Marketing is an essential piece of the puzzle when it comes to prospecting, lead generation, and branding, but most insurance professionals will admit that promoting their products and services takes too much time away from their main task – selling. Introducing yourself to a broader range of consumers and asserting your role as an insurance resource for existing clients is vital to your long-term success, but traditional marketing can be time-consuming.
Thankfully, marketing strategies have evolved. Creative, intelligent, and innovative insurance marketing tools can make your life easier – and help you reach more potential customers. Take advantage of online platforms that can improve efficiency, content creation, and return on your marketing dollars.
9 Marketing Tools for Insurance Brokers
In a competitive insurance market, brokers need to explore every opportunity to connect with prospects and clients. Although the importance of hosting a comprehensive and dynamic website shouldn’t be underestimated, your online presence has to stretch beyond your agency’s website.
Consider the impact the following nine insurance marketing tools can have on your sales and revenue:
1. Social Media Scheduler
Social media plays a key role in building strong client relationships. A professional, yet personal, social media page can draw in prospects and connect you to clients long after a sale has closed, encouraging ancillary product sales and referrals.
Unfortunately, posting daily to multiple platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, can seem impossible in the midst of busy enrollment periods. Using a social media scheduler could help you optimize posts for client engagement, save time, and increase efficiency.
While scheduling “tweets” weeks in advance can help you expand your reach, some social media schedulers can also provide social analytics solutions to help you make data-driven decisions. Explore your options and compare some of these platforms to find the one that best meets your needs:
- Hootsuite
- Buffer
- Smarterqueue
- Coschedule
2. Feedly
A social media scheduler will save you time, but it will only be effective if you have interesting and relevant content to fill your posts. While you can certainly get creative on your own, it can be time-consuming to prepare original posts on a daily basis. Thanks to Feedly, you don’t have to.
Feedly is a news aggregator application for web browsers. It automatically curates relevant content to fill up your scheduled posts. Feedly can help you follow publications and find potential articles worth sharing. There is no limit to the content your target audience will find valuable, including:
- Changes in the market
- The latest news in healthcare regulation
- Health and lifestyle tips
With consistent, substantial content, your posts will build your brand as an industry expert and go-to resource for insurance-related information for new and current customers.
3. Automated Email Marketing
By 2019, ninety percent of the nearly 290 million internet users in the United States will be using email every month. Clearly, email marketing will continue to be one of the most cost-effective and efficient ways of reaching prospects and customers.
Making your emails consistently relevant and timely can be tricky when you are busy managing the rest of your business. Periodic newsletters or quarterly marketing messages may not be enough to capture the attention you want. Go a step further by investing in a platform that automates your email marketing.
For instance, auto-responders can be customized to follow up with prospects at pre-determined intervals, send birthday or holiday greetings, and send renewal reminders.
4. Email List Scrubber
Don’t waste your time marketing to an invalid email list. Email lists decline by 22% every year. Remove unengaged subscribers and focus on the people who really want to receive information from you.
Scrubbing your email lists periodically is an important part of maximizing deliverability rates and reducing bounce-back, and many agencies are using third-party services to maintain list “hygiene.” Pricing and features can differ, so compare some of these cleaning services that can help you refine your email lists:
- XVerify
- QuickEmailVerification
- Email Checker
- ZeroBounce
- Hubuco
5. Canva
Beautifully designed images are a necessity when it comes to marketing campaigns of any size. Investing in a graphic designer might be worth it if you are creating a billboard, but you certainly don’t want to hire someone every time you send an email or post on social media.
If you are a talented designer, you may be tempted to create your own original images, but the continual need for graphics might have you running out of time to actually sell the products you are marketing.
Whether you simply need to free up your time or just don’t have an artist’s skills, you can benefit from an online design solution like Canva, which uses drag-and-drop features and professional layouts to help you design stunning graphics. Templates and pre-designed items can help you create unique and eye-catching images for social media, email, brochures, direct mail pieces, and more.
6. Biteable
Once you think you’ve gotten the hang of designing images, the video takes over the marketing world. Facebook alone generates 8 billion video views per day, while YouTube reports show that mobile video consumption rises 100% each year. To maintain your competitive edge, you have to embrace every platform that will help you reach prospects.
You don’t have to be a Hollywood producer to make a video. Shooting live videos on your phone can be just as effective as anything produced by fancy camera equipment and lighting.
Webinars and video information sessions don’t have to be complex, but if you want to create a more customized video, try a super-simple, template-based video creation tool like Biteable.
7. Survey Tool
Tracking the success of your marketing and sales efforts is an important step in determining your future plans and investments. Learn about your existing customers with the help of a survey tool, such as SurveyPal.
By helping you create a simple survey, you can use these user-friendly online questionnaires to learn valuable information about your prospects and clients. Ask about pain points in finding health insurance, preferred methods of searching for new services and advisors, favorite websites, and much more. Compiling these results can help you improve your marketing results, track lead sources, and ultimately, increase sales.
8. Bitly or Google URL Shortener
A URL link shortener may be included in your social media scheduler software, but additional ways to shorten a URL may come in handy. Link-shortening tools will take any URL and generate a shorter one that will not only be more visually appealing but can be easily shared.
You will be able to track clicks on specific URLs from email marketing campaigns or social media posts, making it easier to discover what content is generating the biggest response.
9. Google Analytics
Google Analytics might not technically be a marketing tool, but it is vital to improving your marketing efforts. Creating a website that maximizes its impact in lead generation and conversion is the key to success when more than 80% of consumers are shopping online, but how can you determine what’s working and what needs to be improved? For example, is your website mobile-friendly?
Installing a short tracking code on your website gives you access to valuable website data, including the source of site visitors and the pages drawing the most attention.
The information can help you determine your success rates in organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and paid ads, allowing you to re-prioritize your time and money moving forward. You will have access to high-level demographic data that can be used to your advantage as you build campaigns to target new customers.
Taking Advantage of Insurance Marketing Tools
Marketing for insurance brokers doesn’t have to be expensive or difficult. Use innovative insurance marketing tools to improve lead generation, create relevant and professional content in email and social media marketing, and build your online reputation as an industry leader with the expertise to help prospects and clients find the insurance solutions that are right for them.
