October 28, 2021 - It’s time for a scary story. There once was an insurance marketing agent who owned a local business. While they were trying to grow their agency, they made a dire mistake. They didn’t invest in digital marketing!
Marketing your local insurance agency can be hard, but Melon Local is here to help make things a little easier. We work with agents all over the country, so when it comes to insurance marketing, we’ve seen it all. To help you avoid common marketing pitfalls, we’ve compiled a list of the most frightful and formidable insurance marketing mistakes we see.
1. Your insurance ads don’t speak to your ideal audience.
When you create insurance ads to attract new customers, you probably have a specific kind of customer in mind. Maybe you’re looking for new car owners in search of insurance or families looking to bundle their policies. It’s important that your insurance ads speak directly to each of these audiences. This also means you should create different insurance ads for different target customers.
If you don’t adjust the language in your insurance ads to each audience, you run the risk of your ideal customer skipping over your ad. After all, why would a web user click on an ad for life insurance when they looked up policies for homeowners insurance? That’s right, they likely wouldn’t.
2. You haven’t targeted your insurance ads to specific locations.
While we’re talking about insurance ads, we can’t forget to mention the importance of location targeting. As a local business owner, you’re looking for customers within your region. Failing to adjust the location settings on your insurance ad campaigns could mean you’re wasting valuable resources on clicks from people who aren’t eligible for your services. For example, if you offer insurance throughout Missouri, you wouldn’t want to receive a call from a lead in South Dakota.
Luckily, many ad platforms make adjusting your location settings fairly simple. You can choose to target cities, regions or even web users within a set radius from your office. You may also choose to bid on a location-specific keyword, such as “car insurance in Springfield, Illinois”.
3. You haven’t claimed your local business listings.
One of the simplest things you can do to increase your agency’s online visibility is to create listings on online business directories. Since Google accounts for approximately 86.64% of the search market, we suggest starting with a Google Business Profile profile.
This nifty business directory is one of the very first things you’ll see when you enter a local search on Google. Go ahead, give it a try now. Search for something like “restaurants near me” or “best handyman in Henderson, NV” and you’ll see a map followed by a list of businesses. These organic search results come complete with essential business information, reviews, ratings, a website link and more. Local customers are extremely likely to browse these results for businesses near them, so it’s important your agency has a complete profile.
4. You expect instantaneous results.
Unfortunately, this is an insurance marketing mistake we see a lot. Marketing is kind of like cooking… it’s not an exact science. It takes some trial and error to create a successful recipe.
Patience is especially important when trying to earn organic search traffic. This type of insurance marketing strategy aims to improve your website’s search engine ranking over time, building value and authority through content. It may take months or more to see significant results, but SEO is also a sustainable, low-cost insurance marketing strategy, making it an important part of your overall marketing mix.
5. You don’t keep track of your results.
We get it, you’re an insurance agent, not a marketer. Reviewing data like average click-through rates or social engagements can be tedious and time-consuming. However, this data will give you valuable insight into the performance of your marketing campaigns and enable you to make adjustments to your “recipe” as needed.
Working with an insurance marketing agency, like Melon Local, makes this part of the process simple. With Melon Local, a dedicated client success manager will review your data dashboard with you regularly to show you exactly what’s working and what’s not. They’ll strategize with you to ensure your insurance marketing strategies are delivering the kind of results you’re looking for.
Who You Gonna Call… Melon Local
We hope we didn’t scare you away from investing more time and resources into your digital insurance marketing strategy. If you have more questions about how to improve your insurance marketing plan, we’re happy to help. Get in touch with the Melon Local team to talk everything insurance marketing.