Digital Marketing for Insurance Agencies: A Complete Guide
Insurance agencies, like any other business, need to market their business to their potential customers. The goal is to spread awareness of your products and services so that consumers will seek you out to meet their insurance needs.
In this complete guide to digital marketing for insurance agencies, we look at the many advantages of digital marketing compared to traditional marketing. Then, we discuss a plethora of different digital marketing techniques and strategies.
So, if you want to learn about customer avatars, email marketing, SEO, and a host of other digital marketing tactics, as well as the benefits of digital insurance marketing, read on.
Why is Digital Marketing a Necessity for Insurance Agencies?
Like any other business, your insurance agency must be profitable to succeed. To that end, you want to cast your net as wide as possible to gather in as many clients as you can. The internet provides the most expansive market in history. It literally spans the globe.
How do you take the most advantage of your access to that vast territory? A digital marketing campaign, of course. With modern day technologies, you can reach untold numbers of potential clients and target them like never before.
Advantages of Digital Insurance Marketing
There are numerous advantages to a digital insurance marketing campaign. First, since it is run over computers, all the relevant data can be tracked, stored, and analyzed with ease. This takes a great deal of the normal uncertainty that comes with a traditional marketing campaign away.
These days tracking the number of people who visit your website or respond to your social media posts is both easy to do and potentially very lucrative. It allows you to respond that much more quickly to changes in the market and to target potential customers with all the more ease.
You’ll be able to increase the visibility of your brand, increase your customer loyalty, and generate more leads. All this results in more revenue which in turn increases your return on investment (ROI) compared to traditional advertising.
Top Benefits of Digital Marketing
The benefits of a digital marketing campaign versus a traditional marketing campaign are quite extensive. In this section, we’ll go through some of the most important such benefits, which include:
Increases in your online visibility
Multi-channel development of your brand
Use of social media marketing to acquire more customers
Converting qualified leads into sales
Ease of market data analysis for better customer segmentation
Optimizing customer retention with market data
So, let’s take a more detailed look at our first top benefit of digital insurance marketing.
An Increase of Online Visibility
Most people seeking information on insurance start online. Their process usually begins with a query in a search engine. So, if your website or web content appears high in the search results, you’ll have a greater chance of attracting them to your site, engaging with them, and converting them to a client.
This is, basically, the whole point of search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is the process of improving a websites’ or webpage’s visibility to search engines through the careful application of a number of techniques from appropriate keyword use to metadata development.
So, if you create useful content such as informative posts about insurance-related topics, or your very own policies for that matter, and then go the extra step of optimizing those pages for search engines, you will attract more potential clients to your site.
This will increase your brand visibility and will likely result in more qualified leads and, ultimately, a greater number of conversions.
The Multiple Channel Development of Your Brand
How well-known is your brand? Do you want to make it more well-known? Of course, you do.
That’s what digital marketing of an insurance agency can accomplish. An online presence is your path to brand building. Correctly done, it will draw both potential and future customers to you, thereby increasing both brand recognition and loyalty. Before you know it, a whole swathe of people will think of you every time they think of insurance.
And when that’s the case, who do you think they’ll go to when they need insurance? You, of course.
Building your brand involves a number of different techniques and strategies. One of these is social media marketing. Running an ad on social media is a great way to make your company more accessible and improve awareness with every individual who sees it.
But buying ads isn’t the only route available to you to boost your brand’s visibility and awareness. Many other options exist. You can:
Create your own podcast or star on someone else’s as a guest
Host sweepstakes
Giveaway freebies
Use catchy infographics
And much more. The internet is a vast domain rich with opportunity. You are only limited by your imagination.
Use of Social Media Marketing to Acquire More Customers
One of the keys to growing your customer base online is a vibrant, engaged online community.
If customers can engage with you directly through social media, you can increase sales and build brand loyalty. If your company offers useful, relevant advice online and responds quickly to questions, your agency will only benefit.
These tactics help humanize and distinguish your brand. You develop a reputation as a company with a soul, one that truly cares. All this can lead more individuals to your cyber-doorstep as they realize that your company provides detailed and effective policy support.
