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You may have heard of a marketing persona before, but does your insurance agency use them? For those of us who haven’t already heard of a marketing persona, allow me to briefly explain what a persona is, and how they can be a powerful asset to you and your insurance agency. First of all, I’d like to mention that we have recently been working on implementing a product called Hubspot, which is a CRM (client relationship management) tool, as well as a social media monitoring tool, a tool for collecting data/analytics, and more. Hubspot is becoming our “all-in-one” center, and there’s so much to their product that we’ve yet to explore all of its features. That being said, I’d like to turn to Hubspot for their definition of a marketing persona, which is also referred to as a “buyer persona.”

Hubspot says: “A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. When creating your buyer persona(s), consider including demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. The more detailed you are, the better.”

Why does more detail help, and what exactly is the purpose of personas? If you’re new to personas, I’m sure these are questions that you’re asking yourself by now. The purpose of creating marketing personas is to understand your target audience better, and give yourself an opportunity to walk in their shoes. The reason we are looking to understand our customers better is so that we can properly tailor content so it actually resonates and leaves a long-lasting message with them, instead of just making merely a first impression alone. The more tailored our content is to the buyer personas we create, the more traction we will experience online. Think about it this way, we were always told that we should be speaking our customers’ language, but now, we can actually master that craft through our agencies’ marketing materials.

I’d like to give you an example of one of our agency’s marketing personas, and how we have put this persona to use to reach a wider audience of like-minded purchasers or individuals through some of our digital marketing campaigns.

Here is an example of a persona that we designed with our classic car insurance purchasers in mind:

With this persona, we have clearly identified our classic car insurance buyers by the most common traits they share. We’ve defined everything, from their demographics, to their hobbies, common objections, and even a day in the life of our customers, this way we can better understand the way they think. Now that we have a persona for this type of buyer in place, we can properly tailor our agency’s content to speak their language. Here’s one post that we came up with:

Yes, with this blog, we wrote all about how classic car owners can store their classic cars for the winter, and we made good traction by speaking in a way that our classic car owners would understand and appreciate. A lot of folks jump on their blog for their insurance agencies and write about their products and services, but if you write about insurance 100% of the time, then you will not be able to build a strong following. Instead, we try to speak to our personas about issues, events, and topics that matter to them, such as storing their classic, classic car shows coming up, and so on. This makes them feel a more personable touch to our overall relationship, and they’ll be more motivated to stick with our agency in the long hull.

Now, there is one more thing I’d like to mention about our strategy with personas, which is how we deliver the content to the people we are targeting in the first place. It all boils down to your social media strategy, and whether or not your agency is paying to play.  What I mean by “pay to play” is that you can invest money into your social media posts by “boosting” your posts in order to reach a wider audience which isn’t just made up of your established network. When you boost a post you can select targeted demographics on who the post will be delivered to online, and you can see an example of one of our targeted audiences below:

Through Facebook’s boosting system, we can select the gender, age, location and interests of our targeted audience. Basically, we can recreate all of the traits listed in our persona to make sure that the folks that we wrote the blog for originally we be delivered this content accordingly. By tailoring your content with the help of personas, you will see more traction and engagement online, that I can promise you.

If your insurance agency doesn’t already have marketing or buyer personas in place, then there’s no time like the present. Ready to get started? Thankfully, Hubspot has already put together a full template that is available for free on their website, which you can download from this page. I wish agents and brokers everywhere the best of luck with their personas, tailoring your content, and overall, getting more traction and engagement with your digital marketing efforts.