The Best Digital Marketing Tool for Your Insurance Agency in 2020: A Checklist
Get a marketing checklist for your agency
We use checklists to do insurance coverage reviews, perform risk surveys, and for loss control inspections. Checklists aren't a novelty for any insurance agency, we all use them for one thing or another for a reason: they work.
But what about a checklist for making marketing decisions or putting together marketing campaigns? What about when it comes time to decide on a new insurance agency website, whether to spend some marketing budget on Facebook advertising or pay-per-click ads (PPC)?
Not so much.
In the 2010 book, The Checklist Manifesto, surgeon Atul Gawande highlights improvements in outcomes in the medical and other fields. For instance,
- Checklists were distributed to poor neighborhoods in Pakistan along with bars of soap. The checklists covered when and how to use the soap in six different situations. In test groups that received the checklist and the soap the "incidence of diarrhea among children... dropped by 52%, the incidence of pneumonia fell 48%, and the incidence of impetigo...fell 35%." It wasn't the soap alone, it was the soap and the checklist.
- In another study, a pre-surgery checklist was prepared with the aim of reducing post-operative infections. When antibiotics are administered is critically important to the prevention of post-op infection. Three months after the checklist was implemented, 89% of patients received antibiotics at the right time. After ten months, 100% did.
- In a WHO checklist study complications in test hospitals for surgical patients fell by 36% and deaths fell by 47%.
- Checklists helped an investment fund manager improve portfolio results by 60 points.
- Venture capitalists using a checklist driven approach to investment decisions had a 10% likelihood of firing senior management for incompetence; others had a 50% likelihood.
The book highlights the use and similar success rates when checklists are used in the aviation and building industries as well.
So what does this have to do with marketing and insurance agents?
Complex systems, or events where small errors end in disaster, cry out for a repeatable, easy to implement checklist. And the fact is, as digital marketing becomes a more looming component in insurance agency marketing, marketing decisions have become much more complex.
Checklists are readily available for marketing plans, you can see a thorough one here for another industry. Even though this list is aimed at the construction industry the outline is just as applicable to a marketing plan for an insurance agent..
However, checklists like this tend to stay at 30,000 feet, they don't really provide a lot of direction when it comes to evaluating individual marketing tactics. So we evaluate marketing options like search engine marketing, search engine optimization, email marketing, Facebook marketing, insurance agency website updates and the like, in isolation, without context. A checklist can fix that..
Get a marketing checklist for your agency
We also tend to risk aversion, going with what we know rather than exploring the unknown. We take the recommendations of our associations and insurance companies and buy whatever the Yellow Page guy is selling because it seems safer.
While a recommended website or Facebook campaign may not be such a bad thing in and of itself, the combination of many isolated marketing decisions (or non-decisions) can spell success or failure, good ROI, or money down the drain.
An actual example featuring insurance company coop for agency marketing
The names have been changed to protect the innocent...
In our example insurance company A offers to coop 50% of an ad that will rotate in the banner of the local TV station's news app and website. The cost to the agency is $350 a month and the term for the ad campaign is six months. As a condition of the coop Company A requires that their logo be part of the ad.
Here we have problem #1: Ads that appear on mobile devices don't allow much space for other content or graphics. Consider the following examples:
To see what an ad like that might look like here's a mobile screenshot of a local news app featuring a couple of different ads for something other than insurance.
This is a good clear graphic with a good clear message: better banking with our mobile app.
The Bank of America logo is there but this ad isn't trying to build brand awareness as much as it is trying to entice an obviously mobile user to take a look at a 'better' banking app. The logo is secondary and doesn't need to suck up a lot of the limited real estate.
This next one isn't so good. We can see Farm Credit's logo but the blandishment, the reason to click, is unreadable.
This graphic was not designed with mobile in mind and is a serious liability in a mobile banner ad. It turns out there isn't much of a call to action, or CTA: 'Here's to better living.' Who knows what that means or why anyone would want to click on it? But the larger problem with their CTA, because of the space taken up by the logo, is that you can't really read the offer.
