Is “make insurance marketing mistakes” on your corporate to-do list this year? Whether you conduct bad marketing or just ignore your marketing altogether, you could be making marketing mistakes that damage your insurance company’s reputation. If you’re not keen on making a large number of marketing mistakes, avoid these bad marketing practices.
Focus on the Amount of Content You Produce
If you have abundant content, that’s great. However, if you have abundant, low-quality content, that’s not so great. Your insurance marketing goal should be to create thoughtful marketing campaigns and to develop value for your customers. If you’re just writing content to write content, you won’t become a thought leader. You’ll just become the latest clutter to muck up your customers’ web search or social media feed.
The remedy: create less content, but focus it on your specific marketing goal and ensure that it fills your customers’ needs.
Offend Your Customers
If you push out a lot of marketing materials, chances are you could develop a campaign that inadvertently offends a large number of your customers. For instance, according to Spokal, a diaper company once created an ad campaign to advertise its excellent diapers, but unfortunately, the campaign offended fathers who were portrayed as inattentive to their baby’s needs. Insurance matters deal with life and death, property loss, accidents, and illness. These are sensitive topics, and it’s easy to offend people when you discuss them.
The remedy: Before you send out your latest marketing materials, make sure that you have corporate guidelines around marketing tone and content. You should also send your materials through a few sets of eyes before the marterials reach the public.
Send Out Unwanted Marketing Messages
Are you in the lazy habit of sending out marketing messages to everyone on your customer list? Your customers may have purchased a product already, or perhaps they’re completely uninterested.
The remedy: Segment your database and target those who are actually interested in that specific marketing message.
Assume That All Is Well in Your Online Marketing
It’s all too easy for someone to hack your website, take over your comments thread, or create a website that has a similar name but a very different and perhaps offensive theme. This happened to Heinz when it shared a QR code on its ketchup bottles. Unfortunately, according to Printsome Insights, “The company let the website expire and then an even saucier organization bought the domain name.”
The remedy: To avoid surprises, you need to make sure that you’re constantly doing due diligence to monitor your website address, social media accounts, and the links that you send out or connect to from your company website. If you don’t stay on top of your online marketing, it could have unintended consequences.
Focus On Price As the Strongest Element of Your Brand
It’s important to have a strong, cohesive marketing message. However, you need to focus on the overall value that your agency brings to your customers, not just the price of your products. Prices change, and this makes it easy for another company to undercut you. If that happens, your only selling feature is gone.
The remedy: Be a well-rounded company with a clear corporate mission. This allows you to promote yourself on the basis of shared values, rather than only focusing on the cost of your products.
At American Agents Alliance, we want to help you excel in the insurance industry. We work with independent insurance agencies on insurance marketing, insurance jobs, and much more. Learn more about our membership benefits and contact us today.
