Insurance Marketing Strategies

Ask any insurance agent about the challenges of selling insurance and the #1 answer given is “finding quality leads” or “prospecting for new business!” Knowing this, what can agents, brokers and agencies do to combat this problem? They need to think “strategy” and that involves creating a plan (a business/marketing plan) – even a basic plan is better than no plan! And it’s always easier to alter or make changes to an existing plan than change gears when you don’t know where you’ve been and where you’re going!

Developing Insurance Marketing Strategies:

For insurance marketing strategies to succeed, it is critical to answer some important questions about your business, your niche, your products and services, how much you’re willing to or should be spending to market yourself and which efforts would ultimately yield the best results for your specific business. Once you’re able to articulate your vision on paper, it will give you a much clearer sense of direction and a roadmap to follow. To get you started, here is a shortlist of some strategies and tactics to consider:

• •  Define your short and long term business goals. The more specific you can be the better. It is important to dream and create a vision of where you’d like your business to be (in terms of lead generation, sales conversions and sales volume).

• •  Define your brand. What products or services do you sell the most of? What differentiates you from your competition?

• •  Define your ideal client demographics. That includes age, marital status, profession, income level, region, etc. (hint: who do you primarily sell to now or would like to start selling to) and then answer the following questions: what does this demographic need? How can your products and services provide that need? Why would this demographic choose your products and services over your competition? How can you position your business or website to get noticed by this demographic?

• •  Considering the above points, determine how you should best market your business to your desired demographics. It is critical to do your homework and research the best strategies that would yield you the greatest results (i.e.: if you don’t have a solid professional website, to create one and then allocate some marketing dollars to and market it on the Internet? What type of traffic would that create for your business? Out of that  traffic/leads, how many can you convert to sales). Would it make sense to combine the power of the Internet with a couple of other tactics to yield the best results. Compare and contrast each tactic. For example, if you’re used to advertising in yellow pages, consider your ROI from that. Are you yielding any solid consistent sales from it? If not, it would be wise to move your marketing dollars to the Internet and create a new set of reliable quality leads. Are you still buying leads? How many sales has that yielded? How about mailing post cards or sending email blasts? Analyze each strategy carefully and then select the top 3 tactics to use as your insurance marketing strategies. 

• •  Then next step would be to determine how much you would be willing (or better yet – should spend) on the above tactics – again do your homework.

• •  Every 90 – 180 days, analyze each tactic and study the return on investment (ROI) to see which is yielding the greatest results (in terms of number of leads coming in, your conversions, and sales volume).

You may have to exercise some patience with some strategies or move one tactic above the other to find the best combination or results for your specific business.  

Regardless of the strategies you employ, it is critical that your insurance marketing strategies span at least one year into the future. Each tactic and strategy needs time to root itself, grow and bear fruit. Be wary of tactics that promise overnight results. And perhaps even more importantly, it is essential to budget accordingly. Be mindful of the saying, “it takes money to make money.” Marketing dollars help get the attention of your potential clients so don’t skimp when it comes to proven methods that can differentiate you from your competition and turn your vision into reality!