Step by Step Insurance Agency Marketing – Part 2

Last week I discussed insurance agency marketing steps and activities a broker should take to establish their marketing base:

• • • Digital branding
    • Customer journey mapping
    • Optimizing your LinkedIn profile
    • Creating marketing content

This week I continue listing insurance agency marketing ideas and how to sequence them. Once you’ve established your marketing base, you now need to ramp up your communication by actively engaging your audience.

STEP 2 – ENGAGING YOUR AUDIENCE

At this step you commit to regular communication with your audience by providing educational information, and sharing your ideas and opinions across multiple mediums.

• • • Website – Create a blog to implement a forum for thought leadership content. Use your blog’s call to action (subscribe) to collect email addresses from your prospects so you can follow up with regular email campaigns. Check out our post on creating your own blog.
    • LinkedIn – Start actively using LinkedIn to engage with your network by sharing content, liking and commenting on articles, updates, and relevant groups.

MARKETING ACTIVITY 5 – Email Campaigns

According to research from VentureBeat, email has proven to provide the highest ROI against all other marketing channels. With that sort of success it’s easy to understand why email is a mainstay strategy for digital marketing, and is a good insurance agency marketing idea to implement.

Here are some email marketing campaigns to consider including into your strategy:

• • • Cold email outreach
    • Nurture campaigns
    • Re-engagement campaigns

When it comes to drafting email campaigns there are few important elements to remember no matter which type of campaign you implement in your insurance agency marketing strategy.

Write like you talk

Don’t let your email sound like a sales pitch, instead maintain a conversational tone. When speaking with someone, you don’t analyze what you’re going to say next. Don’t aim for perfection when drafting your emails.

Get to the point

Keep it short and get right to the point. Focus on THEM, not your offer. Brokers tend to focus on their own attributes; great customer service, professional, years of experience, etc. Instead, focus on detailing how they can benefit, and how you provide a solution to their pain points.

Personalize

Reference a lead’s name or company to add a personalized touch to your email campaigns. Many marketing automation tools allow you to add fields to your emails to do this at scale.

Call to Action (CTA)

Base your CTA on what stage of the sales funnel your target audience for a specific campaign is at. For example if you’re doing a cold email campaign it doesn’t make much sense to try to schedule a face-to-face meeting with cold leads. A more relevant CTA at that stage of the sales funnel may be to have them sign up for your webinar, or request a quote through your website.

MARKETING ACTIVITY 6 – Retargeting

Retargeting keeps track of visitors to your agency website, through a simple script known as a ‘Retargeting Pixel’, and displays your ads to them as they visit other websites online. Insurance agency retargeting can assist in taking your leads from merely ‘just browsing’ to converted sales. Read our blog post on retargeting strategies and tools to find all the resources you need to integrate this method into your insurance agency marketing strategy

STEP 3 – OMNICHANNEL MARKETING

At this step you make a full organizational commitment to marketing. It applies to every step of the buyer journey; from pre-purchase to post purchase. This Includes Step I and 2, plus:

• Step up all activities – Everything from Step I and 2 should be part of an organized and strategic effort, which includes distributing marketing content and calls-to-action to influence buyer behaviors.

In order to execute an omnichannel marketing strategy you first need to fully understand what it entails.

Consumers can now engage with a broker through a variety of channels and devices. They can engage with your agency at your office, on a website or mobile app, through a newsletter, or on social media. They can access products and services by calling on the phone, by using an app on their smartphone, with a tablet, a laptop, or a desktop computer. Omnichannel marketing establishes a consistent and complementary consumer experience across all those channels and devices. You may be wondering how this differs from multi-channel marketing?

Multi-channel marketing is an operational perspective. It focuses on how you allow the consumer to complete transactions on each channel. Omni-channel marketing, on the other hand, views the consumer’s experience through their eyes. This unique perspective allows you to orchestrate their experience across all channels so that it’s seamless, intuitive, integrated, and consistent. Omnichannel marketing anticipates that they may start their buyer journey on one channel and move to another as they advance towards a purchase. This strategy makes each transition, each hand off, from one channel to the next extremely fluid.  Simply put, omni-channel is multi-channel done right!

Check out our blog post on marketing trends for a more detailed overview on how easily brokers can implement omnichannel marketing.

MARKETING ACTIVITY 7 – Triggered Campaigns

Sharing relevant content at the right time is key. If a prospect or customer has previously engaged with a piece of content or purchased a product, you probably want to consider that in your insurance agency marketing strategy. For example if a prospect has read a blog post that you wrote on voluntary lines, then send an email detailing voluntary lines that you offer. You can tie this in with your retargeting efforts to keep your agency and services at the top of their mind.

You can use marketing automation tools to set up multiple campaigns that will trigger based on lead activity. Whether they download educational content, sign up for a webinar, or request a quote. Set up nurture campaigns, with content and copy related to the user activity, that will run automatically based on pre-determined triggers you set. This is a good way to get relevant content in front of a prospect at the right time – which will assist in driving conversions. Check out our blog post on marketing automation software for recommended tools that provide this feature.

EVALUATE YOUR COMMITMENT

By Step 3, marketing is a full-time commitment, and you’ll need to utilize some form of technology to assist in your insurance marketing plan. You should budget for an automated marketing platform to assist in managing the various activities you choose to implement; whether you’re doing the work in-house or working with an outside marketing firm.

Honestly evaluate your resources and determine the amount of human power and financial investment you’re willing to make.

When evaluating your commitment, remember that marketing activities alone won’t get you new business given the complex work that benefits consultants do. But, these steps and activities will provide you with valuable data, content, and ease of access for your consumers, which will lead to more successful conversations when given the opportunity to meet face-to-face.

My final piece of advice is to remember that regardless of how much marketing you commit to, it doesn’t mean you should stop prospecting on your own. Marketing is a great way to generate leads, nurture them, and assist in driving conversions. However, the more qualified leads you can generate at the top of the funnel the better the outcomes. You will still need to put a constant focus on filling the pipeline on an almost daily/weekly basis.

• • • Marketing is there to support and enhance your prospecting efforts. It’s great for developing your agency’s brand and bringing in inbound traffic, but it takes time to build it up to the point where you have a high amount of qualified leads coming inbound on their own requesting more information.
    • Sales prospecting is great for generating immediate pipeline activity. This includes asking for referrals from clients and influencers, cold calling/emails, and networking. Don’t use marketing as an excuse to NOT prospect.

PURSUE THE STEPS THAT MEET YOUR NEEDS

There are so many different insurance agency marketing strategies a broker can choose to implement.  Figuring out which ones work for you can turn into a costly game of hit and miss. We’ve worked with and watched so many agencies start and stop various marketing efforts over the years and end up missing the mark.

I’ve narrowed down those options for you here to assist in avoiding that frustrating outcome. Choose the steps that best matches your needs and resources. Whichever route you choose, commit to getting started today.

The days of depending on carriers (or the necessity of insurance) to create demand are over. ALL brokers are already competing on the value they deliver, which means you need effective marketing to stand out from the crowd and dispel the ‘outdated’ stereotype associated with brokers and the insurance industry at large.

Read Part 3 of our step by step guide to insurance agent marketing.