Convert Qualified Leads Into Sales
An insurance digital marketing plan can readily convert qualified leads into sales. It can do this in many ways. One such way involves the cyber-equivalent of word-of-mouth.
A great number of people share social media posts and emails with people they know who might be interested in the content. For example, a middle-aged woman sees one of your Facebook Ads on renter’s insurance. She doesn’t need renter’s insurance, but her college-age son does. So, she shares the post with him, and he turns his sights to you as a provider.
This online word-of-mouth can dramatically increase your potential sales without additional cost. Think about it. You increase your qualified leads. Your business grows. And it requires very little effort on your part.
Use of Market Data Analysis for Better Customer Segmentation
In the modern age, gathering, tracking, and analyzing data has become ever easier. This allows you to segment the target audience of any digital marketing campaign into ever more specific categories based on the data you’ve acquired from your customers’ behavior on social media sites and elsewhere.
For example, do you want to target a campaign at 40 - 60 year-olds downsizing from an empty nest? You can do that. Do you want to sell car insurance to college graduates that just landed their first “real” job? You can target that too!
The specificity of Facebook and Google Ads are one of the reasons those companies are so huge. Clients can target their ads to such a granular level on those sites, they can dramatically boost their chances of obtaining positive results.
And the rest of the online world is following suit. Nowadays, most ad campaigns use tools to analyze many different factors from age to interests to much, much more.
Optimize Customer Retention with Market Data and Segmentation
Your marketing efforts can also pay off through customer retention. Through the use of data collected from an opt-in email newsletter and the results of social media marketing campaigns, you will gain access to a great deal of useful information. You might learn things like:
How often people open the emails you send
What key words have the most impact
What content on your site is viewed the most often
The first use of information like this is, obviously, to craft more effective, more efficient marketing campaigns for new customers. A secondary use is a little more subtle. You can use the feedback you get to optimize the content on your site and in your email newsletter to generate and keep the interest of those clients you already have.
This process of constantly improving content based on customer insight and market data, while at the same time optimizing SEO, can dramatically improve the impact and effectiveness of your content. As a result, your retention rates for your customers will improve as they will see no reason to leave the gold standard you set when it comes time to renew their policies.
Disadvantages of Traditional Marketing
The primary disadvantage of traditional marketing techniques can be summed up in one word: feedback. Traditional marketing techniques lack the technological infrastructure to provide the feedback that digital marketing campaigns have in spades.
Without such data, it is extremely difficult to determine if your marketing campaigns are having any sort of impact. How many people saw that newspaper ad? Or even opened the direct mail? Or saw the tv spot? Such techniques may or may not work, but that’s just the point. It’s a little like gambling. Getting proper feedback from traditional marketing is difficult at best.
Strategies and Tactics of a Digital Insurance Marketing Campaign
So, now that we’ve covered the benefits and advantages of a digital insurance marketing campaign as compared to a traditional campaign, we’ll take a look at some of the tactics and strategies many digital marketing campaigns use.
Designing a Customer Avatar
The first step to any marketing strategy is developing an avatar. An avatar, or buyer persona, is a detailed description of the type of individual to whom you expect to make a sale. We recommend that you make several such avatars to help you target your various marketing campaigns.
For example, suppose your insurance agency specializes in life insurance. You might develop several avatars: one for a married man with several children, another for his wife, another for a single mother of two, and so on.
Let’s take the single mother of two. Clearly, she wants life insurance to take care of her children if something happens to her. From there, you assign other characteristics. What is her income bracket, for example? That helps dictate which policies of yours she can afford.
Once you complete her avatar, you can use it to inform a marketing campaign directed at persons in her situation.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is how the search engines find your website for organic searches. This, basically, determines your site’s rankings on search results for which you did not pay. As such, it is a very important aspect to your website and your company’s marketing campaigns.
SEO uses keywords, meta-descriptions, and other techniques to get your website to rank as high as possible. The goal is the number one spot, failing that, at least the first page. Anything lower than that tends to drift into obscurity. We cannot emphasize enough the importance of SEO. Without it, you’ll have little chance of maximizing your Internet exposure.
