Marketing your insurance business can take a tremendous amount of time, money, and resources. All of this is well spent, if you bring in more qualified prospects and write more business.
But what if you don’t feel like you’re seeing a return on your marketing investments?
It may be your message that’s to blame.
Most marketing messages fail. They’re overly complicated. They don’t communicate a clear value to a specific customer. They’re all about you and not about your customer. Or, worse, they’re generic, bland, and boring.
You can do better.
Follow these three steps and you’ll be able to craft a bullet-proof marketing message that will help you grow your insurance business.
Create a Marketing Persona
Who is your ideal customer? What do they want?
Don’t be generic. One-size-fits-all is not the way you want to market your insurance business.
In fact, a generic marketing message is the easiest way to bore, frustrate, or annoy your audience. 63% of consumers report better connections with brands who provide content that is personally valuable, interesting or relevant.
How do you bypass boring and generic and get to personally valuable marketing messages?
It all starts with a well developed buyer persona.
Buyer personas help you understand your prospects and customers better, so you can tailor your message to the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of your ideal customers.
In other words, you may know your target buyers are business owners, but do you know what their specific needs and interests are? Do you know what they want?
In order to get a full understanding of what makes your best customers tick, it's critical to develop detailed personas for your business.
The strongest buyer personas are based on market research as well as data you gather from your actual customers. You are likely to have more than one buyer persona, but don’t spread yourself too thin by creating dozens at the get go.
Remember, the point is to understand your core customer so you can tailor your marketing message for them.
Identify Pain Points
What problem does your customer face?
Once you understand who your ideal customer is, you can identify their primary pain points.
Pain points are problems, plain and simple.
Although you can think of pain points as simple problems, they’re often grouped into several broader categories.
If you’re selling commercial insurance lines to business owners, you’re likely to come across the following pain point categories:
- Financial Pain Points
- Productivity Pain Points
- Process Pain Points
- Support Pain Points
Whether you’re focusing on commercial lines or personal lines, don’t be afraid to dig deep to uncover the real problems your customers are facing. In his book, Building a Storybrand, bestselling author Donald Miller says:
“Companies tend to sell solutions to external problems, but customers buy solutions to internal problems.”
Sure, your customers come to you because they want insurance. That’s an external problem. But their real pain points are internal.
They want homeowner’s insurance because they worked hard and sacrificed for years to save up the down payment to buy a house. They’ve invested time, money, and energy into transforming that house into their home. And they ought to be able to protect that home, without making additional sacrifices to do so.
Once you have identified your customers’ pain points, you can start to brainstorm ways you as an agent, or your brokerage in general, can help solve them.
Stand Out from the Crowd
How can you solve your customers’ problems?
Now you have a better understanding of who your customer is, what they want, and what problems they face - it’s time to come to their aid. Why should they turn to you for guidance?
“We’ve been in business for 80 billion years.” Sound familiar?
The length of time you’ve been in the insurance game isn’t necessarily going to wow potential customers.
Yet, this seems like the leading marking message most insurance producers turn to. Their “years in business” is plastered all over their website, email signatures, and business cards like it’s the most important thing a prospect could ever want to know.
Don’t fall back on “years in business” as a differentiator. (Or else you’re setting yourself up to be beaten by any competitor who’s been in business a year or more longer than you!)
What else makes you unique and exciting?
Tip: Don’t start listing features of your products as an answer to your clients’ problems. Rather, think of the benefits that come along with doing business with you.
Your competitors are likely targeting many of your ideal customers with the same products - which means they may have the same benefits. What reason do people have to buy from you?
Let your buyer persona lead the way. If you’ve helped hundreds of contractors get the right insurance and bonds in place in order to secure government contracts, that’s far more valuable to a qualified prospect than the number of years you’ve been in business.
Clarify Your Message
You’ve identified the three primary parts of a bullet-proof marketing message:
- Who is your customer and what do they want?
- What major problem stands in their way?
- How can you help solve it?
Now it’s time to take all of this information and turn it into a clear, concise, and memorable message.
What’s more effective? You be the judge:
“X Insurance Co. is a licensed contractor insurance and bond agency. Since 1968, we’ve been providing prompt and professional service, low cost coverage, and premium support to our clients.”
or
“We help contractors get the insurance and bonds they need to secure major government contracts that pay.”
The second message is clear, simple, and tailored to a specific persona.
It’s a message that’s bullet-proof.
What’s Your Message?
You can craft a marketing message that’s clear, concise, and that stands out from the crowd.
You do it by understanding who your ideal customer is and what they want, what problems they face, and how you can help guide them through those problems so they come out victorious on the other side.
And that’s far more effective than telling people how many years you’ve been in business.
Don’t waste one more minute repeating a marketing message that doesn’t work. Revamp yours right this moment and see the tangible difference a winning marketing message can make on your insurance business.