What do you do to market your insurance agency? Unfortunately, this question often gets the same answer when the owner of an agency replies, “I use referrals.” This is not the best method for a 21st century insurance agency.
In the old days, it used to be that you could go door-to-door to sell insurance policies. Another option was to have clients visit your office to inquire about a policy and then make a purchase. However, these days, an insurance agency needs to be more proactive with marketing initiatives to obtain new clients and keep current clients engaged.
Marketing Strategies
Small-to-medium-sized insurance agencies tend to believe marketing efforts are too expensive and complicated. That’s just not the case. You don’t need to have a huge budget to get your agency name out there.
Developing a marketing strategy doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. We’ve put together a list of methods that are relatively easy and cost-effective, that will take your marketing efforts to new levels online.
Ways to Marketing Your Agency on a Budget
Whether you are offering life insurance or income protection to your customers, you need to take your marketing where your potential clients exist, which is online. Everyone’s plugged in these days. As a result, it’s important to develop a strong web presence for your agency. Take your message out to where your target audience is on the web.
Here are some ways to market your insurance agency on the Internet:
1). Create a website: consider your website as part of your marketing efforts. Your site is like a business card—it’s the first impression many online visitors will have of your company. If you have a website that looks old and has outdated content, visitors will quickly leave for a competitor’s site. Find a web designer who specializes in the insurance industry and hire them to help build your site.
2). Update your current site: if you already have a site, maybe it needs be updated a bit. Again, hiring a web developing is a great option. While it will incur an expense to build or update your site, consider this as a marketing effort and ensure the site contains all the information visitors need, including contact information, content that’s updated regularly, etc. And remember to make sure your site is mobile-friendly, so you’ll rank in the search engines and get more visitors.
3). Use social media: everyone’s on social media these days, including your competitors in the insurance industry. Social media platforms are a great place to share content, engage people by answering their questions, networking and more. Some of the most popular social media platforms to use include Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
4). Create slide shares, webinars and podcasts: these are great ways to share information people need online, while also promoting your company. And none of these have to be expensive. They should contain relevant, current information that people are searching for. For webinars, you can interview experts in the field on different topics and allow participants to ask questions. The same can be done with podcasts. It doesn’t take a lot of expensive tools—you more than likely already have what you need to put together content in these formats.
5). Create sales videos: sites such as YouTube are another great way to get your company recognized. Video content is very popular for many people who are searching for information they need. The reason is not everyone has time to read through a lengthy article. Instead, they turn to videos that they can watch or listen to and get the information they want. You can easily turn a slide share presentation into a video, and this way get even more use out of the same content, for example.
6). Offer live quotes: people love to get a quote right away. In fact, online quotes are very popular. For instance, a visitor to your website may need information and quote on a life insurance policy. If they can get a quote right there on your site, it’s more likely you’ll make the sale then and there. Or some visitors may get the quote, but have questions, and then will call your agency for answers before making a purchase. Either way you’re more likely to make the sale.
7). Use Fiverr: this is a great website where you can hire freelancers to help you do all types of work, including developing marketing materials. On Fiverr, you can find people willing to work from $5 and up designing flyers, writing content for your website, creating videos, and more. This is an excellent option if you lack the resources at your agency and/or are marketing your agency on a budget.
8). Create whitepapers: downloadable whitepapers are another great way to get some marketing miles and staying withing your marketing budget. Create a report on an insurance issue that people would find interesting. You can have it written in a Word document, and then turn this into a PDF that people can download from your website. Make sure the whitepaper contains all your company contact information and branding, keep it simple yet informative. This is another way to get your company in front of potential clients.
These are some of the marketing methods you can use to get the agency in front of potential clients. It doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. Just be creative and get online where your target audience lives on the web.