Whether you're an insurance agent, broker, carrier or lawyer, getting your target markets acquainted with your insurance services can feel overwhelming. For many, their expertise lies in the insurance business and not in self-promotion, marketing or advertising.

Word-of-mouth is the prime resource for many small insurance businesses to win new clients. But depending solely on word-of-mouth to grow your insurance business can be a slow-going affair.

So how to find new clients?

Depending on what kind of insurance services you offer, the best meeting point between you and your potential clients may be online. As such, online advertising is the smartest, most direct way to cast a wider net and reach out to markets that might never hear of you and your services otherwise.

Below are some basic tips for the novice online advertiser:

Know your audience and where they are on the Internet. Which websites do they visit? Which blogs do they read? Which social networks do they engage with? Are they researching real estate online? Or looking at car reviews? Are they in the market to buy a boat? Once you identify who your potential clients are and what their interests include, you'll have a strong sense of where to find them online.

It's wise to use media partner research, like data on media usage, as a guide to reaching your target audience. Find out how many unique users a website has per month, how much time a user spends on each web page and everything else about how users interact with the website. This data will help inform your decision-making process when it comes to deciding what kind of ads to buy and where they should run. If, for instance, you're looking to corner a particular market or city, determine the top indexing websites for that given city or town. For targeting a hyper-local audience, these sites are priceless.

Identifying which websites you want your ad campaign to run on is equally important as what kind of tools you decide to use. Websites typically offer advertisers a range of options for how they want their ad to run. Banner ads, for example, can run horizontally along the top of the page or vertically down the side. Each placement type can be strategically utilized to achieve a particular objective. Using high-impact online advertising units, such as sliding billboards, interstitials and homepage takeovers, can prove incredibly successful for increasing awareness of insurance services. When trying to push a specific insurance offer, nothing will work as well as high-impact placements to draw in a potential client's attention.

Deciding the campaign objectives upfront will also help cut through the clutter and identify where you should spend your advertising budget. The clearer these objectives are, the better. Are you trying to drive traffic to a website? Or, do you want people to enroll in a newsletter? When running a conversion-based campaign, for example, high volume rotational media is a more effective than a one-day homepage takeover.

Run ads early and often. Like with any other form of advertising, repetition is key and it reinforces your messaging with the viewer, reader or listener.

Lastly, don't underestimate the importance of strong creative. Ultimately, no matter how great the placement is on a web page, its strong visuals and messaging that will earn a click-through. The creative doesn't need to be flashy. It just needs to be relevant and to resonate with your target audience.

Jesse Goldstein is an account executive at New York City-based digital media services company Gamut.

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Advertising your agency online? Here are some tips

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