Marketing Channels

Get Started With Digital Marketing for Insurance Agencies

CopyPress

March 25, 2022

A good insurance business has a steady stream of clientele. You may have a group of loyal returning customers that come to you to renew their policies each year, but how do you keep that audience growing? Engaging in digital marketing for insurance agencies can help you expose your company to a larger group of people and find more leads and future customers. In this article, we discuss topics related to insurance digital marketing, such as:

• What Is Digital Marketing for Insurance Agencies?
• Why Should I Do Digital Marketing for My Insurance Agency?
• Types of Digital Marketing for Insurance Agencies
• How To Get Started With Insurance Digital Marketing
• 4 Digital Marketing Strategies for Insurance Agencies

What Is Digital Marketing for Insurance Agencies?

Image via QuoteWizard

Digital or online marketing includes all marketing and advertising efforts that take place on the internet or electronic devices. For insurance agencies, this means any marketing tactics you use to promote your business, products, or services through virtual channels. There are three elements of digital marketing in which you can engage:

• Owned media: Any media channels your company can take ownership of and have near-complete control over the style, posting, and development. Includes channels like blogs, websites, and social media accounts.
• Earned media: Any media that comes from customer engagement that is out of your control, such as social mentions or shares, and online reviews. You can get earned media by creating interesting and helpful content that people want to share with others and talk about online.
• Paid media: Any digital media strategy or channel that requires a fee to use, like pay-per-click ads or content promotion. This is often the most competitive area of digital marketing and likely where you spend the most money.

Why Should I Do Digital Marketing for My Insurance Agency?

In insurance, everything you do is about the clients. Without them, you don’t have a business. Your marketing strategies have to grow as those clients do. Appealing to different generations means figuring out where they spend time. The younger your clients, the more time they are likely to spend on the internet or mobile devices. Reaching clients where they already visit allows you to gain brand recognition and get more people to learn your company exists.

But by engaging in certain strategies, it can also help you build trust and establish your agency as an expert in the field. All of this work can help you attract more qualified leads and convert them to clients, which increases your profit and allows for longevity for your company.

Types of Digital Marketing for Insurance Agencies

As we said, there are many ways for insurance agencies to engage with digital marketing. Some of your options include:

• Content marketing: A strategy for developing written, audio, and visual pieces for a targeted audience to increase brand awareness and build trust between your company and that collective
• Email marketing: A strategy for sending direct messages about your company to a list of subscribers
• Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising: A paid way to advertise your brand, products, or services to a targeted audience online
• Search engine optimization (SEO): A strategy that helps make your business, website, and content more visible in search to increase organic traffic
• Social media marketing: A strategy that uses social media content and channels to meet your audience where they spend time online to attract new leads and customers
• Text message communications: A strategy similar to email marketing that allows you to send direct communications right to your customers’ mobile phones
• Video marketing: A strategy that uses dynamic video or animation to explain concepts, give advice, or appeal to your audience in a way different from written content
• Website design: A strategy that allows you to develop a content hub for all your information on the internet

How To Get Started With Insurance Digital Marketing

Use these steps to get started with digital marketing for your insurance agency:

1. Discover Your Audience

To create an excellent marketing strategy, it’s important to know for whom you’re planning it. Insurance customers are older—meaning they are often not teenagers—because they have to be old enough to own things that need to be insured, or have another reason to purchase insurance. But as younger generations grow up and reach the age where they need these products, the way they expect to receive marketing and communications may differ from your usual way of doing things.

When you’re starting with digital marketing, learn who your current target audience is. Discover where they spend time online and how they like to receive marketing messages. You can do this by looking at your website analytics or seeing who’s spending time on your social media platforms. Learning their demographics is a good starting point, but those pieces of information don’t show the complete picture of a customer. Digging deeper into your audience’s habits and preferences rather than just who they are on the surface can help you plan a more effective strategy.

