How to Create a Marketing Plan for your Insurance Agency
Marketing: the generator of all business. Marketing is an essential part of every insurance agency and needs to be implemented in a strategic manner. In order for your insurance agency to succeed in its’ marketing efforts, you must have a strong marketing plan. In this article, we will go over the four steps involved with creating and following up on a marketing plan for insurance agents.
First and foremost, let’s talk about what a marketing plan is. A marketing plan is a set of instructions or “blueprints” to promote something within your insurance agency. It could be for a new product, The Annual Enrollment Period, informational guides, and much more. When creating a marketing plan, you need to identify what you will be promoting and who you will be promoting it to. As an insurance agent, you work with clients and prospects daily. Therefore, due to that fact that you continuously work with people, your marketing plan should be centered around relationship marketing. Relationship marketing is precisely what it sounds like – creating long-lasting relationships with clients and prospects in order to gain their trust and provide them with personalized products and services.
Let’s move on to the objectives of a relationship-oriented marketing plan. This marketing plan is made to help you and your peers at your insurance agency understand the common goal/goals to works towards. It will help your agency be more aware of the problems and opportunities within the insurance industry as well.
To create a relationship-oriented marketing plan, you must first focus on your insurance agencies mission statement. Why do you do what you do? This is where people look for humanization and the benefits they will receive from your insurance agency.
Next, your agency should conduct a SWOT analysis. By now you may be wondering, “What on earth is a SWOT analysis?” Don’t worry; it’s not as complicated as it sounds. A SWOT analysis stands for:
Strengths
Weaknesses
Opportunities
Threats
These analyses help insurance agencies to identify their strong areas, areas where they need work, and they force your agency to examine external environmental factors as well (competition, target market, stakeholders).
The next thing you’ll want to do for your marketing plan is set objectives. These objectives need to be:
Measurable
Time-bound
Realistic
Comparable
Forming objectives is similar to setting goals, so putting yourself in a goal-setting mind frame would be helpful in this step.
The next step for your marketing plan is to define your target market. This means you will need to get a good description of the people who are in need of the products and services that your insurance agency offers. You will need to know the way your target market makes purchasing decisions, which marketing techniques are the most effective with them, and how to appeal to your target market.
Next, you’ll need to have a “marketing mix” for your insurance agency. A “marketing mix” consists of 4 things:
Product
Place
Promotion
Price
In order to effectively utilize the “marketing mix” technique, you mustn’t focus on only one of these things, but all of them. An equal representation of each of the objectives in the “marketing mix” will result in a better success with your insurance agency’s marketing plan.
Lastly, you will need to know how to follow up on your marketing plan. There are four steps that go into this process:
Implementation
Evaluation
Control
Post-audit Tasks
Implementation focuses on turning a marketing plan into actual assignments. It’s important to find a person who is responsible and authoritative enough to be able to delegate these plans to other insurance agents and employees.
Evaluation is the step that involves evaluating the results achieved with your marketing plan. Are they up to par? Is there anything that should be changed?
Control is used to help correct changes that need to be made within a marketing plan. Use this step to eliminate pieces of your plan that do not help your insurance agency reach its’ goals.
Lastly, post-audit tasks are tasks that can be created by looking at the results of the marketing plan. When completing post-audit tasks, you should look for things like strengths, weaknesses, and new opportunities. Use post-audit tasks to create new recommendations for the marketing of your insurance agency, and focus on the good things, and the things that can be improved.
And there you have it! The simple, but effective, way to create a relationship-oriented marketing plan for your insurance agency. Remember, creating a marketing plan is entirely customizable and should be designed to fit your insurance agency’s needs.
For questions or comments on creating a relationship-oriented marketing plan for your insurance agency, give us a call at 800-962-4693, and we would be happy to assist you.
