The insurance industry and insurance agency marketing are changing. As we’ve talked with some of our Partner Platform clients and technology partners, we’ve consistently heard that cultivating a solid customer base and understanding and addressing customers’ needs is what will make agencies stand out over the next five to ten years.
Two ways to keep customers and grow in your niche are through agency reviews and referrals.
The importance of customer reviews has grown exponentially in the past few years. What was once a nice way to get customer feedback has become an essential marketing tool. Reviews establish trust, a critical but difficult to cultivate factor in gaining and retaining customers. [SD1]
And, reviews can help you learn more about your customers. Positive reviews highlight what’s working, while negative reviews show you how to improve your service.
To harness the marketing power of reviews, you need to get involved. Your agency is receiving reviews right now, so the first step is to find out where you’re being reviewed, claim your business page, and take control of the narrative. Most businesses find reviews on Google, Yelp, the BBB, and even Facebook.
Once you’ve found your reviews, address any negative feedback. Whatever you can say or do to acknowledge the customer’s concerns and provide some form of a solution helps. Write your reply on the review site and attempt to reach out to the person in private, too.
Now that you know where you’re reviewed, you can also point customers to review your agency. Studies show that up to 68% of customers will leave a review, but only if you ask. You can directly ask customers when interacting with them, give them an option to leave a review after a service experience, and simply include a “leave us a review” link in your email signature.
Finally, don’t wait to ask. The ideal time to ask for a review is after a customer had a good experience. Ask for reviews after a speedy policy renewal, successful claim processing, or another positive interaction. You want the customer to have those “good vibes” in mind when they write up their experience.
As an agency owner, you likely already know the value of gaining referrals. Referrals come at little to no cost to your agency and bring in valuable leads.
So how are you to gain these holy grail referral customers? Similar to reviews, the first step is to ask for referrals. The ask can be as simple as a “know anyone looking for ‘X’ type of insurance coverage?”. Make the ask in an email, phone call, or in-person conversation – it doesn’t matter where, just ask.
Again, similar to reviews, ask after a good experience. You’re much more likely to get a “yes” to your referral ask if you do it after a customer had a positive interaction.
Another referral tactic is to offer an incentive for referrals. While you can’t offer discounts to policies, you can offer an Amazon gift card or entry into a raffle to win a day at a local spa. That slight nudge can be what someone needs to connect you with a referral customer.
You should also make it easy. Don’t put the work on the customer making the referral. Supply them with an email template or card they can hand to someone. Offer a link to a pop-up referral email in your email signature, too. Anything you can do to remove barriers increases your chances of success.
Finally, keep asking for referrals. While you don’t want to hammer your customers with the subject every day, you should reach out a few times a year to remind them they can refer someone to your agency. The more you ask, the more likely you are to get that “yes” eventually.
One of the best ways for Partner Platform agencies to make referral and review requests easy is to use our integrated CRM and marketing automation system. Agents can see how prospects and customers are connected to target ideal referral requests. Marketing teams can leverage marketing automation to remind customers of review and referral opportunities and follow-up as needed.
And, our integrated Proposal Creator makes the time from a referral or review contact to becoming a customer shorter than ever. With built-in, branded proposal templates, Partner Platform users can have a proposal to a potential customer in minutes.
Learn more about how our intuitive, customizable Partner Platform agency management system and CRM can help you grow your client base and keep your agency thriving for years to come. Get in touch at 800.747.7005, Option 6, or [email protected].
We’re almost halfway through the year, and a lot has changed since January. At this mid-year mark, we took a look back at some of our most popular posts and put together a list of the essentials. These posts can help hone your insurance marketing strategies for the remainder of the year and beyond.
These posts are just the start of the informative content
we have to help your agency improve your marketing, sales, and overall
processes. Check out all our articles on the Partner Platform blog
and get in-depth resources with our online guides.
Got a topic you’d like to hear more about? Contact us and let us
know.
Are you intentional about your insurance agency marketing? If you’re sailing by on your current client base and waiting for the phone to ring, you’ll soon be left behind. As one of our clients recently said, the “order-taker” agencies are quickly becoming a thing of the past. With most potential customers searching for insurance online, you need to be thoughtful about your agency brand and how to get it found. [SD1]
Get more tips on how to boost your insurance agency marketing here
Your first step is a healthy assessment of your agency’s brand and marketing strategy. Gather your team, survey your customers, and take a look at how you’re seen. From there, think about how you want to be seen and get steps in place to make that happen.
Before you can start marketing your agency, you need to have a solid base of who you are as an agency: your brand. Do you have a specialization? Are you known for serving a particular geographic area or type of business? Think about what it is that sets you apart and build your brand around those strengths.
Read more about how to discover your agency niche and use it to grow your business
Once you know what to show off, get it out there. At a minimum, have an agency website and app. Both these tools are critical to getting your name out there. Add a social media presence only if you can maintain it well. You’ll need to share something once a week at a minimum. Otherwise, your social page will look outdated and reflect poorly on your agency.
Increase your presence with photos and videos showing off your agency personality – staff pictures, images of your community, and other visual aids give visitors a picture of what is most important in the industry: relationships. A blog is an excellent tool to expand on who you are, including highlighting your service and expertise, both of which are critical to bringing in new customers.
Dive into the must-haves to make your insurance website competitive here
Make it easy for people to get in touch with you. Include easily identifiable “contact us” forms on your website and respond quickly to social media and other inquiries.