Most insurance consumers these days do substantial digital research before deciding on an insurance company from which to buy. Often, they start with an Internet search. Failure to optimize your website cuts you off from those potential customers.
Although it may not be necessary to employ an SEO expert on your staff (although some insurance brokerages do), you should at least cover some of the basics of SEO with your website: use keywords, meta-descriptions, proper formatting, etc…
PPC (Pay-Per-Click)
PPC or Pay-Per-Click is a marketing technique where you pay a certain amount every time someone clicks on the link in your ad. The link takes that person to your website where, ideally, you can convert them into a sale.
While it’s true that PPC campaigns can lead to an increase in sales, without proper management and understanding, PPC can consume the profits of those sales leaving you with only a small ROI (return on investment) and the sense you are grinding your wheels.
One of the keys to PPC is realizing that a click that leads to your website is an opportunity, not a guarantee. Although every visitor represents a chance to turn a profit, you only have a few seconds to catch and keep their attention and convince them that you can help them with their problem. Your page must be bold, concise, and filled with sufficient calls to action to convert.
Social Media Marketing
In the 21st century, social media is booming. Millions of people are on the various platforms throughout the day, often for hours on end. Any digital insurance marketing campaign must take this fact into account and dedicate some of its resources to marketing here.
You’ll have to hit all the hot properties: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and a multitude of others. A good marketing company will help you manage your online presence on these platforms or even run your campaigns for you. Done correctly, it will allow you to reach a huge amount of potential clients without too much difficulty.
Web Development and Design
Doing business in the 21st century virtually requires the development and maintenance of a website. They are ubiquitous now. And they are necessary.
Every such website should incorporate the values, principles, and vision that defines its business. Unique to the core, it should grab the customer’s attention, yet still keep an intuitive design that makes navigation easy.
It goes without saying that the successful website is the one developed and maintained by a professional team, either in-house or external. A good site carries engaging content in the form of informative blog posts, articles, and videos that will generate more traffic and help increase sales.
All aspects of the site contribute to its effectiveness. These include:
The layout and general design
The color scheme
All the pics and images
The presentation and type of content
The navigability
It should carry very little excess clutter that distracts visitors too readily. The contact page should be relatively easy to find. Answers to questions—particularly insurance questions for sites developed for insurance agencies—should be accessible and easy to find.
Recognize that a good website can be incorporated into a branding strategy. As brand awareness goes up, so too will website traffic, and vice versa. They feed into each, providing ever increasing gains for your company if they are designed well.
Another important aspect of your website must be how it takes into account your user’s level of understanding of your insurance products.
We recommend that a substantial part of your site be designed around prospective policyholders who are just starting out on their insurance journey. That is, you should design a site with the notion that much of your traffic may have very little understanding of the intricacies of insurance and how your products can best serve them in the end.
The most relevant information should be the most accessible for the beginning prospect. Finding further information that increases the prospect’s knowledge and advances them further toward their goals and, ultimately, the purchase of your product, should be easily found.
The same is true with respect to person-to-person customer service. No one enjoys wasting hours on a website looking for the hidden phone number or email that will put them into contact with a real live person. The more time your prospects waste on your site, the more likely they are to leave it without successfully engaging or making a purchase.
Lastly, but perhaps just as importantly, are the technical aspects of your site. The pages must load at breakneck speeds whether they be input forms, on-site chat boxes, or anything else. And all content, in whatever form, must be optimized for mobile devices or you will lose those types of customers all the more quickly.
Content Writing
It should be obvious that the key to a successful website is high-quality content.
As noted previously, the best content is that which is optimized for SEO without sacrificing your user’s experience. That means that not only should the content increase your rankings in searches, but it should be clearly, coherently written in a way that engages the reader. You must write for both the human being and the machine.
As far as SEO is concerned, the content on the site can be optimized with a number of different techniques. These include the following:
Increase Content Length: This helps to maximize the relevance of the information for your audience as far as the search engine is concerned.
Add Text to Your Visuals: Make sure you complete all descriptions and alt-tags for all your images and other visuals as this can help boost your rankings and increase engagement.
