For many independent agencies, sales and marketing are a continual sticking point. Excellent service and friendly faces are abundant, but teams struggle to bring the same enthusiasm they have for service to their insurance agency marketing and sales.
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As the way we do business changes, so, too, does the way we market. If you’re looking for ways to up your marketing, try these insurance marketing strategies to help your agency bring in business and grow your base
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Insurance prospecting can be intimidating, even for the most seasoned professionals in the industry. Finding prospects can seem a daunting task, much less making the sale and moving them to customer. But, with the right tools and perseverance, insurance prospecting is not as impossible as it seems.
Tool #1: Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
You’ve heard CRM thrown around a lot – but what exactly is it? A CRM is a tool that allows you to track leads, prospects, and current customers, reviewing and adding information to see where they are in your sales cycle. Think of it as the modern day little black notebook full of relevant data to help you nurture leads, keep track of customer needs, and stay organized in your sales process.
CRMs are essential information hubs. They store contact information, meeting details, follow-up attempts, and even website visits and interactions for each constituent. All that data in one place gives you an accurate picture of where you stand not only with each customer or prospect but overall as an agency.
Tool #2: Integrated Communication Tools
What you say and how often you interact with prospects and customers is a critical piece of the sales cycle, yet it’s almost impossible to remember to note each interaction. That’s where integrated texting and email come into play. These synched up communication tools make it easy to feed your customer and prospect interactions right into your CRM, so you never miss an entry.
Find out more about Partner Platform’s email integration and integrated texting offerings
Tool #3: Social Media Scheduler
Regular action on social media is now a required part of your insurance prospecting. Customers and prospects alike will look to your social presence to get a feel for your agency and to see what others think of you. You need to post regularly to steer the conversation. Frequent posting also shows you’re active and engaged and brings you top of mind to those searching for a provider.
A social media scheduler can help you keep up with regular posts by allowing you to simultaneously post to multiple platforms at once. And, true to its name, a social scheduler lets you plan ahead and schedule posts for weeks and months in the future. That means you won’t need to take time every day to remember to post but can dedicate a time to schedule ahead and avoid the interruptions.
Tool #4: Marketing Automation
Marketing automation brings social and other communication scheduling together in one system. With its email features, you can schedule regular e-newsletters, birthday and holiday greetings, and renewal reminders to customers. You can also set up customized prospect outreach messaging to send at different intervals, including an automated first message sent to those requesting a quote or filling out other forms.
For social media, marketing automation tools can schedule messaging and track data like shares, likes, and comments. Plus, messaging can be tailored by audience and synched up with your email communications for an all-in-one outreach messaging and tracking hub.
See how Partner Platform’s Marketing Automation Manager can help your agency improve prospect outreach and customer retention
Tool #5: An Integrated Insurance Management Platform Experience
While each of the insurance prospecting tools above can boost your sales, together they can exponentially improve your outreach and client retention. That’s why we created an all-in-one integrated prospecting experience with our Partner Platform.
The cloud-based comprehensive system includes our Marketing Automation Manager, which creates customizable, automated workflows and mass campaigns for client and prospect communication, and our Producer Results Manager for a complete customer relationship management solution to convert prospects into lasting clients. That’s a winning combination you can’t beat, and just part of what the Partner Platform has to offer your agency. See more Partner Platform capabilities and view a demo to see how the Partner Platform can change the direction of your agency.
One communication channel is no longer enough to get your message out for insurance agency marketing. Different generations of customers respond to different things, each prospect uses some but not all available communication modes, and technology is evolving at a rapid pace. That’s why 87 percent of retailers recognize an “omnichannel” approach as vital to their marketing success.
Omnichannel means reaching out via multiple communication channels at once (i.e., phone, email, and social media). It’s a lot to take on. In fact, a recent report showed more than 21 percent of insurance agents acknowledged they need to “stay in front of their network” with marketing, but they simply didn’t have enough time.
What’s the answer to too much tech and too little time? Marketing automation. Below are four ways your independent insurance agency can leverage automation to reach wider, engage better, and still make it home in time for dinner.