And create ways to gather potential customer contact information. Have a pop-up asking website visitors to sign up for an email list, request contact information when signing up for an in-person or online event, and collect emails when visitors request a quote or to view expert content. The more ways to can gather contact information, the better.
Once you have that contact information, get it organized in your agency management system or CRM, and reach out. As we said, those who passively wait for customers to reach them are falling behind.
Be active about gaining contacts, too. Ask for referrals from current customers and see if they’re willing to write a positive review on sites like Google, Yelp, and AngiesList to help bring in more business. The more access points and outreach you can muster, the better.
The marketing tools of today are less about advertising and more about building a relationship. While price and policy matter, it’s who you are and the expert service you provide that makes the difference.
We know and value building these relationships, which is why we built our Partner Platform system to help agencies improve service with time-saving systems. Our integrated accounting and policy downloads, customer-service tools like integrated VoIP and automatic caller profile pop-up, and targeted sales and marketing systems like our integrated CRM and marketing automation are all designed to automate tedious tasks so agencies can focus on people and service.
Learn more about what these tools can do for your agency, increasing efficiency in time-consuming tasks so you can focus on relationships and service. Get in touch with us here, at [email protected], or by calling us at 800.747.7005, Option 6.
Among the many insurance marketing strategies out there, blogging continues to be a popular and useful tool across the years. We consider blogging an effective method and have the facts to back it up: websites with blogs have over 400% more pages indexed in Google than those without a blog, and more than 60% of consumers made a purchase based on a blog post.
See why we ranked blogging among our top insurance marketing strategies to gain website traffic
Beyond the stats, blogging also provides benefits like:
So, how do you get started?
As with any new process or strategy, start small with your blogging and scale as you go. Begin with one or two posts a month and slowly build as you get your footing. It takes time to establish your blog presence, but the wait is worth it. Focus on the quality of your content rather than the quantity to start.
Ideas may flow freely, but action can be sparse. Ensure you have a team or a team member heading up the blogging process. Ideally, you should have a few individuals devoting time to your blog to diversify ideas and spread-out responsibility. Still, there should be one point person dedicated to moving things forward.
The first place to look for ideas is other blogs in the industry. Check out their topics and determine if any would resonate with your audience. Check-in with your larger agency team, too. Discover the common questions team members get from customers and ask what topics they think are relevant. No idea is a bad idea at the start – this is the time to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.
To make your blog an effective marketing tool, you want to use relevant search words reasonably often in your posts. Your locality name plus “insurance,” or “insurance agency,” and other variations are an excellent place to start for most independent agencies. Another great combination is adding in your specialty for something, like “small business insurance Houston.” These key phrases have a lower competition since they focus on your local city or county, but they have a relatively high search volume.
Once you have a few phrases, you can discover more using tools like Google’s keyword planner to identify similar search phrases and rank your current terms by competition and search volume.
What’s your agency’s specialty? Discover how to determine and leverage your agency niche here
Before you start churning out posts, determine how you will categorize them. Take a look at your topic ideas and determine how you should group them (i.e., Auto insurance, Life insurance, Tips and Tricks, etc.). Organizing posts makes it easier for someone to continue diving into topics of interest, keeping them on your site longer, and increasing their engagement.
A blog without readers is like a tree falling in the woods – does it make an impact? The answer is no. Once you have a few posts up, begin sharing the news of your blog on your social media and via your regular newsletters. Add a “share” button on each post so readers can let others know about posts they enjoyed.
No matter how great your blog content, if the site it’s hosted on is out-of-date or difficult to navigate, it won’t succeed. Ensure your agency has a professional, secure, and attractive landing place before implementing your blog strategy.
Partner Platform users can get a sleek, engaging custom website to promote their agency brand thanks to our Partner Connect agency website offerings. Find out more about how you can upgrade your agency’s website experience: contact us at [email protected] or 800.747.7005, Option 6.
When Lara Moffitt began as CEO of MHJ Insurance, her first order of business was to find a new agency management system. She knew their old system was complicated, expensive, and had poor customer service. It was clearly time for MHJ to make a change.
So, Lara rallied her team to start their search for a new agency management system provider. The three-month-long project included a series of interviews, demos, and plenty of internal discussions about what was working and what wasn’t.
Innovation is key to longevity in any industry, and the insurance industry is no different. Insurance revolves around people and relationships, making it an inherently dynamic field.
Digital insurance demands seem to change by the day to keep up with evolving customer and agency needs. That’s why we at Partner Platform partner with various tech partners to stay up to date with changing conditions. We as an organization can only be experts in so many areas, so we recognize the need to partner with outside specialists to fill our gaps.
We work with industry groups and tech companies to cover areas like digital document processing and cyber security, among others. Below are a few of our recent posts highlighting these valuable tech partnerships.
Insurance tech advancements are making everyday processes faster and more efficient, and customers are demanding more digital interactions than ever before. Despite the benefits and increasing customer demand for insurance tech, your team may be hesitant to adopt new technology.
This hesitancy is understandable. Change is difficult, and introducing a new process or system to an individual’s workflow can be frustrating. But, the benefits of integrating insurance tech into your agency far outweigh the challenges of overcoming change.
Here are a few ways we’ve seen agencies work to be more receptive to new technology and system updates.
