Successful Marketing For Insurance Agencies
This article, written by eMaximize, was published on Forbes in Aug 2021
The insurance business relies heavily on constantly growing its clientele. It’s a great business to own because your customers need to renew their policies every year. This creates opportunities because insurance agencies can often take a small loss on their CPA (customer acquisition costs), knowing their customers will renew their policies the following year at a zero dollar CPA.
The challenging part is growing your customer base. Insurance agencies are often competing against the major carriers with much larger budgets in addition to their local competitors. Nearly every single American is a potential customer as they typically have some sort of insurance – home, auto, renters or business. Defining and targeting your ideal customer is critical in deploying a digital marketing strategy for insurance agencies. Baby boomers are getting older and new customers are much more tech savvy.
Based on our experience handling marketing for insurance agencies, we will share some effective strategies to help you position your insurance agency for growth & success.
Define Your Target Audience
It’s difficult to create a marketing strategy until you define your target audience. As I mentioned, many agencies have an increasingly older customer base. Many of the marketing strategies used to gain them as a customer are no longer going to work today. Gen-X & Millennials are extremely tech savvy, many of which don’t understand why you would ever walk into a bank, let alone work with an insurance agency instead of going online to Mercury, Geico or Progressive.com.
Insurance agencies should determine their customer personas then craft a marketing message to appeal to those personas. The message should then be syndicated on all relevant social media & advertising platforms where they might attract their ideal customer.
Create The Digital Customer Journey
Your website must be highly organized to the customer journey. This means quickly guiding the customer to the information they need to in order to make a decision. The information that’s most important should be easily accessible. Navigation should be intuitive. Customer testimonials should be present. Call to action should be abundant. Visitors should not struggle to contact you by email, phone call, snail mail or smoke signal ?. Your insurance agency website needs to accommodate every person’s preferred method of contact. Your competition is fierce.
Connecting with an actual person who can offer a high level of customer service is paramount. Nobody wants to communicate with a chat bot or a phone tree. Your website visitors expect pages to load quickly and to display well on mobile devices.
Create High Quality Content
Most consumers research quite a bit before they spend $1000 on an insurance policy. Consistently creating high quality & unique insurance information on your website will potentially capture these lurking visitors. Research analytics to understand the information your target customers are looking for when they switch to a new insurance agency. Explain what it’s like to work with your agency. Constantly publish rate comparisons for the major insurance carriers. You’re website should be the only place potential buyers need to go in order to get all the information they need in order to make a decision.
Devise & Implement an SEO Strategy
SEO for insurance agencies is a critical piece of an insurance marketing strategy. Insurance agencies are facing more competition than ever before. As we mentioned they are often competing against the national and international carriers, local competitors and the rapidly growing number of rating sites like Nerd Wallet. There are various SEO strategies you can implement to rise above your competitors to become the top insurance agency in your market but it’s not easy.
SEO has gotten extremely complex. It’s not something your webmaster can learn on the fly. You need to consult with an insurance marketing agency. It’s also not a one time fix or cheap, but the benefits far outweigh the efforts to get there. SEO will increase your visibility in Google generating organic traffic and ultimately converting your lookers into bookers. It is not something to be skipped or you.
PPC Advertising For Insurance Agencies
Insurance agencies are up against stiff competition. Every person looking to purchase insurance is looking for the best deal, which means a lot of time on searching on Google. PPC Advertising (Pay-Per-Click) is a way to get your insurance agency in front of these people who are searching for the best deal, a specific policies or simply an insurance agency nearby.
But most people ignore ads, right? Think again, 75% of people say paid ads make it easier to find the information they are searching for, (Clutch.io, 2018).
Creating PPC Campaigns for your insurance agency is not easy. Gone are the days when a business owner could run their own Google Ads. The ad platform is so complicated now that even experienced analysts and Google reps get confused. There are many options – geo targeting, device targeting, bidding strategies, not to mention writing attention grabbing ad copy and landing pages. It’s best to find a reputable digital marketing agency for insurance agencies to work with. They will stretch your ad budget much further than you can yourselves.
Summary
These marketing tactics to promote your insurance agency are just a few of the different strategies to get your agency to stand out from the pack. If you would like to discuss a custom marketing strategy for your insurance agency, please give us a call or send us a note by clicking one of the buttons below.
Thanks For Reading!