Related: How To Use Your Buyer Persona To Create Targeted Content

2. Plan a Digital Customer Journey

A customer journey is a path a lead takes from learning about your company to becoming a paid patron, and hopefully, a repeat one. Marketers often use tools like a marketing or sales funnel to track this journey and determine where certain members of their audience fall at any given time. These funnels can also help them determine what types of targeted content may work best when people are in different areas of that customer journey.

You can create a funnel, map, or plan for your customer’s ideal digital journey through your website and content. When doing this, you may consider user experience aspects of your online presence, such as:

• Intuitive navigation
• Convincing calls-to-action (CTAs)
• Abundant and varied contact points
• Easily accessible information

Planning how you want people to take the journey from discovering your insurance agency to making a sale online can help you plan individual pieces of content and make all of your tools—like your website, blog, or social media platforms—as appealing to them as possible, no matter where they’re at in that journey. To make sure you’re not just building online assets for your individual preferences, have your colleagues and trusted friends and family walk through your established user experience to provide updates. There are also services that provide you with a video walkthrough of your website by third-party individuals. You can see how someone without a history of you or your business navigates your web pages.

3. Choose Your Channels

With so many options available for digital marketing, it may feel overwhelming to tackle all of them at once. But you don’t have to do that. Start by choosing channels that make the most sense for your company, budget, and audience. Your audience research can tell you where your best leads or potential customers spend their time. You can then determine which of these may be the best starting point for your digital marketing plan.

The size of your team may also influence how many channels you can choose from the start. A smaller team may need to start with fewer channels and scale up as they become more confident and established in digital marketing. Common channels may include:

• Social media platforms: Consider that your target audience may not be on every social platform out there. Therefore, you don’t have to be either.
• Websites: A website can be cost-effective, or it can take up the majority of your marketing budget to develop a good one. However, a good website can convert leads, establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry, and help people to know, like, and trust you.
• Blogs: It can be time-consuming and costly to find, hire, and train content creators for the blog section of your website. But, blogs are an effective way to reach your target audience through search queries and organic traffic. If you want to engage in content creation, but don’t have the time or resources to do it right, contact CopyPress. We have more than 2,700 writers, editors and QA experts who are able to create the content you need to get noticed.
• Email and text clients: Newsletters and text messages can be very effective forms of connecting with your audience. You can send notifications when you’re noticing a drop in insurance rates overall, or when your company is giving discounts for certain customer qualifications. You can stay top-of-mind with your subscribers by sending industry news or creating specialized emails like for birthdays.
• PPC ad space: With PPC, you’re able to target certain keywords that are popular in your industry and create an effective plan that drives people to your website to learn how you can help. Consider budgeting for this line item, as you’ll pay for each click you receive from search results.

4. Develop Your Content

Insurance is an industry where people may do a lot of research and comparison before they ever make a move to purchase. That means it’s going to take more than just getting your name out there for brand recognition to make sales, even though that helps. To convert an insurance client, you also need trust and knowledge. One way to build all three things is by creating high-quality content to share with your audience.

To develop the best content, think about what your customers really need or what they want to know. This could include providing solutions to their problems or advice on how to navigate different areas of the insurance industry. Consider customer pain points, such as why they might look to switch insurance providers. Content comes in many varieties, so your audience research can help you figure out where the targets look for it most. Some options include:

• Blog posts
• Resource articles
• Social media posts
• Live and pre-recorded video
• Podcasts
• eBooks
• White papers
• Infographics

Start a call with CopyPress to learn how partnering with a content agency increases your chances of getting the right pieces in front of your target audience at the right time. We help you by creating written and custom design content for insurance agencies that your customers crave.

5. Set an SEO Strategy

You can create the best content in the world, but if you don’t take time to do SEO on each piece and every channel you use, it may be for nothing. SEO is important for insurance marketing because of all the competition in the field. You need to operate in the same channels and areas as your competitors, but you also need to outperform and outrank them in search to get brand recognition and build bonds of trust with your audience.

