I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how important a successful marketing program is for an agency’s long-term health.
It seems as though agencies are beginning to understand how important marketing should be, based on the phone calls I’m receiving asking for help. The Internet is changing how consumers research and purchase insurance. Yet even with the game-changing nature of the Internet, basic marketing principles still apply.
Here are a few recommendations to help you begin strategizing about how you can develop a marketing program or enhance your existing programs.
- Measure everything: Wasteful marketing can be a real drain on an agency’s budget. Before you start any type of marketing, establish a way for you to measure the success, or failure, of each marketing strategy and tactic.
- Have a good lead generation system: Never in the history of marketing have there been so many ways to attract customers to a Web site or storefront. The trick is to sort through the clutter to find what works for your agency and your customers. By knowing your customers, you’ll know exactly what medium your agency should use to attract new consumers.
- Know your customers: A successful marketing system isn’t just about attracting new business. In fact, retention and account rounding can pay much bigger dividends to the bottom line than just concentrating on new business. Knowing what policies your customers have, and don’t have, allows you to create a marketing process to get additional business.
- Compete on value, not price: Price is important, but too many agency owners think that consumers simply want the lowest priced product or service. Once you find what your customers value, you can charge a premium for it.
- Speak about your customers’ problems, not your products: Often, agency owners build an entire marketing system around policy coverages. For instance, the Web site and brochure describe what is covered and what is not. Instead, your marketing message should describe customer problems and how to solve them.
- Create a follow-up system: I wrote an editorial about follow-up failure in August 2009. What I said then bears repeating: “The biggest reason agents don’t write more business is because they simply don’t follow up. If agencies fixed this one thing in their marketing process they would automatically increase the number of new clients.”
Technology is available to help you manage your marketing system. The first step is to understand the need for marketing. Then, create a marketing strategy for the agency, implement that strategy, and monitor its effectiveness. If you do all of these things, you can’t help but become more successful.