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Is your agency growing? If the answer is yes, then how much and how? If the answer is no, then why?
Let’s tackle the first question; how much did you grow? Let’s say that your growth was 9% this year. How do we analyze that number? The key is to understand how much you grew. First, look at how much of an increase the carriers took. If they took 7% then your agency grew 2% not 9%. Next, you need to look at how it grew. Was it purchasing other agencies or was it organic? If it was organic then how did that come about? Was it a book rollover? If that is so then that was not true growth, however, if it was due to your traditional or internet marketing and digital strategy then that is real, valuable growth.
Once you have analyzed your growth in 2014, you must decide how you plan to grow in 2015. Don’t just hope for growth, your agency needs a strategy. At first your strategy can be broad, for example, my agency plans on bringing a fourth social media engineer which will allow us to market more. Then we will elaborate on where and what we are going to increase. To do this we first made a list of the most important aspects of our marketing. In our case the list looks like this:
- Increase interactions with clients and prospects on social media
- Integrate more of our clients into our blogs
- Write longer, more effective, and more content rich blog posts
- Improve visual content marketing
- Better our personal digital marketing strategy
After we have created our list, I give my marketing team a marketing calendar so that each member of the team has a road map of where we are going. What does this road map look like? With our calendar, I can see at a glance that, on Monday, January 2nd:
- Julia will work on visual content about being an independent insurance agency and she will aim to create 4 engaging visuals.
- Kevin will write thought provoking insurance rich blogs on why people should be insured by independent insurance agencies and what value we can bring.
- Our video producer, Mal, will begin to develop a video that corresponds to Kevin’s blog posts.
Your agency must have a consistent message and that is hard to accomplish without a strategy. This type of collaboration will bring you into the social media world with a targeted message and allow you to have an ROI. So what steps should you take to achieve this growth from your marketing?
- Have a marketing budget
- Hire a social engineer
- Put a strategy together
- Execute your strategy
- Review it and fix what did not work
Marketing takes effort and energy but it brings real growth. Your true growth lies in your marketing.
