Marketing your insurance business is a must if you want to grow your agency. Competition in the insurance industry is tough and you need a solid marketing strategy to make sure your insurance agency grows at a steady rate.
Relying on referrals alone will likely not help you reach your ambitious goals. Thanks to modern technology, new marketing strategies are emerging every year and it’s up to you to capitalize on them.
Audit Your Current Marketing Strategy and Lead Sources
Regardless of the size of your agency or the regions it serves, your marketing strategy needs to be detailed and specific. With the number of marketing channels these days this can be a daunting task, but knowing exactly how many leads each marketing channel brought you is crucial if you plan on making realistic goals for your marketing strategy.
So before you start launching new campaigns left and right, make sure you take a deep look into your business to understand what really drives conversions. If you’ve never done this before it’s a lot of work, but once you’ve gone through it you can reuse it quarterly.
If your doing any digital marketing you or your digital agency should have analytics set up with conversion tracking so you know your lead sources. This will serve as a benchmark for future goals and will serve as the foundation of your marketing strategy.
Improve Local Search Rankings through Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Although everything is moving online many consumers like to work with a local insurance agent. Showing up #1 locally on Google can be a huge source of calls for your business. If you simply google “Insurance” you’ll see how the results are dominated by large brokerages. Ranking for these keywords can be very competitive, but SEO can still deliver tremendous ROI if done right. By simply choosing the right keywords to target you can get highly profitable ROI for your business.
So if you’re considering doing SEO for insurance be sure you carefully consider your targeted keywords and avoid going after anything too competitive. These large brokerages simply have huge marketing budgets making it tough to compete, but for every competitive keyword, there are hundreds more niche and less competitive keywords.
Below these large brokerages are the local results. This is where your insurance agency get a an extremely high ROI. Ranking locally in the maps comes down to optimizing your Google My Business. If you want a detailed guide that goes over what you can do to show up locally – SEO for Insurance Agents.
The local maps take up a large part of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) which leads to it getting an excessive amount of clicks. Local SEO is highly reliant on proximity, so if you optimize your listing right, you can show up at the top when ever some one searches the right keyword and they are near your office.
Once you start doing Google My Business SEO you’ll see the ROI, many people simply call these businesses from their cell phone or get directions to their location. We have clients that receive 400+ calls per month from their GMB. Your GMB is an asset you don’t want to ignore. There are many basic steps you can take to optimize your GMB listing.
If you decide to work with an SEO agency to manage your local Google My Business listing their goal should be to make your listing show up in the top 3 for selected keywords. As you continue to do SEO you’ll see your radius increase. In other words the area that your local listing shows up in becomes bigger and bigger over time when you invest in SEO.
Get a Professionally Designed Website
Nothings worse than spending a lot of money on marketing and sending that traffic to a poorly designed website. Many insurance marketers are solely focused on increasing traffic while increasing conversions can bring in more leads almost over night. You want to be sure that your website is professionally designed and delivers the right message to your prospective clientele visiting your website. Your website is not the place to cut corners, especially if you are going to invest in digital marketing.
Optimize for Conversions
At times it’s not the most attractive websites that get the most conversions. If you decide to get a professionally designed website be sure it is set up to convert. Websites that convert well are typically simple and have a solid value proposition.
Each page on your website should have one specific purpose and one call to action. Many times companies will want to fill their website with call to action buttons all over the page. It’s best to keep your prospects focused. So think deeply about what call to action you want to show on your website. Make sure it’s something unique.
Everyone knows the “15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance” by Geico.
Look at how simple the Geico home page is. Just one call to action “Start a Quote” stands out. If you are looking for more specific information on a type of insurance you can click through to other pages. That’s website designed with conversions in mind.
Develop Your Brand & Online Reputation
“Build your brand” is a phrase that seems to be getting tossed around quite a bit, but what does it actually mean? Your brand is not something tangible, so it can be hard to gauge how well you have “built it”. Here are some important metrics to look at to quantify how strong your brand is:
- Online Reviews: The quantity and average rating matter. If you can get hundreds of reviews you’re doing amazing, dozens of reviews and you’re doing great
- Social Media Following: How many people follow your social media accounts?
