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When it comes to your insurance agency’s marketing, personalization is key. Why? Well, think about it this way – when was the last time that you had received excellent service? Thinking back on this service, did the company make you feel like you were their only customer, or that you had exceptional one on one service? I’m sure they did, and this is something that we need to capture within our insurance agencies. This can take place online, in person, or even in traditional forms of marketing such as thank you cards or postcards. Regardless, if we personalize our “marketing touches” with how we interact with our audience, we will see much more engagement and be able to push the envelope when it comes to developing new business. Today, I’d like to discuss how you can make use of marketing personas and personalizing your onboarding process, so that your customers and clients will want to stay with you for the long hull. While we are often focused strictly on developing more and more new business, it’s important to nurture our existing client base as well, because we live in a business of renewals. Let’s get started.
What exactly is a marketing persona?
When we discuss marketing personas, we are essentially talking about mock profiles that your insurance agency can create to personify your most common or target customers. So essentially, you can create a fictional biography that will describe your most frequent customers, and by focusing on this persona, you can tailor your content to pique their interest. Let’s run through a quick example of one of our agency’s marketing personas.
With one of our personas, we have Bill and Jill, an average set of parents that live here in our hometown of Stafford Springs, Connecticut. Bill works as a plumber for a local company, while Jill works at a local arts and crafts store. This couple has two kids, they are in their mid 40’s, and they have a combined stable salary of just over $100,000 a year. Bill and Jill have been through all of the hoops in life, so they know that they need insurance to protect the things that matter most. Not to mention, these folks have a large extended family, most of which also live right here in town.
In this persona, we look at occupation, age, household income, location, and more. This helps us understand some of our most common customers, that way when our agency creates content to push out online, we can write in the voice of someone that “Bill and Jill” would want to listen to. We’ve created six total personas on our top six most common customers for our agency, which also include truck drivers, young couples, more elderly folks, classic car collectors, and local business owners. While we also try to help out the folks like millennials or people who fall under other categories outside of our marketing personas, we try to focus our content on our personas so that we hit home with the majority of our customer/client/prospect base.
Try creating 5 or 6 personas within your insurance agency as well, tailoring your content to those profiles, and then see what happens with your engagement rates online with your audience. Be sure to measure the performance on your website, social media, email marketing campaigns, and anywhere else that your agency is marketing digitally. If you have to, don’t be afraid to make adjustments with your campaigns/personas as you move forward to get the most engagement in your space online.
Communication is Key
As we mentioned earlier, personalization is all about connecting with your customers on their terms. With that being said, you should be looking for multiple outlets where you can connect with your customers or clients online. This could mean a traditional phone call or having customers stopping into your office, or even making yourself available for text/email throughout the day. This shouldn’t be the end of your communication strategy though, as you should be marketing to social media, and on multiple platforms. Our insurance agency makes use of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+ and LinkedIn. This could sound like a lot to bear all at once if you’re new to social media, and that’s okay. You just have to take things one step at a time when it comes to social media marketing, and if you’re looking for a place to start, I’d suggest checking out our article on mastering the world of social media.
Beyond communicating with your customers on their terms, you should also be providing them with content that makes them feel like it was designed just for them. This includes visuals, videos, branded content, your blog, and more. All of this should come together on your website, but it should also be made available in all aspects of your digital marketing. Your content should be tailored to meet each persona’s individual wants and/or needs. That can include providing your business owners with tips on how they can efficiently run their business or prepare for upcoming seasonal shifts. It could be safety tips for parents when it comes to various places they can visit with their children. Whatever the information, if it’s geared toward one of your personas, then you will definitely see more engagement with your audience online, as long as your personas properly line up with your customer/client base. Don’t be afraid to adjust your personas moving forward though, because it will only help you if you notice some of your content isn’t performing that well.
Email Marketing at its Finest
Yes, the last thing I’d like to discuss with marketing personalization is when it happens within your email marketing campaigns. With your campaigns, there’s a lot to think about when it comes to the design. There are multiple factors to think about, such as what content to include, what branded visual content you can include to engage your viewers, and where the email should be sent out. When it comes to your marketing personas, you can use them to create a few categories, or targeted lists, where your email marketing campaigns can go out. Let’s run through a few brief examples.
For one email campaign that we designed, we recently wanted to blast out an email to our local community to tell them about our Flag Day campaign. We included visuals from the previous year’s Flag Day campaign, and all of the details on who can participate, when, and where the campaign will take place. After that, we chose to send it out to everyone within our community’s zip code. We wanted all ages, genders, personas, etc. to see this campaign, and the common factor here was location.
Similarly, we had another campaign where we specifically spoke to restaurant owners about how they can protect their business efficiently. With this campaign, we chose to only send it out to our list of restaurant owners, but this time, we chose to do so with any location. We included visuals of restaurants that were eye catching and appealing, and of course, tailored them to our insurance agency’s brand. We linked to our website, and included all of our social media links for them to connect with us.
These two campaigns were very different in nature, which is why two separate targeted lists were needed in order to have a touch of personalization. Our goal, at the end of the day, is to make all of our clients and customers feel like our agency deals with them and them alone on an individual basis. When you make your customers feel that sense of priority, believe me, they will want to stick around for the long hull.
Overall, personalization is a step in the right direction when it comes to your marketing, whether it’s traditional or digital. By personalizing your insurance agency’s marketing, you will see more engagement, more traction, and longer lasting, strong relationships with your audience.