The first step to marketing is establishing your brand. See what four questions to ask to define your agency brand
1) Social Media
Social media is multi-channeled in itself. Your customers and prospects may use one form or social media and shun another, while a different segment does the opposite. To keep all parties engaged, you can schedule posts via social media marketing automation. The key is to post enough to stay top of mind, but not too much that you’re spamming customers’ feeds.
When posting manually, insurers too often forget to post for a while and try to make up for it with a post-storm all at once. This method is ineffective and possibly damaging if followers get annoyed and walk away. According to a recent Forbes article, posting once or twice daily on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn is sufficient. Twitter moves at a faster pace, so up to 30 well spread out Tweets per day is okay.
Remembering to post even once a day on your personal social media seems impossible, hence why scheduling posts via marketing automation is a life-saver. Pick a time at the start of the week or month to schedule out postings in one block. Be sure to review them again as posting day gets closer, and make space to follow up at least once a week on any messages or replies. These small but consistent conversations help you bring in leads, endear customers, and boost your brand presence.
Make sure your website is as on-point as your outreach – see how to make your agency website a sales and service resource
2) Email
At this point, email is the most seasoned form of customer outreach. Since it’s been around the longest, email has seen multiple iterations. A one-size-fits-all email blast is no longer acceptable. The key to email engagement is audience segmentation and customized messaging. Recipients now expect each message they receive to speak to their interests, their place in the buying process, and other personal preferences. You’ll need to create multiple email templates to answer each of these expectations.
Another part of email communication is setting an effective cadence. Sending emails too close together can turn a prospect off while spacing them out can mean losing the sale to another agency. Cadence will vary by prospect or customer, most notably around their place in the buying journey.
Email analytics through marketing automation are a huge asset. The data you gain shows you what’s working and what’s not. These analytics are critical in helping you determine the best messaging and cadence. Such information is pivotal to shaping a successful email marketing campaign.
Hit all generations with your marketing – read about how to market to different generations
3) Texting
Automated texts are similar to email messages but shorter and more direct. Texts serve more as reminders or small nudges to move prospects along in the buyer journey. For example, you could schedule texts to be sent to customers reminding them it’s time to renew their policy. Or, you can set up a cue to text prospects who have asked for a quote but haven’t taken any action within a week.
The beauty of text is it’s more direct than social or email. You can almost guarantee the person will see the message since it’s sent right to their phone. But, this directness can be a danger as well. Too many texts or texting too soon into the buyer’s journey can turn prospects away. Reserve texting for hot leads and current customers only, and use it sparingly.
Before you text, check out these dos and don’ts on texting for your insurance agency
4) Human interaction
Texts, emails, and social posts work to keep your agency top of mind, but your personal connection with customers is what keeps them coming back. Utilize marketing automation to nudge you to take action. Add reminders in as part of your various automation campaigns, ensuring you’re firing on all cylinders.
Such connections can be a phone call, a personal email, or an offer to grab coffee or lunch. Though marketing automation can do a lot to keep your pipeline moving, facetime is invaluable. It’s these in-person interactions that customers remember and share, furthering your reach and solidifying your agency’s good reputation.
Hear from SIS partner agencies on how Partner Platform helped them connect more, and better
Find What Works for Your Agency
One of the most significant benefits of marketing automation is its customization – all content and messaging can be crafted to your agency brand and your words, coming from your social media profiles and email. That human element is what makes it meaningful and engaging to prospects and customers.
At SIS, that personal engagement is what drives us. We engage on an individual level with each of our partner agencies and actively reach out to find out how we can help them do more, better. It’s these interactions that prompted us to add our Marketing Automation Manager (MAM) to the Partner Platform. Our MAM system not only provides personalized, branded, marketing content and campaigns, it also integrates fully with our Partner Platform agency management tool for streamlined messaging and data analysis.
Find out more about MAM and Partner Platform’s other capabilities – contact us to schedule a demo 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.