How to Grow Your Insurance Agency One Call At A Time

By Johnna McCooey | May 2, 2016

Local Strategies to Stand Out in a Challenging Lead-Acquisition Marketplace


The insurance industry is spending big on local marketing, but the results individual agencies experience depend on the tactics they execute. For independent agents and brokers looking to stand out online, positive web reviews and a mobile-optimized website are not enough to ensure a high search ranking. Firms must think strategically about how they access high-intent, high-quality leads in the path to purchase.

Spending on advertising within the insurance industry doubled between 2000 and 2009, to more than $4 billion per year. But with fewer ways to track the results of offline initiatives, more agents doubt the effectiveness of the marketing channels and methods they’ve used for decades. Industry analyst Street Fight’s Local Merchant Survey found that small and mid-size businesses (SMBs) are spending the bulk of their marketing budgets on online channels, with 61 percent allocating a minimum of 25 percent of their budgets to online advertising. This can be seen among health insurers. eMarketer forecasts the industry will spend $2.55 billion on online and mobile advertising by 2019.

The Online Challenge for Insurance Providers

With more than 1.1 million Internet searches per month in the sector, it has become increasingly difficult for insurance ads to have an impact. When consumers search for insurance on the web, they’re more likely to use general keywords than branded terminology. (Think “auto insurance,” as opposed to “State Farm motorcycle insurance in Topeka.”) This can cause consumers to be confused about the differences between insurance providers, and it makes it difficult for brands to stand out.

With so much competition in the insurance industry, growing agencies can no longer afford to sit back and wait for customers to find them.

Exacerbating this challenge is the recent announcement by some of the largest search engines that they will no longer show paid ads along the right-hand side of the search engine results pages. This affects insurance SMBs who enroll in pay per click campaigns to drive leads, generate phone calls, promote downloads, or achieve any of a dozen common marketing goals. It doesn’t take many searches to see that some of the largest insurance companies are spending millions for online marketing strategies to ensure their listings come up first when consumers search for broad insurance keywords. Those clicks are simply too expensive, and the margin of error too small for local insurance agencies to compete.

Additionally, providers also have to compete with the noise being generated by the traditional advertising market, where between 10 and 15 different insurance television campaigns are running at any given time. The challenge for SMBs, and even larger insurance companies is how to gain mindshare and reach consumers at their most optimal moment of need.

A Paradigm Shift

With the advent of the Affordable Care Act requiring everyone in the U.S. to be covered by health insurance, insurance agents and brokers are juggling their marketing and advertising messages to resonate with several different target markets. Additionally, societal changes shift the demographics of insurance buyers:

The number of single-parent households in the U.S. doubled in 1970, increasing the number of insurance decisions made by women. People are waiting longer to get married, affecting their need for life insurance policies.

There are many more multicultural markets than ever before, with white non-Hispanics making up 69 percent of the population compared to 83 percent 40 years ago.

Also, the do-it-yourself insurance market has been made popular by the Millennial generation, the 76 million people born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s. According to industry analyst BIA/Kelsey, 48 percent of Millennials turn to the web first when shopping for insurance, compared to only 28 percent of Baby Boomers. Additionally, the ease of buying policies online has caused brand loyalty to take a back seat — it’s easier for consumers to price shop and make educated decisions about their policy versus a competitor’s. This is forcing companies that once marketed only through agents to appeal directly to consumers.

These changes challenge insurance providers, as they need to shift their marketing messages and methods to reach their target markets and differentiate themselves from the crowd.

Generating Real Results

When businesses aim to generate leads, the key is in capturing the best leads at the perfect time. Website clicks are useful, but phone calls and visits to an agency’s brick-and-mortar location are far more indicative of a successful strategy.

According to BIA Kelsey, 66 percent of SMBs rate phone calls as a good or excellent source of leads (well exceeding online forms, emails, or clicks). Calls are rated highest within professional services like insurance, which places a high value on new customer acquisition and underscores the opportunity to drive phone leads.

As buyer demographics change, insurance companies must shift their marketing messages and methods to reach their target customers. Using a strategy that generates phone leads, insurance providers can target consumers based on the type of insurance they are looking for and their geographic locations. These strategies also allow businesses to only pay for leads that convert. These strategies complement the traditional brand awareness campaigns.

Delivering on Marketing ROI

Phone call leads complement traditional brand awareness campaigns, but they are very different for return on investment (ROI). Whereas an insurance business may have to wait days, weeks or even months, to gather enough data to evaluate the effectiveness of a brand awareness campaign, the results of performance marketing phone leads are accessible right away.

And timing is everything. Although chance encounters via search engine optimization, search engine marketing, social media, and email campaigns can produce website clicks, they don’t target consumers at key points in the purchase cycle, and they don’t result in conversions at a mass scale. A pay per call program improves ROI by deploying advertising budgets more effectively. Using pay per call, the advertiser makes a competitive bid that it is comfortable paying for, and then pays only when the call meets its qualifying requirements. It’s a much more targeted approach that doesn’t eat into margins.

With so much competition in the insurance industry, growing agencies can’t afford to sit back and wait for customers to find them. Strategic pay per call lead initiatives offer a way for firms to reach out at the moment when consumers are most likely to be ready to purchase — ensuring a growing agency is flooded with new leads.

Topics Agencies Market

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