Saying that marketing your insurance agency is important would be an understatement.
Marketing is often the only way you can get new customers to walk through your doors, either digitally or physically. Folks no longer just pop downtown to their local insurance agency when they need a new policy. These days, you have to get your brand out there, and you must have a strong online presence to do that.
The insurance agency marketing tactics below encompass the core elements of a strong marketing strategy. If you’re ready to kick your business up a notch and bring in some new clients, begin by familiarizing yourself with these points. Once you understand what you need to do, you’ll be in a position to decide if you want to DIY your agency’s marketing, or if you’d rather hire a team of professionals to handle the tricky parts (and the tedium) for you.
The insurance industry is incredibly competitive. That means your marketing strategy needs to be on point if you want to stand out against the numerous other agencies in your region.
Unfortunately, staying on top of the game is made more difficult by the fact that consumer behaviors and technology are always changing.
The good news is that if you can master the following marketing tactics (or hire someone knowledgeable to do them for you), you’ll help guarantee your business stays visible no matter how crowded the market becomes.
Remember, the main goals of marketing your agency online are to:
To achieve those goals, you’ll need a multi-pronged approach that involves your website, online reviews, social media accounts, and targeted advertising.
We’ll talk about each of these facets below, but we also recommend downloading our Digital Marketing Playbook for an in-depth look at these steps in detail.
Before you can start marketing your agency, you have to know who you’re trying to market to. Who are your ideal customers? What are their ages, where do they live, and what types of insurance coverage do they need?
Coming up with a buyer persona for your ideal target demographic will keep your marketing efforts aligned with your business goals. That way, you won’t find yourself buying paid ads geared toward teenage drivers when you’re actually more interested in working with established drivers who have squeaky clean records.
As you draft your buyer persona—or perhaps a few personas, if you offer a wide range of services—keep in mind your customers’ needs, wants, and pain points. What are the problems they are experiencing in finding quality insurance coverage, and how can you help them solve those problems for good?
Understanding what your customers want and don’t want is the “secret sauce” that will guide the development of your agency’s entire marketing strategy—so make every effort to nail this crucial step!
Of course, your website will be viewed by people interested in buying insurance. It will also be scraped by search engine bots that categorize your services based on the words that appear throughout the site’s text (called “keywords”).
That means your website needs to be appealing and intuitive for users, but it also must contain the right type of content—content that will allow your site to rank high in search engine results. This is the basis of search engine optimization, or SEO.
Picking the right keywords is such a complex process that entire books have been written on the subject! You can start with this blog article as a primer.
Essentially, you want to include words and phrases that accurately describe the services you offer in your site copy. For instance, don’t use a keyword like “cheap car insurance for after a wreck” if you specialize in getting great coverage for elderly drivers—even if that keyword appears popular and, in theory, should rank well. Describing your services accurately demonstrates your specialties to your users and to search engines, so it’s easy for clients to find you when they need something you provide.
The rise in AI content is causing several changes to the way search engines index websites. SEO best practices are evolving quickly, and it can be tough to stay on top of all the updates. To make matters more complicated, you’ll also need to avoid using negative keywords that actually hurt your website traffic. It can be difficult to detect these subtle saboteurs, which is why it pays to hire a professional team to optimize your website for search engines.
In addition, you’ll also want to make sure your website’s navigation menu is clear and helpful, that all your pages look good on mobile devices, and that you’re offering enough engaging content—think blog posts and videos—to keep users on the page once they find you in a search.
If you search for a type of business in Google, you’ll likely see at least one profile for a local company show up near the top of your results. It’ll look something like this:
The savvy owners of these businesses have taken the effort to control how their profile appears, adding their company name, contact information, website, and maybe even some engaging photos to draw the eye.
Now, search for “insurance company near me” and see what comes up. Is your profile front and center, or did your competition win out?
If you haven’t yet completed your Google Business profile, you’re missing out on a powerful tool. These profiles act as a sort of landing page for your agency. When someone searches for insurance using the keywords you’ve chosen, this profile will pop up and give them everything they need to contact you and potentially purchase a policy.
In addition to Google, you might want to set up a profile on Yelp and other platforms that help connect people with the services they’re looking for.
Business profile platforms like Google and Yelp offer space for users to leave reviews.
These reviews are the word-of-mouth advertising of yesteryear, multiplied a thousandfold because they’re freely available online to anyone who cares to look. If you have great reviews and you respond courteously in the comments, it will do wonders to promote your agency as a welcoming and reputable place to buy insurance.
On the other side of the coin, resist the urge to respond harshly if you do get negative reviews, as that can reflect badly on your business.
Think about the last time you looked through Facebook. Did you stop to watch every ad that appeared on your feed or did you keep scrolling past the obvious promos to get to the content you actually wanted to look at?
If you’re like most people, social media ads aren’t very effective at attracting your attention or convincing you to buy the advertised product. They do promote brand awareness—you can probably recall at least one or two brands you see frequently on your feed—but that’s about it. If you’re not ready to buy, they’re not going to change your mind in the moment when you’d rather relax on your couch and see what your friends have been up to.
Instead, use social media to make connections with people in your community and assert yourself as a knowledgeable expert in your field.
Make creative, engaging videos about how to understand the fine print on an insurance policy, for example, or publish weekly blog posts about important topics your customers need to understand to find the best policy for their needs.
