Big things are happening in our webinar series Roadmap to Effective Insurance Marketing. We recently wrapped up the second webinar in our 6-part series. Each session has been powerful on its own, so we encourage you to mark your calendars for the upcoming ones. We know it will be relevant to you and here’s why.
Many of you responded to a survey we sent last Fall, and you shared with us the areas of your business you’d like to grow. You also shared the top ways we could support you as a managing general agent. As always, we know you want to stay on top of the changes in insurance policies and products. But you also shared that you really want encouragement and resources to effectively grow and manage your business. You mentioned learning about social media, lead generation, prospecting, and more.
As a result, this series, along with several other events, has been set in motion this year to offer you the best resources and training. We will always be about connecting you to carriers and the best products to sell. But we know that the day in and day out of your business involves so much more.
Marketing Your Insurance Agency
Especially if you’re an independent agent, you may wear many hats. For many of you, there isn’t a full-time marketing person within your business. We know that almost half of you have been an independent agent for less than 10 years. That may mean your business doesn’t run entirely on referrals, or maybe you find yourself having to sell across different generations. Others of you have been in the business for many decades, but you’re probably noticing– everyday– how the strategies are changing for reaching new prospects. Even the channels for communicating with your existing base is different than 10 years ago.
If any of these characteristics describe you, we fully believe you still CAN win in this area of your business. You can boot-strap your marketing and grow the traffic and leads for your agency this year with the right tools and the right mindset. And those 2 things are the exact focus of our marketing series. You have to understand key concepts of inbound marketing and digital marketing first so that you can promote your business the right way, to the right audience, using the right mediums and tools, and using as much intentionality as possible. But it also means starting somewhere, giving it a try with what might be your first marketing campaign. Then, learn from there.
If you missed the first 2 webinars and what we’ve just described seems a bit overwhelming… just take a breath and trust us. It’s definitely one step at a time. This is why we are offering this series. Each one can be helpful independently too. And we’re happy to send you the content from the ones you may have missed. We want to give you great resources. We want to help you apply it to your own agency–all through this series.
In each webinar, we talk alongside our marketing partner, The Marketing Squad, who helps break down concepts and techniques for all the participants. We hope you’ll be one of them in our next webinar on June 20th. We also give away free marketing tools you can download at the end of every webinar. These tools help you set goals, plan campaigns, organize content, and more.
If you’re still wondering whether or not the webinar content will apply to you, just ask yourself a couple things:
- What kind of presence already exists online for my agency and brand? Is it underwhelming? Is it reaching the right audiences?
- Am I tracking my conversion from a visitor to a lead to a sale? If so, am I happy with that conversion rate?
- Do I intentionally pursue and generate leads on a weekly basis?
- How much of my time is focused on marketing my business? (If your answer is zero, then you definitely need to take advantage of the tools we offer in the webinars.)
The Importance of Inbound and Digital Marketing for You Today
If you think about the today’s culture, your own behaviors, or maybe your kids or your friends, the values are clear. People want to be communicated with in a way that is informative and even entertaining. We want to get the answers they need by googling it or chatting with a nice support person who is easy to reach and easy to talk to. We don’t want to wait for a webpage to load. We don’t want to be spammed or overloaded in their email inbox.
We read online reviews and search for recommendations. We buy when the value is made clear and when the way to buy is easy to use. (Think, Amazon!) We are enticed by good subject lines but not sneaky sales tricks. We crave connection and great stories, especially on social media and in videos. These values apply to almost every industry because they all involve humans. We have to be using these values as business leaders.
Here are a few more statistics about the importance of inbound and digital marketing, not just for large businesses, but small to medium-sized too.
- 73% of businesses believe that email marketing is core to their business.
- 75% of small business owners see internet marketing as “effective” or “very effective” as a tool to attract new customers.
- 71% of small business owners do their own digital marketing rather than utilizing an expert.
- 78% of mobile searches for local business information result in a purchase.
- Inbound (content, digital) marketing generates 3X the number of leads than traditional outbound marketing and costs 62% less.
- 46% of people read blogs more than once a day.
- 75% of people who use search engines like Google never scroll past the first page of search results.
- For B2C marketing, 94% rely on Facebook, 82% use Twitter, 77% utilize YouTube and 76% also use LinkedIn to distribute content.
- Online reviews are trusted as much as personal recommendations by 88% of consumers, even for the insurance consumer.
These statistics challenge us. We hope they challenge you. We want to personally challenge you to make sure to attend the next insurance marketing webinar in our series on June 20th at 1:30 pm. If you haven’t checked out what each one offers or if you haven’t RSVP’d to attend, just do it here. Please don’t miss out on this opportunity. We’re ready to take YOUR marketing and sales to new places. Are you? Let’s go!