Engaging in regular on-page and technical SEO best practices can help increase your visibility on search engines and generate organic traffic. The more people who can find your content and online channels, lead to more opportunities to make conversions and sales. CopyPress’s content analysis tool can help with your SEO strategy. The report shows how you stack up against your top three competitors to learn what you do well and what to improve. It also shows gaps in your strategy, which you can fill with better keyword selection and content to grab segments of the marketing your competitors don’t cover.

“CopyPress gives us the ability to work with more dealership groups. We are able to provide unique and fresh content for an ever growing customer base. We know that when we need an influx of content to keep our clients ahead of the game in the automotive landscape, CopyPress can handle these requests with ease.”

Kevin Doory

Director of SEO at Auto Revo

4 Digital Marketing Strategies for Insurance Agencies

Take advantage of these digital marketing strategies to increase your chances of attracting the right audience to your business:

1. Use PPC Ads

PPC advertising allows you to share your information on search engines, social media, and website banner space for a fee anytime someone clicks and visits your content. According to TechJury, PPC ads generate twice the number of visitors compared to SEO. While engaging in SEO overall is still a great best practice for digital marketing, if you’re looking to get more results and traffic more quickly, using PPC campaigns could help. You may use keywords like “home insurance,” “auto insurance,” and “insurance agencies in (name of your city).”

2. Develop Long-Form Content

While short-form content may be quicker to write, long-form content can help you really tap into the needs of your audience and provide the most value. Most long-form articles and videos go in-depth on a topic and provide as much information as possible. These types of pieces answer questions and serve as resources for people to share and reference in the future. Creating long-form content can help establish your agency as a thought leader or expert in your field. This builds trust and credibility with your audience.

Wondering where to start with developing long-form content? Perform a Google search for popular search queries for your industry. Google provides a “People also ask” section that’s full of FAQs from those searching for the same query. You can rank in this section based on the content on your site, so targeting similar information can be beneficial. A search of “home insurance” may display questions like:

• What are the three basic types of home insurance?
• What does home insurance do?
• Is there anything not covered by homeowners insurance?

Expand any of the questions you see and Google will provide you with even more topic-relevant questions you can gather insight from.

3. Engage on Social Media

Having a social media presence is a good start, but when trying to outperform the competition, it’s actually the bare minimum you can do on that channel. Social media can help with your digital networking if you use it to your advantage. Respond to your followers when they ask questions. Engage in relevant industry discussions. Use your brand voice in all communications and remember your manners.

Remember that you don’t have to appear on every social network out there. Focus on the ones that are going to provide the best return on your time. For example, you may find that there is a lot of discussion on Twitter using industry hashtags like #homeinsurance that gives you the opportunity to join the conversation. You can use Twitter to search for hashtags and engage with tweets and threads that make sense for you and your agency’s brand. If you want to join Instagram, you may post houses and cars for sale in your area and use location tags and relevant hashtags to get noticed by your target audience.

4. Try Gated Content

Gated content is exclusive pieces you create and put behind a sign-up form or a “gate” to collect lead information. The goal of gated content is to create a piece so interesting or helpful that your audience will exchange their contact information to access the piece. By putting content behind the gate, you collect information like email addresses and phone numbers, which you can use to engage with potential customers through your digital marketing strategies. In return, the lead gets something of value to them, such as an eBook.

For example, knowing that home insurance quotes can be confusing because many people don’t understand what each line item covers, you may create an eBook that assists your audience. This piece of content can describe typical line items, what the homeowner can remove or reduce coverage on, and the typical costs of each or factors that contribute to the cost. Gated content should be enticing enough for sign-ups and not material they can easily find online.

Making digital marketing a priority can help insurance agencies reach new clients, nurture lead relationships, and compete for a larger market share. By researching your audience and trying different strategies, you can appeal to a wide range of potential customers in the areas where they spend time and are most receptive to marketing messages.

CopyPress

March 25, 2022