It’s also a good idea to stay in touch with current and past clients as well as reach out to potential business partners and influential members of your community. When a young couple buys their first house in your town and you’re good friends with their realtor, you’ll reap the benefit of your online efforts in the form of a referral.
Unlike social media ads, search engine ads are a fantastic way to connect your business to the customers who need your services. That’s because the people who see your ad in search engine results have searched for your offering specifically, using terms like “affordable home insurance in Oklahoma” or “cheap car insurance for good drivers.”
In other words, they’re actually interested in buying insurance right now.
To get started, set up a paid ads campaign with the search engine of your choice; we recommend Google as your first stop. You’ll choose your ad text, select keywords that make sense for the customers you want to attract, and decide how much you want to invest in the campaign. Most commonly, you’ll encounter pay-per-click (PPC) options, where you pay somewhere between a few cents to a few dollars every time an interested reader clicks your ad to get more information.
Since PPC advertising isn’t free, it’s riskier to experiment with this tactic versus, say, changing your website keywords around. Ideally, your ad clicks will result in new customers contacting you and buying policies, but in practice it can be hard to make back your investment with a DIY ad campaign. This is one of the areas where it certainly can pay dividends to hire a professional team that knows how to run successful ads.
Once you’ve set up a Google Ads campaign, your ads will appear at the very top of search results when users search for the keywords you included in your ad text. They’ll be designated as “Sponsored” content, much like this:
If you run ads on Facebook, YouTube, or other platforms, your advertisements will appear in different spots—usually placed before videos or mixed in with viewers’ usual content feeds.
Establishing an email marketing campaign is a great way to make sure you’re contacting leads on a regular basis.
Craft compelling emails that will help potential customers remember your brand, find more information, and learn about the process of working with you. Though writing these emails can take some effort—and might be best handled by a professional team—they’ll serve you well once you’re up and running with a system to automatically reach out to leads at scheduled intervals.
A good CRM (Customer Relationship Management) or LMS (Lead Management System) can automatically track and email leads who haven’t signed on the dotted line yet and encourage them to contact you when they’re ready to move forward.
Once your digital marketing strategies are in place, you can devote some effort to building referral networks and business partnerships with other local organizations.
Keep in mind, the online platforms on which you’ve established your presence will serve as an important basis for reaching out to your contacts. We do recommend sending the occasional gift basket and handwritten card on special occasions, but a lot of your interactions with potential referral partners will probably take place on social media as well. That’s why we advise setting up your digital platforms first before focusing on other areas.
It can help to invest in software that will keep track of your customers’ and professional peers’ birthdays, anniversaries, and other special notes. That way, you’ll get a notification when it’s time to mail a card, make a phone call, or set up a lunch date.
If your plan for generating referrals could use some attention, check out this webinar by top agent Scott Grates where he walks listeners through his techniques that earn him more than 1,000 referrals per year.
Unless you contract with a professional marketing firm, you’re probably not going to find your optimal strategy right off the bat. It will take time to spice up your website, make it mobile friendly, and find the keywords that bring in the customers you want. It will take even more time to establish a regular posting schedule on social media and stick to it for the long term.
And since conditions are always shifting, you’ll need to revisit every single one of your marketing strategies from time to time to fine tune them and make sure they’re still producing the results you want. Search engine algorithms change, social media platforms come and go like the wind, and you’ll need to adapt your methods to stay relevant online.
The best way to stay on top of your marketing results is to measure specific outcomes in proportion to your financial investment, effort level, and the time you spend maintaining your strategies.
If one keyword tweak doubles the inbound traffic to your website, that’s an amazing result.
If you spend three weeks writing an incredibly detailed and helpful guide to buying insurance that exactly one person downloads and reads, that’s not a sustainable method for the long haul.
You’ll need to measure metrics like website views, social media engagement, revenue generated from ad campaigns, and more to gauge the results of your digital marketing efforts.
In practice, this can be harder than it sounds.
You want to swap out one keyword for another on your website? Okay, now wait six months and measure the percent increase of traffic your change generated. Do this for every tiny alteration you make, and one day you’ll have a clear picture of exactly what works well for your business and what doesn’t. At least, you’ll have a clear picture until Google’s algorithm changes and you have to start over at square one.
The sheer tedium involved with tracking and optimizing your marketing strategies is one of the reasons we highly recommend working with a professional digital marketing team like ours at EverQuote.
We not only allow you to skip the trial and error phase of starting a new digital paid marketing campaign, we’ll also see that campaign through to the very end with constant monitoring, measuring, and updates. You’ll get the results you want faster—with zero hassle on your part—and you’ll be able to maintain your results without having to play the endless game of catch-up inherent in the DIY route.
If you’re just looking for advice on how to build your agency from the ground up, we offer tons of educational resources—like our Digital Marketing Playbook, which you can download here.
But for the insurance agent who is too busy running a business to take on a whole new profession in digital marketing, we also offer comprehensive digital paid marketing services that can take you from a bare minimum online presence to the most recognizable agency in your area.
Finally, when you just want to find new clients now and you don’t have time to play the long game, you can always sign up to receive live leads or calls straight to your inbox or phone line.
Contact EverQuote to get started right away!
*Marketing Services availability varies by carrier