What should be in a freelance insurance agent’s marketing plan in 2021?
Each new year comes with new opportunities either for personal growth or business growth. So, 2021 shouldn’t be any different. That’s why, like everyone else, freelance insurance agents come up with new year resolutions and goals for their personal development and businesses. However, these resolutions and goals cannot be achieved without a plan.
As an insurance agent, you’ve made resolutions and goals probably to earn more money this year, to open your own agencies, to grow your portfolios, and so on. However, do you have a marketing plan that will ensure that you commit to achieving your resolutions and goals?
As an individual, a marketing plan will steer you towards achieving your goals by ensuring that you’re following the right strategy. On the other hand, as an agency, a marketing plan will define the direction for your company and help your business to understand how to get to your business goals.
So, what should you include in your marketing plan in 2021?
- Performance Evaluation
Before developing a marketing plan, you need to take an in-depth look at how you’ve been performing in your insurance business so far. Do a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) to find out where you are at the moment and where you need to go.
Your strengths could be the ability to easily get contacts for prospects, while your weakness could be taking too long to sign up these prospects until they choose your competitors over you. On the other hand, new opportunities could be new products and pricing that you can capitalize on for a new market. Finally, threats against your business could be competitors, or as we’ve experienced with the Covid19 pandemic, a global event that leads to an economic downturn.
- Target Markets and Goals/Objectives
Your marketing plan must also have these two things. Identifying target markets is important because they determine the products your prospective customers need and the pricing. Once you’ve identified these prospective customers and their needs, it will be easy to come up with a strategy to reach them. For example, do you meet them through digital marketing and social media ads, or do you directly go to them to networking events and community activities? Once all this is determined, you can move on to creating your marketing goals.
Set SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely) goals for your target markets. Keep in mind that each market will probably need its own goals. For example, the marketing goals for high-income prospects who live in Lavington and Kileleshwa will be different from the marketing goals for middle-class prospects who live in Roysambu and Ruaka.
Here is an example of a smart goal:
Goal – I will increase my sales by 10% by 30th April 2021.
Specific – This goal is specific to what you want to achieve by the end of April.
Measurable – You can measure your sales at the end of April against where you are now to find out whether they increased by 10%
Attainable – It’s attainable because it’s a reasonable percentage to be able to gain in 3 months
Relevant – It’s relevant to the growth of your business
Time – It gives you a reasonable time frame to increase your sales.
Agencify offers you a way to organize your goals. You can manage your deals, sales, renewals, and generally manage clients’ account through this platform.
- Messaging
An experienced agent knows that different target markets are approached with different messaging. For example, your pitch to sell motor insurance to a 55 year old rich man who drives the latest Range Rover model will be different from your pitch to a 26 year old middle-class man who just bought his first car, a Toyota Passo.
Also, your language may change depending on the client, whereby sometimes you might need to pitch in English, sometimes in Kiswahili, and sometimes in mother tongue. .
Finally, each insurer you represent might give you different marketing material with different messaging. This is because they want their brand to be portrayed in a certain way.
Basically, your marketing plan should guide your messaging for your prospects depending on their needs.
- Creativity
A good marketing plan will have a section that guides your marketing activities and methods. For example, should you go and hand out flyers or brochures in a mall? Should you market on social media? Should you create a website and run digital ads that will send prospects to the site to sign up for the insurance products you’re selling?
This section should also include a referral strategy, whereby you request your existing customers to refer you to their friends and family. You can incentivize them; for example, by buying the lunch or dinner. You can also use your friends and family to refer prospects to you.
- Budgeting
You can’t implement a marketing plan without a budget. Think about it – if your marketing activities are to call or email clients, you’ll need phone airtime and/or internet connection. You’ll also need to pay for transport to go and meet prospects. You’ll also need to pay for the incentives that you want to give your clients, friends, or family for referrals. Therefore, estimate the number of marketing activities that you need to do then allocate a budget for them.
- Tracking Metrics
Tracking metrics will ensure that you don’t run your business on autopilot. They will help determine what’s working and what isn’t. That way, you’ll be able to make adjustments accordingly so you can stay on track and achieve your goals by the end of the year. For example, feedback from clients on how they heard about you could help determine whether your marketing methods are working, and which methods are working best. For example, if your highest signups are coming from social media, you can adjust your marketing strategy and budget to focus more on social media signups.
As previously mentioned in this article, you can organize your goals using Agencify. Do you want to learn more about how this works? Feel free to contact us on email: dennis.njenga@agencify.insure or phone: 0768 759 399
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