep your blogs to the point. With consistent and helpful content, you’ll become an authority in the insurance industry.
7. Do PPC Ads
With the level of competition in the insurance industry, you can’t rely solely on organic content for your marketing. Organic content only will not bring all the visibility you need to your insurance agency. PPC marketing for insurance agents can help you catch the eye of your potential customers. When people look for the best insurance policies or agencies, it puts you at the top of the results.
PPC ads refer to pay-per-click ads. PPC is activated every time a client clicks on your ads. It is a surefire way to direct customers to your website. You can engage this strategy to boost the speed of lead generation.
Popular platforms where you can activate PPC ads are:
- YouTube
Feeling skeptical about how well advertising can work? Research shows that 75% of people find PPC ads the best source of information. Your marketing agency can help you figure out the details of paid-per-click advertising. You don’t have to worry about geo-targeting, keyword bidding, or device targeting.
Read more on our guide to Facebook marketing for insurance agents.
8. Encourage Positive Reviews
Reviews are like refueling for an insurance agency. Every interested client looking to inquire about your service will check for reviews. A bad review can discourage a potential client. Good reviews can help you close several deals.
Encourage reviews from existing customers. When people can’t get reviews from friends or family, they check reviews online.
Studies show that 89% of customers read reviews online before purchasing. You can leverage this habit to convince customers to purchase insurance. Get your clients to leave positive reviews when they buy insurance. It will help others know you can be trusted.
When your clients drop the reviews, whether positive or negative, ensure you comment. Your comments should always be polite and understanding, regardless of the review. Potential customers also read your responses to reviews.
Generally, satisfied clients are always willing to provide reviews on your request. Good reviews are important because they build your authority in the market space. It helps your insurance agency become trustworthy in the eyes of the public.
A marketing tactic you can implement to get reviews is by giving out incentives. You can give time-based incentives. You can offer a discount on one of your insurance services. Good reviews will help you to maintain a high rank on search engines.
Make the process of collecting reviews as stress-free as possible so more people can be encouraged to write about your agency. For the best impressions, always publish your best reviews on your website.
CrankWheel’s post-meeting redirect feature is a great way to gather reviews. To enable the feature you’ll need to log onto your CrankWheel Dashboard.
From there, you go to Configuration and click Collateral. Click Post Session redirects and then you click on Add Post-session redirect.
It’s a good idea to add at least two possible redirects, one that directs prospects to your webpage and one that redirects to a form that collects reviews.
When you are in a screen sharing session, click Actions on the CrankWheel interface and select which page you want the prospect to be redirected to when the session is over.
If the prospect is not likely to buy from you in that session, direct them to your website. But if you are going to close, redirect them to your review and rating form.
9. Keep Track
There is no point in using the best marketing strategies when you don’t know if they work. Track every part of your business. It would help you know when your marketing strategies are working or failing.
You can carry out surveys and get answers from clients on the effectiveness of your services. Provide incentives like a small gift to get clients to answer your questions.
Once you find that a particular marketing strategy isn’t working, try out another until you find what works for your audience. You will, however, save costs by understanding your audience before using a marketing strategy.
Bonus: Capture warm leads instantly
When you start using new prospecting tips for insurance agents, you will likely start to attract inbound leads through your website or your social media channels.
Use our Instant Demos widget for your page or your social media profiles for instant warm lead capture. It’s a simple call-to-action widget that pops up a form once a lead clicks a “get a call now” button on your page. Once the lead has entered a phone number, you will get instantly notified and you can call them when they are still looking at your page.
Conclusion
Marketing as an insurance agent doesn’t have to be hard. You can get the right clients for your insurance agency with effective marketing strategies and a minimal budget.
We hope that this article serves as guidance to improve marketing for your insurance agency. Make sure to hit your goals in your marketing strategy and ensure your insurance agency targets the right kind of audience. Good luck!
See our related posts on Social Media Marketing for Insurance Agents and Marketing ideas for insurance agents.