- Social Media Engagement: How many comments do you get when you post something on Social Media?
- Website Traffic: How many people visit your website on a monthly basis? How many of those are returning visitors?
In my opinion, you’ve done a good job of building your brand when you talk to a brand new prospect you’ve never met and you tell them who you are then they say “oh, I’ve heard of you before”. That’s solid brand awareness for your insurance agency. Building a brand has less ROI in the short term, but if done right, can have amazing ROI in the long term.
Get Reviews
We’ve already mentioned review generation in the brand building section above, but it definitely deserves it’s own section in our Insurance Marketing guide. If possible, you want to have hundreds of reviews across all of the review sites.
Reviews help boost credibility and increase conversions. It’s that simple. Having tons of reviews will amplify your digital marketing efforts.
Getting reviews is simple, there’s no need to complicate it. Simply ask each client for a review after you provide your service. Be sure you have a professional script as you do with everything else.
You can see in the image above that some insurance companies have hundreds of reviews. More reviews help increase click through rate and conversion rate. A prospective customer is more likely to call a company that has hundreds of reviews. It’s social proof.
Do reviews help with local rankings? From our experience they do, but certain reviews have more weight. Reviews left by local guides seem to help rankings more. Also longer reviews with keywords in them tend to help boost rankings. Not instantly, but they can help over time. Simply put, reviews can only help your business just put in the effort and get them.
Create and Promote Video Content
Video content is becoming more and more important. Video content is simply engaging and builds your personal brand like nothing else. You don’t need fancy equipment to start video marketing. If you have a smart phone you can start shooting today. You don’t need the highest quality video to make a positive impact on your brand. People like video that is not extremely polished for day to day content.
Specialize or Run Specialized Campaigns.
You often hear “the riches are in the niches”, but you may already be running a general insurance agency, so what can you do? You can simply run niche marketing campaigns. One way you can do this is by targeting people on Google Ads based on Search Intent. For example, they can be interested in “auto insurance” so you can serve an auto insurance ad to them. Likewise, you can run a targeted Google Ads campaign based on search intent for people interested in life or home insurance.
Retarget your audience
Retargeting (aka remarketing) can be a clever way of increasing conversions. If you’re doing any form of insurance advertising or inbound marketing like SEO, you’ll notice it can be somewhat resource extensive to get a user on your website. Many of those users will leave your site without converting. When you set up retargeting ads you’ll be able to serve ads to people who have already visited your website with the goal of getting them to convert after they’ve seen your ad multiple times.
Retargeting ads can be very inexpensive on a CPC basis when compared to Google search ads. The average CPC will be similar to a display ad, in the 50 cents to $1 range. Retargeting ads are really a great way to boost conversions.
Run Facebook Ads
Facebook ads are still a great way to reach your target market. You can either run them yourself or hire a professional agency to help you generate quality insurance leads. Either way, don’t overlook Facebook ads they have immense ROI.
Manage Your Leads with a CRM
You may be sitting on a pot of gold and not even know it. Many leads you recieved a while back that didn’t convert may be ready to purchase now. That’s where a strong CRM comes to play. We like to reccomend HubSpot CRM, but there are many others like 17hats or Salesforce. It doesn’t matter if you manage your leads on a Google Sheet or Excel file, just be sure you’re following up.
Engage Your Audience on Social Media
If you’re looking to target a high net worth audience consider LinkedIn. You can reach business owners interested in commercial insurance or simply connect with professionals. If you follow Gary Vaynerchuck I’m sure you’ve heard him say how Linkedin is the place to be. You get so much more organic reach from Linkedin when compared to other social networks.
The best times to post on LinkedIn are weekdays from 12 pm – 2 pm. That’s when professionals are taking their breaks and checking in on LinkedIn. Think of LinkedIn as a networking event. You don’t want to be simply promoting your business left and right. Focus on providing value to engage with your audience. Also, be sure you spend some time connecting with professionals and messaging them to establish a relationship. Over time you’ll reap the rewards if you’re consistent enough with posting and connecting on LinkedIn.
