Marketing Ideas for Insurance Agents in 2014

Marketing ideas for insurance agents have meant many things over the years. Perhaps you’ve been told that door hangers are a good investment. Maybe you’ve invested a few dollars in getting some internet leads to call. Some of you might even sponsor local teams and try things like yellow pages and pizza box advertising. The one thing these all have in common? You can’t measure the success of these tactics and the message and medium are stale.

So what do you do? We’re nearing the end of 2013 now and a lot of you are still using and falling back on these older marketing practices to get new business leads. It’s time to let those practices go and while they might provide a sense of security, deep down, you know that they’re a waste of time and money.

A lot of you have invested time or money in setting up a website and social media accounts, but nothing seems to really be working. That’s because it’s time to take the next step. You truly have to embrace these online mediums and make them work for you. How you might ask? Through content marketing. Good content marketing happens when you create and share interesting content that is meant to help, not sell. The idea is simple: get your policyholders eager to hear from you so you stay top-of-mind with them.

You already know that the easiest leads to close are from referrals. 2014 should be the year that you begin to reach out to your policyholders through great content marketing and multipurpose this content across your online channels.

1) Start A Blog

Writing a blog is a great way to have a source for all of your content. Now if you approach your blog writing as a chore, it will become one. Where content marketing helps you here is when you are putting together your topic list. If you’re in home and auto insurance, don’t write about the benefits of policy bundling. No one wants to read that. Instead, write about the new technology in cars that have Heads Up Displays (HUD) to help keep your eyes on the road. Or maybe you could write about great ways to shop for appliances to help you save money. This content should be interesting and engaging. Think of it as being industry adjacent to what you do but not so out there that it doesn’t fit your business.

2) Email Newsletter

I know, email newsletters aren’t anything new. But with a blog that you’re writing to actively collecting great content, wouldn’t it make sense to put that content to use elsewhere? Take those great blog posts you’re writing for your business or agency and put it together in an email newsletter format. That way, even those policyholders that don’t actively read blogs will now be able to partake in your hard work. And if this sounds like a little too much work, we can always do it for you too.

3) Promote Through Social Media

With new blog posts coming out every week, it would be a good idea to share these on your social networks. Unlike email or even telephone marketing, social media audiences have the ability to truly silence you by unfollowing you or worse, blocking you. That’s why sharing high quality content to your social networks is key to having a socially engaged network of followers. Here’s a guide to help you get started using social as an insurance agent.

4) Referral Contests…

Getting potential policyholders requesting rate quotes from you is something that is always of interest. So why not run a referral content? You know that these referrals close so much easier than cold internet leads so this is your chance to capitalize on your existing policyholders. Do some sort of campaign that enters everyone into a drawing. For ever referral they submit, they’ll be entered to win an iPad Air or $500 Amazon Gift Card. If this is a successful approach for you, think about doing it quarterly.

5) …Through Facebook

Or to make the most out of killing two birds with one stone, run your referral campaign through Facebook. You can promote the content through email and social, and then have everyone “Like” your page in order to submit referrals. This is a great way to get your email only clients on your social media channels and your social clients to read all the great blog posts and links you’ve been sharing.

When trying to do a blog, email newsletters, and social media, it’s best to approach this logically. Trying to do each of these by yourself is exhausting, but if you take a single piece of content and multipurpose it across all mediums, the amount of work you’ll have to do is significantly lessened.

And as always, if you want to simply automate your content marketing, email and social media, OutboundEngine is here to do the work for you.