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5 Digital Marketing Mistakes Insurance Agents Make (And How to Fix Them)

Marketing is an ever-changing subject. And for many agents, the biggest marketing challenge is simply finding time to keep up. 

Unfortunately, this can lead many agents to adopt ineffective marketing practices to save time. From blogging inconsistently to avoiding social media—prioritization remains the challenge. Many independent agents are left asking, what’s worth the time? 

So to help you prioritize your marketing, we’ve compiled a list of some of the most common digital marketing mistakes we see. Each item on our list can be easily corrected manually or with the support of marketing automation like Fuse™. 

Read on to learn more about these opportunities and pick up a few tips that could impact your marketing.

1. Not Prioritizing Customer Retention

Independent insurance agents suffer from the highest customer acquisition cost compared to any other industry—the average cost to secure a new client is seven to nine times higher than the cost to retain a current one. 

This makes client churn a key priority to long-term growth and overall business health.  And beyond your actual products, one of the best ways to reduce churn is to improve your client communications. On the one hand, because communication is critical to retention and a major driver of referrals, and on the other hand, because everyone can email, why not adopt a few best practices going forward?

Improving Client Communication:

  • Write strong subject lines (Email): If your content is your product, then your subject line is your packaging. So before your email can be effective, it needs to have a great subject line. To write one, creatively reference the content of your email, build curiosity, and ask questions. For example, “This week’s trending topics” or “Should I do X or Y?”—not “Weekly Newsletter.”
  • Determine your cadence (Email): It’s difficult to determine a “correct” email cadence and send time, as they both depend on the performance of your unique contact list and content. Start with at least two emails a month while testing send-times if you’re unsure. Then, adjust based on performance.
  • Send the right content (All comms): Above all else, your content needs to be relevant to your audience. The better your segmentation, the better you can target your message and the more powerful it will be. Timely content is always a must. 
  • Personalize when possible (All comms): Don’t forget the human element. Whether it’s an email, text, or direct mail, include opportunities for personalization. For example, every few emails could include an update about your family or someone in the office. Or you could send a happy birthday or welcome message via direct mail. Personalization is typically most effective as a tool to deepen established relationships.
  • Leverage cross-channel marketing (All comms): Don’t let your communications channels stand alone! Use emails, texts, and direct mail in tandem across your campaigns to help improve the efficiency of your communications.

Solving the Challenge

Though these options offer an opportunity to improve your client communications, they can be difficult to achieve at scale. For this reason, we recommend adopting marketing automation tools like our platform, Fuse™.

Fuse™ offers the deepest two-way management system integration of any insurance marketing automation tool—empowering you to micro-target and trigger email, text, and direct mail communications based on more than 100 client and policy data points. The result is communication at scale, allowing you to improve retention without adding more work to your schedule. 

2. Failing To Create a Site That Passes the 5-Second Test

The 5-second test is all about measuring the effectiveness of your homepage. To perform the 5-second test, start by navigating to your website. Then, without clicking or exploring, give yourself 5 seconds to absorb what you can. Then ask yourself the following: 

  1. What does your agency do?
  2. Who do you serve and why? 
  3. How are you different from other agencies?
  4. What is the next step?  

If your homepage doesn’t answer these questions in 5 seconds, here is how you can fix it.

What to do instead: 

Copy is often the reason agency sites fail the 5-second test. To fix this, start by answering the questions above. 

Next, format your homepage to provide these answers concisely. Questions one through three will be your hero message (the message that appears at the top of your page), while question four will become your call to action. 

For example, the homepage of F3 Agency answers all of the above with a short sentence and two clear calls to action:

Like the F3 Agency site, agents should provide a second call to action, offering alternative communications methods or more information to the visitor. This way, you can meet the needs of your different visitors, allowing them to remain on your site. 

3. Using Social Media the Wrong Way

For many agents, social media can feel like a time-sink that’s not worth the investment. 

But that’s far from the case. Instead, the problem often lies in how agents leverage social media. Social is not for immediate ROI. It’s a long-term investment, and agents that use social media well take it as a brand-building opportunity. 

It’s a chance to show what makes your agency different from others through your personality, content, and opinions. Here are a few effective ways to use social media.

What to do instead:

  • Interact with other users: Social media is a conversation – so be sure to engage the content of other users. Comment, like, and share what you find interesting, tag other users, and aim to engage five posts for every one of your own. 
  • Write posts with engagement in mind: Engagement determines the success of a post, increasing reach by appealing to the algorithm and users alike. To increase engagement, make posts skimmable, ask questions, provide context and avoid being “salesy”. 
  • Post often: Consistency is necessary for high social media performance. Take the time to develop a posting strategy to keep your channels active. And for every post you make, comment on at least two others.

If time is still an issue, then consider focusing your social media efforts on one channel, in this case, LinkedIn. 

Not only is LinkedIn the most professional network. It’s also the most powerful social channel for lead generation, according to Hubspot, surpassing both Facebook and Twitter combined:

4. Not Claiming Your Google My Business Listing

Claiming and completing your Google My Business listing not only helps potential clients locate you. It’s also a great location to collect reviews.

For this reason, we recommend agents create a method to request reviews. Doing so can improve your ratings on Google, which also benefits your local SEO. 

How to set up your Google My Business:

Start by claiming your Google listing by going to Google My Business Site, typing in your business name, and clicking on “claim my business.” Then, optimize it by filling out all relevant information on your dashboard alongside social media links, a logo, team images, and a description. 

Your Google My Business listing likely is the first or one of the first things in your organic search results. Clients and prospects will reference it for directions, a brief overview, to check out the pictures, etc. Claim it!

Requesting positive reviews:

Of course, ensuring the customers you’re contacting are happy is critical to requesting reviews. Fuse™ reputation management can help do just that, providing tools to measure your current NPS score and sort your clients into three categories: Promoters, Passives, and Detractors.

Once the results are rolling in, all the information from the surveys will appear in the Reputation Management section of your Fuse™ dashboard. From here, you can see every client’s response and start requesting reviews or turning “Detractors” into “Promoters.”

5. Not Finding Time to Blog (And Therefore Help Your SEO)

Blogs can provide a dramatic boost to ROI for a few reasons. First, they provide an ongoing source of content to use in other communications (remember retention above?) and save time and effort. Second, they’re a powerful way to improve your site’s SEO and improve organic traffic. 

Marketers that prioritize blogging are 13 times more likely to see a positive ROI, according to Hubspot

Despite this, many agencies aren’t blogging, often citing time as the biggest constraint to creating quality content. Here are a few ways to create quality content and save time all at once. 

What to do instead:

  • Leverage a firm like Agency Revolution for content and then make it your own: Your blog should have a voice consistent with your brand. Many firms can give you access to content, and a few enable you to edit it. You can also find content on the internet and simply opine on the topic. Or consider hiring an intern to help write your blog material. 
  • Include images: Images are processed 60,000 times faster than text. They also make your blog post more enjoyable to engage with. Consider creating your images using a tool like Canva to add a sense of quality to your posts. Graphs, checklists, and diagrams are a great way for advisors to include imagery by visualizing data. 
  • Write for SEO: Start by asking trusted clients what keywords they would (or did) use to find you. Think like your clients to identify the best keywords. Next, write your blog title and headlines using your targeted keywords. Be sure to also write your blog for length as, according to data from Ahrefs, Google tends to prioritize more detailed blogs:

With the ever-changing nature of advisor marketing, these 5 mistakes are very common. Hopefully, these suggestions are helpful, but if you’re looking for additional assistance, we’re always here to help.

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