Insurance Agency Marketing and Lead Generation...

The insurance agency marketing ideas and plans that are floating around can be hazardous to your agency's health.

See, marketing an insurance agency is not rocket science. But there are many pitfalls an agency manager or owner can fall into that will cost you big bucks in needless advertising expenses.

The first insurance agency marketing mistake is called 'me too marketing'. In other words, every agency is looking at other agencies and copying what they are doing, and then what happens is they all look the same.

Effective insurance agency marketing is not about looking the same as the other guy. It's about standing out from the crowd and getting people interested in what you have to say.

But sadly, insurance agency marketing is mostly about image based advertising. Which brings me to...

The second insurance agency marketing mistake! This is the most common mistake in the insurance and financial planning industry...

Branding.

Brand marketing and advertising is a colossal waste of money. What it is basically is where insurance agencies take a shotgun approach to marketing and blasts their company name over and over hoping that eventually someone will call because they remembered their name.

You might be thinking, "But all the big companies do it so it must be working."

It's the wrong marketing approach because...

• You can't measure response.
• Nobody cares about your company name except you (I know it hurts but it's true, sorry!)

In addition, it's very expensive. Give me a third of the budget of any regular brand marketing campaign and I'll flood your agency with qualified insurance leads...

Brand marketing sends your advertising representatives children to college and buys them a Porche, but it can put you in the poor house.

But all the big companies do it because they don't care about response rates to their marketing (not always, but usually). They care about their stock price. When they make expensive brand awareness commercials it does absolutely nothing to generate leads, but it shows their stock holders that they are doing something.

Insurance marketing and lead generation should be measurable. In other words, use direct response marketing online and offline (70% - 100% of the advertising budget). Direct response marketing is about measuring response rates to your insurance agency advertising.

For more information on effective insurance marketing, start with this article. And then read all the related articles.

• Referral Secrets
• 8 Marketing and Prospecting Secrets

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