10 Marketing Tips for New Insurance Agents

Top Marketing Strategies for Insurance Agents

In 2018, approximately 36,500 independent insurance agencies operated in the United States, according to the 2018 Agency Universe survey conducted by the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America (IIABA). In 2019, independent broker-dealers accounted for 24 percent of sales of individual annuities, while independent agents accounted for 20 percent.

That’s a lot of competition. Also, as an independent insurance agent, you not only have to compete against your peers but also against large firms. You, therefore, must find a way to stand out from the crowd to drive sales and that’s where utilizing effective marketing strategies for insurance agents comes in.

As an independent insurance agent, you’re likely great at sales. You understand people and know how to close the deal. However, marketing isn’t quite the same, especially since determining your return on investment can be challenging.

While sales are easily quantifiable and will ensure the success of your business, marketing will help you get those sales and scale up your business. Effective marketing strategies for insurance agents will help you generate qualified leads, build relationships with prospects, and even generate long-term loyalty from existing clients.

Read on to discover some highly effective tips for marketing for insurance agents. However, keep in mind that the overall strategy you employ needs to be your own and should be dictated mainly by what your customers need and want.

1.      Polish Your Online Real Estate

Nowadays, most consumers research products and services online before making a purchase. Even purchases made in brick and mortar stores and offices. So, having a professionally designed website is essential if you want to succeed.

The goal isn’t just to be present online, however. To maximize the benefits of your website, make sure to provide valuable content showcasing your expertise. It will help you build credibility and ensure that your prospects and customers consider you their go-to source for all their insurance needs. This makes it an outstanding low-cost approach to marketing for insurance agents.

To expand your online reach, consider asking for links from your business customers. It will provide both parties with excellent cross-marketing opportunities.

2.      Always Be Networking

You should never miss an opportunity to network, whether you’re at an event or just popping down to the store for a carton of milk. That means always having business cards on hand to hand out.

It might seem old school, but business cards are still the most effective way to provide prospects with your contact information. Of course, it helps if they are professionally designed because first impressions matter.

3.      Go Mobile

People use their mobile devices nowadays for everything from chatting to friends to making important purchases. In fact, an increasing number of people are using their smartphones to interact with the web than laptops.

It’s definitely an opportunity you shouldn’t miss out on, which means ensuring that your site is mobile-friendly. If people can’t browse your site effectively via their mobile devices, they’ll take their business to someone else.

4.      Become a Sponsor

Sponsoring a community event, whether it’s with funds or by volunteering your time, is a great way to get involved in the community. It will help increase awareness of your services. However, it will also help build goodwill and show that you genuinely care about the community and the people you do business with.

5.      Turn into a Social Butterfly

Social media is bigger than ever, which makes it an invaluable tool for marketing for new insurance agents. However, building your presence on social media requires constant interaction. So, make sure to choose only one or two channels to start with because you don’t want your social media marketing efforts to end up dragging the rest of your business down.

Just make sure to create a plan and stick to it. Facebook and LinkedIn are outstanding options to start with, with the former being ideal to prospect individuals and the latter a good option for commercial customers.

6.      Track Down Your Potential Customers

Just like you would join social media sites where your customers hang out, you should do the same thing in real life. Consider your target market carefully and where you’re most likely to find them. If you focus on health insurance for freelancers, for example, you could check out co-working spaces.

7.      Educate Your Clients

The internet provides with a slew of inexpensive tools you can use to educate your customers about insurance and the products you offer.

Podcasts, slideshows, and webinars are a great way to not only provide value for prospects and customers, thereby generating goodwill, but can also help you lay the foundations for long-term relationships.

Just remember to provide lots of value. The more value you provide your prospects and customers with, the more indebted they will be to you, and the more likely they will be to do business with you.

8.      Work with Other Professionals

Another great way to approach marketing for new insurance agents is by partnering with professionals in other fields to share leads. For example, consider entering a referral agreement with your accountant, where you will both promote each other’s services to your clients. This is a great way to expand your customer base while building a strong professional network.

9.      Advertise Online

Online advertising is highly effective. II provides numerous metrics you can track and the ability to quickly adjust your ad campaigns to improve effectiveness, making it one of the best advertising mediums. Pay-per-click, banners, and site sponsorship are just a few of the online advertising tools at your disposal.

However, for the best results, you should consider contracting professional insurance agent marketing services. This is especially true for pay-per-click and similar advertising strategies that can become a money sink if you don’t know what you’re doing.

10.      Give to Receive

It may sound mercenary, but the fact is that when you give people something first, no matter how insignificant, they feel indebted to repay you. Charities often take advantage of this strategy by sending out small gifts to encourage people to donate.

You can do something similar with a giveaway. To really take advantage of this approach to marketing for insurance agencies, make sure that what you’re giving away is related to the product you are selling in some way.

Sending insurance newsletters to clients and prospects on a regular basis helps keep them up to date on ways to reduce risk and improve their lives — and strengthens your image as an insurance expert.  Print newsletters are especially effective because, unlike email, most postal mail actually gets opened and read.

While there are a lot of effective marketing strategies for insurance agents, in the end, which ones work for you will depend on your products and target market.

