Insurance marketers face numerous challenges when it comes to attracting and converting new customers. To start, they are tasked with trying to match prospective customers with a wide array of products — making it very difficult to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. There’s also a general lack of awareness about the value of insurance products, so insurance marketers devote much of their time and effort toward educating potential and customer policyholders.
To overcome these challenges, insurance marketers must adopt a robust multi-channel digital marketing strategy. A solid content marketing strategy can drastically help you stand out from the competition. The right content can generate interest in your insurance offerings, fill your sales funnel, and nurture these individuals into loyal policyholders.
Content marketing is effective because it provides the opportunity to talk in-depth about a topic or pain point that is relevant to your target audience. And having the right mix of content allows you to thoroughly educate your contacts about the importance, details, and value of your offerings over time to help them make smart decisions.
The main obstacle for insurance marketers, however, is in getting the right content in front of the right audience. It’s difficult, but not impossible. Today, we’re going to walk you through how to leverage marketing automation to launch a content distribution strategy that gets results.
Develop Targeted Email Nurture Campaigns to Expand Awareness Over Time
Email continues to be an extremely effective marketing tactic, especially for organizations that know how to do it right. Batch-and-blast email marketing might help you capture a lead or two, but it will also ruin your email reputation and send your SPAM complaints shooting through the roof. The best strategy for email marketing is to keep your efforts as targeted as possible to help you secure inbox placement, motivate your contacts to open and read your messages, and drive conversions.
Instead of adopting a one-size-fits-all strategy, try segmenting your audience based on their insurance needs, stage in the sales funnel, and primary pain points. Then enter them into relevant automated email nurture campaigns that address all of these characteristics. As opposed to generic campaigns, email nurture campaigns help you spread out and build out your messaging over time. Following these best practices will not only improve your email reputation and deliverability but also help you in your efforts to get the right content in front of the right audience.
To get the biggest bang for your buck from your email and content marketing efforts, you should focus on the customer journey and spread out your messaging to build awareness over time. Your first email should serve as an introduction explaining why you’re emailing your contact and what they can expect to see from you in upcoming emails. You should also link to a content piece that will pique their interest, describe what you have to offer, and provide them with a foundation to build on as you continue to send timely emails with great content.
Your next 2-3 emails should serve up additional content that helps you establish trust with your potential policyholders and educates them about the best options for their unique needs Your last email should sum up what your contacts have learned, include links to previously read content, and offer them an opportunity to talk to one of your insurance brokers directly to keep them moving through the sales funnel.
Email nurture campaigns help you nurture, educate, and stay top-of-mind with customers throughout the entire customer journey. The right marketing automation tool can allow you to A/B test subject lines, preview text, copy, design, and more so you can continue to improve these efforts for maximum results.
5 Marketing Challenges Facing Insurance Brokerages
Use Landing Pages and Forms to Gather Important Policyholder Information
Email nurture campaigns are a great way to educate your contacts over time, but what can you do when you don’t have the right information to help you deliver relevant content? Simple! Gate your content behind landing pages and web forms that you can share via social, through paid digital advertising, and your website.
Create a landing page that provides your contacts with a brief summary of the content they’ll receive. This usually includes a brief intro paragraph outlining the challenge your content helps solved, followed by 3-5 bullet points summarizing what the prospective policyholder will learn by downloading the asset. You should aim to keep your form to only 2-3 fields to make it as easy as possible for your visitors to access the content they need. Lastly, include a strong and prominent CTA above your form and a briefer version as a button below the form.
A marketing automation platform that includes adaptive forms can help you gradually collect the crucial contact information you need as your prospects move through the customer journey without having to ask for the same information twice. So, for example, if you already know your contacts name and email, you can collect information related to their industry and title next time they fill out a form — and so on.
Landing pages and forms help you curate information based on your target audience’s insurance needs and funnel stage, among other attributes. They also allow you to collect critical information that can inform your marketing strategy as you continue to guide these contacts through a compelling customer journey.
Take Advantage of Event-Triggered Emails
Striking while the iron is hot is critical to capturing your target audience’s attention, staying top-of-mind, and effectively guiding leads through the sales funnel. With event-triggered emails, you don’t have to wait to launch a campaign or gather critical information to start sending your contacts relevant information.
Set up emails that automatically launch whenever a contact completes a critical action — such as visiting a web page, signing up for an event or webinar, or requesting more information. You can even implement event-triggered emails for special events like birthdays, renewals, and holidays.
Event-triggered emails do more than allow you to quickly engage with your contacts. They also serve as a great tactic to help you distribute targeted content. By sending your customers and leads educational materials that correspond with their actions, you can continue to cultivate their interests and effectively guide them to the next step in the buyer journey.
Promote Your Content on Your Social Channels
Most of your current and prospective policyholders probably spend at least an hour of their day online browsing through their social feeds. So if you’re not consistently promoting your content on social, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to attract your target audience. Marketing automation makes it extremely easy to streamline your social media efforts and activate your social media advocates to help you get your content in front of as many insurance consumers as possible.
Act-On’s Advanced Social Media Module allows you to curate and schedule posts ahead of time, repurpose previously shared social content, and even create content boards so that your team can easily share your posts and content with their networks. You also gain access to valuable engagement insights that allow you to optimize your efforts to continuously improve results. And because all these tasks are automated, you don’t have to live your life on your phone or in front of a computer screen to ensure that you have a constant and effective social media presence.
Act-On Makes Insurance Marketing Easy and Effective
Marketing automation makes it easy to launch marketing campaigns that help you stand out in a saturated market while saving time and resources. The right platform can help you streamline resources, deliver more targeted communications, and improve results.
If you’d like to learn how marketing automation can help your insurance company overcome some of the most common industry challenges, download our eBook, 5 Marketing Challenges Facing Insurance Brokerages.
But if you want to cut to the chase and see our platform in action, please schedule a demo with one of our marketing automation experts. They’ll be more than happy to show you how to implement all the strategies we’ve outlined above and more.