In 2023, an insurance marketing strategy isn’t optional.
If you want to grow your business, especially in an uncertain economic climate, you need to come up with a plan for how to do so.
Furthermore, the right strategy goes a long way in ensuring that you properly serve your target audience and keep your pipeline of leads full.
In this guide, we break down the process of developing an insurance marketing strategy that generates results in 2023 and beyond.
Skip ahead: Purchase aged leads.
Start with a clear picture of your target audience
It’s impossible to effectively market, advertise, and sell insurance products without a clear picture of your target audience.
Without this, there’s a good chance that you’ll spend time, money, and other resources on activities that don’t move the needle.
Identify your target audience by reviewing data associated with current customers. Answer questions such as:
- What type(s) of coverage do they carry?
- What’s the average age of your customers?
- Where do your customers live?
- What’s the average income of your customers?
- What percentage of your customers hold more than one policy type with your company?
Answering these questions, among others, will help you paint a clear picture of your target audience.
The next step is to understand the needs and preferences of your customers. This allows you to develop a marketing strategy that aligns with them. For example, if a large portion of your business is life insurance, “needs” may include:
- Monthly premium payment in a specific range
- A death benefit to replace x years of annual income
- A term life insurance policy that lasts until retirement
You may not clearly understand the needs and preferences of your customers. This is common, especially if you’ve never developed a defined insurance marketing strategy.
However, as you dig into customer data and continue to speak with customers and prospects, you’ll quickly gain a better understanding.
The final step is to clearly articulate the benefit of insurance in the circumstances common to your target audience.
Sticking with the life insurance example above, benefits could include:
- Money to pay for final expenses
- Income replacement
- Paying off your home mortgage and/or other debts
- Providing funds for your kids’ future, such as educational expenses
Telling life insurance prospects that they need coverage isn’t good enough. It’s easier to engage them and make a sale by providing benefits specific to their circumstances.
Know your competitors inside and out
The more you know about your competitors the easier it is to implement a strategy that exploits their weaknesses and puts a spotlight on your benefits. Here’s an example:
- Strengths: Strong national brand, expansive product line, and competitive pricing
- Weaknesses: Subpar marketing strategy, poor customer reviews, and a less-than-ideal web experience
Can you match or exceed these strengths? Can you exploit these weaknesses? What do competitors offer that you don’t and vice versa?
The best way to answer these questions is to clearly articulate your unique selling points and the benefits of working with your insurance company. Unique selling points could include:
- Instant quotes
- Live chat customer service
- Industry-leading mobile app
- Hassle-free buying experience
With these points in mind, you know exactly what you want to convey to your target audience.
Competitor research
1. Review their website
Start with their website. You can quickly learn about their products, industry ratings, their overall approach to sales and marketing, and more. Take 30 to 60 minutes to thoroughly review three to five of your top competitors. You won’t regret the time you spend on this task since you want to know which other options are available to consumers.
2. Request additional information
Maybe you’re wondering how a competitor shares policy information via email. Or perhaps you want to take a closer look at their direct mail campaigns. There’s nothing wrong with requesting information. Though slightly deceitful, you’ll get an idea of what their response time is to their customers if you pose as one.
3. Follow them on social media
What type of content do your competitors share? What social media platforms do they use the most? How much do they post? Once you know what your competitors are doing on social media, you can develop a plan for outperforming them.
4. Sign up for their newsletter
This will show you the type of content they share, how often they share it, the calls to action they use, and more.
Make it a habit to sign up for every insurance company, agent, or broker newsletter you come across. Stay up to date on the tactics they’re using and how they’re pushing them. Take what they’re doing but do it better.
In addition to the research you complete upfront, keep close tabs on your competitors in the future. You never know when you’ll find something you can use in your own marketing strategy.
Set clear marketing goals and objectives
One of the biggest marketing mistakes you can make is taking a scattergun approach.
This is also known as “throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks.”
For instance, you focus on email marketing today, content marketing tomorrow, and social media marketing next week. When you spread yourself thin, with no real focus, results are harder to come by.
Protect against this by linking business objectives to marketing objectives. Doing so ensures that every marketing idea you employ moves you closer to reaching your overall business goals.
Taking this one step further, don’t assume that your marketing objectives are aligned with your business objectives. Carefully measure, with data and KPIs, to ensure that you’re always moving in the right direction.
Common marketing KPIs for insurance companies and professionals can include:
- Website traffic
- Leads
- Qualified leads
- Opportunities
- Conversion rate
These marketing KPIs often relate to more insurance-specific KPIS, such as:
- Quota vs. production
- Average policy size
- Revenue per policyholder
- Policy lapse ratio
There’s no such thing as too much data. Use data to set KPIs, plan how you’ll hit your business objectives, and implement a laser-focused marketing strategy.
