5 Common Agency Marketing Mistakes

Insurance agents face immense challenges in Internet marketing. They must devise exceedingly smart strategies to avoid any wasted online marketing expenditure. The following five mistakes occur too often:

1. Wasting time and money on bad SEO campaigns

“Black hat” SEO agencies dangle juicy traffic and lead carrots in front of insurance agents, luring them into ill-conceived, cookie-cutter SEO campaigns.

SEO can be a very productive option for agents, provided they have a solid strategy. Generally, a successful lead-generation SEO campaign for insurance agencies will have a strong local SEO component, focus on “long-tail” keywords in strategic niches with a very high potential for conversion, and use an aggressive off-site strategy involving the creation of content to acquire high-quality backlinks.

2. Dabbling in social media

People don't want to talk about insurance on social media, and they don't want to be sold to. Social media can be effective for building relationships with existing clients and establishing credibility, but building an engaged social media community takes a lot of time and effort that can be spent more productively in other marketing activities.

3. Poor website strategies

If an agent is part of a corporate website structure, setting up a second, personal website will not pay off. It will confuse prospects and search engines as to which website is the correct one to use for inquiries, and even a little seed of doubt will produce precipitous declines in website visits and leads. Winning agency websites have unique, valuable content, structured to enable visitors to find what they need quickly. Also critically important: having a mobile-friendly website.

4. Under investing in or mishandling e-mail marketing

E-mail is a terrific option for insurance agencies, if it is done properly. Specific problems to avoid include:

Using purchased lists. This is never effective. Build a house list as relevant and up-to-date as possible. It will pay off in the long run.

Starting and stopping. Consistency is the key to effective e-mail marketing. It can take subscribers months to catch on and engage.

Coming on too strong. E-mails providing useful information put prospects and clients at ease, and generate meaningful inquiries in the end.

Coming on too weak. Selling is part of the equation. An e-mail providing subscribers with no way to interact or inquire is only doing half the job.

Not using an e-mail management platform. This is ineffective and amateurish. Many solid, reasonably priced online platforms are available to give e-mails a professional look, and make distribution and analysis easy.

5. Failing to track and measure

Agencies perpetuate bad online marketing campaigns when they fail to capture the right data, or fail to review it regularly. In terms of data capture, agencies must be able to tell which marketing campaigns are generating leads, and how many leads are being generated.

Phone leads are often ignored in online marketing campaign tracking. Make sure you can trace any phone inquiry back to the source. This is done through assigning unique phone numbers to each campaign—e.g., a unique phone number for the website, a unique number for e-mails.

In terms of review, online marketing is always an exercise in continuous improvement. Without analyzing which online sources are generating the most leads, it is impossible to strengthen weak campaigns—or eliminate them— and invest more in ROI-producing campaigns. With proper data capture and review, your online marketing will get stronger every quarter.