Be Consistent: Maintaining consistency throughout the actual content, the meta description, and the page title not only serves to boost rankings, but helps decrease confusion on the reader’s part as well.
As far as the human being is concerned, quality of content is king. Such can include articles, blogs, testimonials, statistics, and more. Done right, human-friendly content is one of the most critical aspects of the website. Make your customer’s needs a priority.
You can do this through tracking analytics to determine what traffic generates the most interest. Figure out what information is most useful to your customers and then provide them with that data. They will reward you for your efforts.
The modern prospect does a great deal of online research before they buy. Relevant, engaging content makes it all the more likely they will buy from you.
Gated Content
Gated content is content accessed through an interface or “gate” such as an Email Newsletter Signup Form or something similar. This allows you to collect data from your prospects such as email addresses or insurance interests or any other unobtrusive information you think might help a future marketing campaign.
The key is to make the content behind the gate ever more irresistible. Offer value. That can’t be stressed enough. You’re engaged in a trade. You must give them something they want—eBooks, whitepapers, whatever—and they will give you something you want—their data.
Crafting marketing campaigns becomes that much easier when you’ve collected reams of data to add to your marketing lists.
Marketing Automation
Another available tactic in digital insurance marketing is marketing automation. Marketing automation allows for the consolidation and automation of a large number of different marketing activities. These can include such things as certain web content, email campaigns that incorporate conditional logic, and other forms of digital advertising.
Marketing automation can also be used to capture and analyze the data generated by any prospect or policyholder to provide a transparent view of that individual’s insurance journey. This provides valuable information that can be used to further your marketing endeavors.
Email Marketing
Another effective digital insurance marketing tactic is email marketing.
Email marketing allows you to keep touch with your customers, enticing them back for repeat business in an easily measurable, cost-effective way. Emails can be standardized and automated, or they can be tailored to the buyer personas or customer avatars you have carefully constructed. Used in a surgical manner, they can greatly increase the chance of engagement and sales.
As you build your email lists, you’ll be able to fine tune your avatars and learn ever more about your audience and what drives them to your site. This opens up limitless possibilities of finely tuned and targeted email campaigns.
Conversion Optimization
Getting a million people to click onto your website doesn’t do you any good if you fail to convert a reasonable number of them to customers. This is where conversion optimization comes in.
Through the use of high-quality strategic content and other tactics that promote the user’s experience on your site, it becomes easier to convert website visitors into customers. And this, of course, is the goal of every business.
Video Marketing
Video marketing is a highly recommended form of digital marketing for the modern insurance agency.
In today’s world, a short video can be placed on an actual website, on a blog, in an article, or on a social media site as well as YouTube or virtually any other place online. Videos are highly effective because they are a visual medium that excels at capturing a person’s attention.
They are also a great way to present valuable information and, even more importantly, they provide an opportunity for an insurance agency to build their brand.
They do this by helping establish trust, credibility, and professionalism; allowing for shareable, or even at times, viral content; being very mobile user friendly; being easily embedded into marketing emails; and finally, helping increase conversions.
Intelligently used, videos can help an insurance agency earn incredible rewards from their digital marketing campaigns.
Taking the Next Step—Hiring A Digital Insurance Marketing Agency
Every business owner knows the importance of marketing your business. The insurance business is no different. It may seem like a herculean task, but the right digital insurance marketing agency can help you achieve your goals by providing you with the effective professional services you need.
With the right agency at your side, you’ll be able to grow your business with a well-tailored, well-designed website and a host of other marketing strategies and techniques.
Conclusion
There you have it—a complete run-down of the benefits of a digital insurance marketing agency as well as a host of their most common techniques and strategies. Don’t put it off any longer. Take the leap and hire a digital insurance marketing agency today.
Sources:
How Insurance Agencies Benefit From Marketing | 321 Web Marketing
Insurance Digital Marketing Agency | Insurance SEO | Cardinal Digital Marketing
Insurance Digital Marketing - What You Need to Try Right Now (mediaboom.com)
Digital Marketing Best Practices for Insurance Companies | Act-On
