When you first started building up your insurance agency or brokerage, you might have done what many business owners do: bypassed developing a marketing plan. Marketing is crucial to the growth and stability of any insurance business, and a solid marketing plan can put you in a position to consistently draw in new business. Here we explore the reasons why this is true.
1. A Marketing Plan Helps You Set Goals
A marketing plan will force you to define your objectives for the growth of your business. You need to focus on the results you’re expecting to get from each step as a means to determine how to prioritize the various aspects of the plan. How will you draw in new leads? Do you want to do a television ad? Or, for budgetary reasons, will a Google Adwords campaign be more worthwhile? Consider every possible avenue by which you might reach your goals, and develop those ideas into the framework of your marketing plan.
2. A Marketing Plan Defines Your Audience
One common misconception is that a company’s products and services are universally useful to anyone. However, seasoned business professionals know that this is never the case. You must define who you’re really selling to. Specify their typical demographic and any other unique characteristics that you can use as a guide to help you determine what’s most useful to your marketing efforts. For instance, if a health insurance’s target audience was adults age 70 to 90 for their products, they probably would have little luck marketing on Twitter.
3. A Marketing Plan Keeps Things Manageable
Once you have your preliminary plan in place, you can then approach each level and break it into manageable parts. For instance, you could designate one member of your staff to manage your Facebook page. If your goals define the structure of your marketing plan, then you can easily figure out how to distribute the work and get things done efficiently.
4. A Marketing Plan Sets Your Budget
Very often, marketing costs can spiral out of control for those insurance business owners who don’t have a marketing plan in place or who don’t fully understand the value of the marketing they’re choosing to do. Use your marketing plan to determine what you’d like to do and what it will cost right off the bat. It may be that you’ll have to put something on hold until the funds are available or that you can take on a few smaller projects right away because the costs are negligible.
5. A Marketing Plan Creates a Schedule
You might do what so many insurance business owners do: launch a burst of marketing all at once and then completely ignore it for the rest of the year. Marketing is most effective when done steadily, in a diverse number of ways. You need to stay in front of your target audience. Over time, you’ll find that integrating marketing into your daily, weekly, and monthly processes isn’t that hard.
Need help developing a marketing plan for your insurance agency or brokerage? Direct Connection can help! Learn more.
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