Can inbound marketing actually work for your independent insurance agency?
It can, but only if it’s not neglected. Inbound marketing for insurance agencies is one of the most beautiful flowers in your marketing garden, but you need to continue to give it water and food, or your inbound marketing efforts will fade away. With the right care, inbound marketing can be a focal point of your marketing strategy.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is the opposite of traditional marketing strategies that reach out to an audience, hoping to find leads. Instead of sending out a wave of marketing material with a message, inbound marketing focuses on drawing in readers who turn into customers over time. According to Weidert,
“Inbound marketing offers a special opportunity for insurance lead generation because the approach centers on attracting leads by answering prospect’s pressing questions and concerns.”
By focusing on what those who are searching for information want to know, inbound marketing helps your insurance agency build a positive relationship with them, as they come to see your business as a useful resource.
Drawing in Organic Traffic
When you create an inbound marketing campaign, you not only want your content to be strong: you also want content that draws in traffic online. According to Neilson Marketing,
“The goal in creating blog or landing page content should always be to implement SEO keywords, but while maintaining fresh, relatable content and distributing it in an easily digestible way.”
This means that you need to constantly consider your SEO. What keywords or keyword phrases are your readers looking for right now? How can you build links between your content and others’ content online?
Care and Feeding of Your Inbound Marketing Strategy
Just like outbound marketing, inbound marketing needs ongoing planning and care. However, since it’s about building an ongoing relationship with your audience, and since much of it happens online, inbound marketing is something that you need to think about every day. Rather than sending out the occasional flyer or placing an ad in the newspaper, inbound marketing is about building a relationship with your customers on a steady basis. It involves:
- Developing a bank of high-quality content on your blog that answers customers’ questions and shows how you’re a valuable resource to your community
- Creating providing and deep content that establishes you as a thought leader in the insurance field
- Developing images such as video, photos, and infographics that stand alone as valuable images for your readers and are easy to share on social media
- Adding up-to-the-moment content that’s live and interactive, such as live feeds from workshops
- Considering how to use your social media accounts as more than just a promotional tool, asking questions and soliciting others’ experiences.
- Talking with others on social media, and becoming a resource person by adding content to groups or replying to questions online.
Encouraging Engagement
Another element of your inbound marketing strategy is encouraging engagement with your readers, turning them from readers into customers. You can do this through social media connections, but you also need to do this on your website.
- Focus on developing and renewing your calls to action, so that readers sign up for future interactions with your company and move into your sales funnel.
- Evaluate each of these CTAs frequently to ensure that it’s working.
- Provide items of value to your readers as they sign up for more information: a free webinar, an e-book, or another item that will act as an incentive to engage with your business.
Like many efforts that you make to build your insurance business, inbound marketing takes effort.
We’re here to help you develop the right strategies to help your independent insurance agency grow. Whether you have questions about inbound marketing for insurance agencies or you want to build your insurance network, contact us today.
