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The Top 3 Insurance Marketing Mistakes — and How Agents Can Avoid Them
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The Top 3 Insurance Marketing Mistakes — and How Agents Can Avoid Them
Insurance agents have to wear many hats, especially if they’re building their own agency. With everything you have to do each day to keep your business running, marketing often falls through the cracks.
If you’re like most agents, your first priority is sales.
But you’re also the bookkeeper responsible for keeping your accounts in order. Plus you’re the office manager making sure everything runs properly. And you’re probably also the janitor responsible for keeping your office clean. Months fly by without any time for serious marketing
materializing.
If this sounds familiar, take a minute to check your marketing efforts and results against this list of common missteps… and solutions.
If you find that you’re guilty of any or all of them, don’t take it personally. Instead, congratulate yourself on discovering an opportunity to improve sales — or even head off at the pass a future slump in insurance leads. Like the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
1. The one-trick pony
If you’ve found an approach that your prospects respond to, but have abandoned the rest of your marketing, a word of caution: What’s driving insurance leads to you in droves today may dry up tomorrow.
Successful strategies are always based on a combination of things operating in sync. When one of those elements shifts, the equation that made it work alters and the results are inevitably different.
When this happens — and yes, it’s usually a matter of when and not if — it’s important to have other systems in place to pick up the slack.
Of course, if you have a golden goose, don’t change anything. But do invest in a couple chickens… so you don’t put all your eggs in one basket. If your goose stops being so golden, you’ll have a backup in place while you look for your next big winner.
2. Inconsistent messaging
Are you changing your message on every other marketing piece you use?
Don’t just look at the words you’re using, also observe the look and feel and general tone of every asset. If your name is going to stick in people’s minds, it has to be consistently delivered at every turn.
While you may not be a big brand like Pepsi or Toyota, you are still a brand nonetheless. This means you fly or die by certain rules. And the first rule in brand-building is consistency.
From the first time a prospect sees your ad in the yellow pages to the email signature they see when you thank them for signing a policy with you, your image and message should be coherent and consistent.
For example, you may want to market yourself as the health insurance “problem solver” in your area. You can also mention that you have affordable programs and great service. But if your brand is “problem solver,” the majority of most of your marketing pieces should reinforce your image as a problem solver for insurance shoppers.
Through repetition, you will achieve recognition. And recognition is where trust-building and relationship-forming begin.
3. Infrequent contact
Did you know that the average person has to see something seven times before it registers?
If your marketing is intermittent or worse, drops off at all the wrong times, it’s time to make some adjustments.
The goal is to touch prospects repeatedly and continuously. Don’t assume that they’ll remember you when they’re ready to buy next year, if you haven’t “touched” them for over nine months. The burden is on you to keep connected.
No matter how good your campaign is, timing and frequency are still necessary ingredients for marketing and sales success.
While this may sound like a call for a bigger marketing budget or more time on the phone, that is not necessarily the case. A small investment into an email autoresponder can do the trick and help you nurture your unclosed insurance leads.
For example, an email autoresponders specifically designed for the needs of busy health insurance agents can send a steady stream of marketing messages to your leads and prospects. Each customized email serves two important purposes:
• Guide the prospect to a buying decision.
• Ensure that they remember you when they are ready to buy.
Email autoresponders allow you to keep your focus on your freshest and ready-to-close leads — where they belong. When an unclosed lead in your “long-term” bin is finally ready to close, your email autoresponder will make sure that he or she will have your offer and contact information close at hand.
These are the three biggest marketing problems that insurance agents and brokers face.
There are others, but if you make sure to address these three common pitfalls, you’ll at least have a functioning marketing system to generate and nurture insurance leads — while you focus on selling and closing. |
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