As I’ve been saying in my recent posts on logos, building your insurance agency brand should always be a primary consideration when communicating with your audience. Building your brand is the same as building an asset. If you’ve ever bought or sold a service business, like an insurance agency, you know that a lot of its value resides in “goodwill,” or the firm’s branding, since service businesses don’t usually hold a lot of hard assets such as property and equipment.
Probably the easiest and most powerful way to build your brand is to promote it with your agency newsletter. There are at least five ways to do this.
1. Your nameplate: Make sure you’ve got a well-designed nameplate — often referred to as the masthead or the header on Page One of your newsletter. It should showcase your logo, which should project the essential qualities of your firm. Make sure your logo or nameplate has some color in it, to make it stands out on the page. Also include your phone number, address and, if you have a small agency, the names of your principal producers. Firms with multiple locations may want to use a sidebar to provide information on their various locations.
2. Second color: One design element that really brings out your branding is the use of a second color throughout the newsletter. If, for instance, your logo’s primary color is red, using red as the highlight color in the newsletter can help unify your nameplate branding with the rest of the text.
3. Custom articles: Purchasing a professionally written newsletter from Smart’s Publishing is a reliable and economical way to project your expertise. But it helps to reinforce your branding and your firm’s unique services by personalizing it at least from time to time with text specific to your firm. For example:
- Short biographies of producers and CSRs
- Special programs you offer
- Agency or community events that you’re involved in
- Articles or opinions about insurance topics by the president or others in the firm
4. Variable printing: At Smart’s Publishing, we use digital presses to print all our newsletters. This gives us the flexibility to personalize, if you wish, every single copy of your newsletter. For instance, if your newsletter is folded into a self-mailer, we can imprint a personalized greeting on the mailer panel of every newsletter. You could say something like: “Diane, Scott Insurance is pleased to provide your August issue of Insurance Buyers’ News. Give us a call if you have any questions about the articles in this month’s issue. And thanks for letting us serve you.”
5. Frequency and consistency: Your efforts to build your brand will have the best success if your impressions are frequent and consistent. Mailing your audience a printed newsletter on a regular basis is certainly one of the best ways to accomplish this goal.
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