Also, don’t get attached to any one strategy. If something isn’t working, don’t be afraid to swap it out for another approach. For example, if you find that you aren’t generating leads or really connecting via social media, don’t be afraid to try a different platform or even completely switch to cold calling or in-person meetings.

The key is to be flexible and scale up once you’ve discovered the marketing strategies for insurance agents that work for you.

I think it’s a given by now that target marketing is smart marketing. If you’re not yet a believer in target insurance marketing, skip past the eight ways listed here about how to develop a target market and read the wrap-up section. But I’m assuming you are already enlightened and just want to jump in and get started.

So how do you find target markets?  Here are 8 potential opportunities :

1. Look at businesses or clients you are already serving. Take a close look at your book of business.  Do you write a lot of printers, restaurants or artisan contractors? Have you had a lot of success providing life insurance for young families? Is long-term disability a market you know well? Maybe you have only one or two clients of a certain type of business, but others in your firm also a write a few of these clients. Leverage your firm’s reputation as a specialist in this target market.
2. Consider emerging industries or businesses, especially in your area.  Cybersecurity has been a growing concern for the past couple of decades and it just keeps getting more important. The benefit of developing deep expertise in one area is that you can use it to leverage the rest of the account.  Write all the ancillary insurance as well.   With cybersecurity, banks are an obvious example.  But say you provide cybersecurity insurance for a manufacturer, you could also provide all the other property and casualty needs, including workers comp and employee benefits.
The easiest, most consistent way to stay front and center in the minds of your target markets is by sending out a monthly newsletter. Smarts partners with agents all over the nation who appreciate the advantage newsletters give them with their target markets. Request some free samples and see why.
3. Did you work in a different industry before you started working as an insurance producer? Do you have contacts you made while working in the restaurant business, construction or pharmaceutical sales that could be leveraged into insurance sales? Your knowledge of another industry could be your golden ticket.
4. Are you interested in a particular insurance product?  I got my start as a broker working as the protege of a producer who was known as Mr. Business Interruption.  He knew everything there was to know about B.I.   He taught it, lectured about it and was known for his depth of knowledge all over the West Coast.  Obviously, he didn’t just write the B.I.  He also wrote the rest of the account: property, liability and workers comp.
5. Or maybe you have a personal story that makes you passionate about selling a certain kind of policy. One producer tells the story of how his mother would not have lost her business if she had purchased disability insurance to give her the extra income she needed while she couldn’t work for several months. If this was your story, you might become a kind of evangelist for making sure this doesn’t happen to other small business owners.
6. Observe the demographics in your area. Life insurance opportunities exist with new families. What about long-term care for aging boomers? One producer looks for seniors who own CDs. He shows them the probate advantages of purchasing a life insurance policy for their beneficiaries, if they have any; or, if they don’t, the advantages of an annuity.
7. What do demographic or political trends tell you?  The ACA has been a challenge that’s redirected the focus of a lot of agents.  Right now the economy looks poised to add new jobs in manufacturing.  Is this an opportunity?  The demographic shift of baby boomers moving into retirement the past few years has opened a lot of opportunity for agents who want to focus on senior benefits: medicare, long-term care, critical illness, annuities, etc.
8. You don’t have to restrict yourself to one target market, of course. You might end up having specializations in several. You might want to work in several related target markets, which is typically the approach that many personal lines agencies take, providing a range of products to families and individuals throughout the life cycle. An agent could start by providing a young man with auto insurance, then go on to provide homeowners, life insurance, long-term disability, long-term care and annuities throughout that individual’s lifetime.

Still debating whether target marketing makes sense for insurance producers? Here’s my take on why this is the best approach to take unless you already have a developed book of businss.

• Target marketing allows you to use your time efficiently and provides a much better return on investment. Have you ever tried to sell a product to a customer when you had no prior knowledge or experience with the industry or the product? The opportunity presented itself and you took advantage of being in the right place at the right time. Or so you thought. Then a competitor who specializes in the industry or the product suddenly turned up. The competitor offered a better product and made a better presentation and you were left feeling maybe a little embarrassed. But the worst part of all was you had probably invested a lot of time and energy getting up to speed, learning all about the new industry or product so you could make the sale. With target marketing, producers — and their staffs — use their time and resources much more productively because they know their market.
• By focusing your efforts on the markets that you have studied and deal with on a regular basis, you build your reputation and credibility more easily. When you use sales tools such as newsletters, brochures, and Internet marketing, you are aiming at a very defined, comparatively small market. When you do this consistently, making a series of impressions that underscore your expertise and interest in doing business, you’re building your brand. Then when the opportunity arises, your prospect will recognize you and they will be much more likely to want to do business with you.
• By targeting certain groups, whether demographic or trade groups, you develop premium volume in particular lines with similar risk characteristics. This can make negotiating with underwriters easier and more efficient. In some instances, understanding your market well and building a sizeable volume in it may even allow you to leverage your book of business into a special program that you could wholesale to other agents.
• Producers who specialize by trade group often comment on how much satisfaction they feel serving a particular industry. Many come to feel as if they are part of the target industry itself, belonging to its associations, serving on committees with industry members and generally developing a strong bond with the group. This can offer great personal and professional satisfaction.

Even if you’re a seasoned producer with a well-developed book of business, think about targeting your future efforts if you have never done so before. You’ll work smarter not harder.