What are your goals?
Setting clear marketing goals and objectives is critical to your success, but there’s something you could be missing: the need to make adjustments in the future.
Maybe you’re in the early days of your career as an insurance agent. You have small goals and objectives, knowing that you have to start at the bottom.
As you begin to grow, you don’t want to maintain the same goals. This “small thinking” could hinder you from reaching new heights.
Using website traffic as an example, you may be happy with 500 visitors per month as a new agent. After a year, once your website is more established, 1,000+ visitors per month may be a better goal.
Be realistic when setting goals and objectives. It’s okay to push yourself but don’t set unattainable goals. Doing so will set you up for failure and disappointment.
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Choose the right marketing mix
Your marketing strategy should do two things: increase awareness and generate leads. Don’t focus so much time on one that you overlook the importance of the other.
Consider all of the following:
- Local advertising: Billboards, direct mail, and sponsoring local events.
- Pay per click (PPC): You pay a fee every time someone clicks on your ad.
- Search engine optimization (SEO): The act of optimizing your website to increase search engine visibility when people search for target keywords.
- Content marketing: The use of content to share knowledge, engage your audience, promote your brand, and generate leads.
- Social media marketing: The use of social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, to connect with and engage your audience.
- Email marketing: A type of direct marketing that uses email messages to educate your audience, promote your products, and share helpful guidance.
- Lead buying: The act of purchasing insurance leads.
Understanding the strengths and limitations of each tactic allows you to properly allocate marketing resources on your march to achieving your goals.
The biggest mistake you can make is implementing too many tactics from the get-go. Doing so will “water down” your marketing strategy, making it difficult to gain traction in any one area.
As a general rule, choose two or three tactics and devote all of your marketing resources to them. Perform A/B testing to see which combination of tactics works the best for you.
A good mix could be SEO combined with content marketing and lead buying.
When choosing a marketing mix, opt for tactics that complement one another. SEO and content marketing are a good pair because content creation is an essential part of reaching the top of search engines.
As you gain experience and achieve results, you can then introduce new tactics to your original marketing mix. Soon enough, you have a robust strategy that allows you to generate traffic, leads, and conversations through various means.
Outline an implementation and measurement plan for your strategy
This is a three-point process.
1. Develop an action plan for implementing each tactic
It’s one thing to make a list of tactics (see above), but another thing entirely to implement each one. How will you add these to your marketing strategy? You won’t make any progress thinking about marketing tactics. You have to implement them and take action.
Content marketing is a good example. You know you need to create and distribute content, but how you take action will ultimately determine the results. Answer questions such as:
- Will you create all of your content in-house? Are you okay with the idea of hiring outside writers?
- What type of content do you want to create? Blog posts? Whitepapers? Newsletters?
- What will you use as your primary methods of distributing content?
Your initial action plan may not be perfect, but that’s okay. What matters is that you have a defined plan for implementing the applicable marketing tactics.
2. Design a sustainable workflow to create consistency
Implementing too many marketing tactics can bog you down instead of bringing efficiency to your process. You want a sustainable workflow with measurable consistency.
A consistent strategy will generate results.
A big part of this is knowing who is responsible for which tasks. Are you the sole person in charge of developing and managing your company’s marketing strategy? Do you have help, such as the ability to hire freelance writers and an SEO consultant?
Your workflow can and will change over time, but you must remain consistent with your approach.
3. Monitor your progress
Don’t assume that your marketing strategy is yielding results. Carefully monitor your progress and make adjustments as necessary. Sometimes it’s the smallest changes that have the biggest impact on performance.
How you monitor your progress depends on the tools that you choose to use. You can opt for a simple approach, such as tracking traffic data with Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Sheets.
There are also various tools, some free and some paid, that you can use to monitor your progress. Ahrefs has all the SEO tools you could ever need. Hootsuite is a top choice for scheduling social media content.
Also, the use of a KPI dashboard can save you a lot of time. Databox is a top choice, as it allows you to build dashboards and track performance in a centralized location.
Continual monitoring of your progress and performance allows you to pinpoint what’s working and what isn’t. With that, you can determine which marketing tactics to double down on and which ones to leave in the past.
Conclusion: Insurance Marketing Strategies
To summarize, here are the basic steps you should take:
- Define your target audience
- Understand your competitors
- Set marketing goals and objectives
- Choose a marketing mix
- Create a plan to implement your strategy and measure results
With this guide to developing an insurance marketing strategy, you have everything you need to take action in 2023. By doing so, you position your company to strengthen its brand, attract new customers, and ultimately increase sales.
Photo by Kindel Media