Let's go back to the first example.
It turns out the Bank of America ad falls apart when you click on the 'better banking with our mobile app', ;and this illustrates problem #2. Take a look at what shows up if we click the Bank of America ad:
The reasonable person would reasonably expect to learn more about the virtues of the bank's mobile app, that's what the ad offered in the first screenshot. Instead we are presented with a credit card offer.
If it feels like bait and switch (and it does) the reasonable person probably would leave the app and go back to whatever they were doing on their phone. An ad that started out with such promise falls apart after the click.
If our coop-boosted insurance agency banner ad committed one of the two mistakes above, or another of several possible mistakes, the likely outcome at the end of six months would be a wasted $2,100.
Suppose for a moment the insurance agency in our example was not making the decision to launch the banner ad in isolation, as in,
'Gee, you'll pay half of the ad cost? And the app gets 300,000 viewers a month? Sign me up!'
What would the insurance agency need to consider to have a greater chance of success?
Let's suppose the ad was meant to encourage consumers to get a car insurance quote. Here are some of the things a good checklist would lead you to consider:
- Are we targeting the right group with the ad? What data is available to support this?
- The app may get a lot of viewers but are they our demographic? How many are repeat viewers? Another useful metric, which should be readily available, is the number of times the app has been downloaded.
- Are we able to deliver on what we are offering? (e.g., instant, competitive quotes or a quick turn around)
- Do we need additional graphics for the ad or landing page?
- Do we need a special landing page on our website or elsewhere for the campaign? (almost certainly)
- Is the ad offer clear and compelling? (For example, 'Get a car insurance quote' probably won't work, 'Save up to $467 on car insurance' might.)
Digital marketing overlap - amplification or scrambled signals?
The screen shots in the example above illustrated a mobile experience, but even on a desktop, problem #2 would have resulted in failure. Let's see how by looking at a different example that illustrates an effective ad.
As often seen in Google search results, some paid ads (PPC), placed by insurance agents and companies, will show up in a search for 'homeowner insurance.'
A click on the second ad in the list goes to this web page:
A page like this is called a landing page, it is built for a specific purpose: to convert people who click on the ad that appears in search results. The page reinforces the ad offer, provides some other value propositions, and clears the way for the viewer to take the next step. It's pretty well done, no clutter or superfluous content, just a straight line to conversions.
What many insurance agencies do on the other hand is point their PPC Google ads to an existing product page, like this one from the same company's website:
A good checklist will keep you from missing any of those things. A good checklist will take something that seems complex and difficult and make it manageable.
You choose: insurance marketing dysfunction or synergy and leverage?
Problems #1 and #2 are examples of dysfunction. Suppose instead an insurance agency put an ad campaign together the more closely resembled the desktop paid search example above. A synergy has been created between the Google Ad and the insurance company website.
But there are opportunities for even more advertising efficiencies.
The agency now has some collateral that can be leveraged in other channels and campaigns. Here's a quick inventory of that marketing collateral:
- Tested ad copy
- Mobile friendly graphics
- Website landing page
This collateral can be put to work in Facebook advertising, LinkedIn ads, push notifications, and email campaigns.
Once a marketing campaign is green-lighted most of the work involves collateral creation. Once the collateral is created, the heavy lifting is done, and the door is open to many other marketing campaigns. The collateral can be further leveraged because you can run the campaign intermittently over a period of time. Campaigns don't need to be one-off events.
Download a marketing checklist for your insurance agency
Make the checklist your own
Any checklist, including the one we have available for you here shouldn't be considered the be-all-end-all. You should modify the checklist and make it your own.
Consider marketing campaigns your insurance agency has launched in the past. Where did the breakdowns happen? Was it you just didn't have a good way to measure results? Were there unexpected knowledge and tasks that your staff weren't prepared to perform? Was it that old bugaboo, failure to follow through?
Being honest about past failures will help you refine your checklist to what computer scientists call max-flow-min-cut: what is the minimum effort or change to behavior that will yield the largest payoff.
As an example, Boeing has made checklists available to airlines who fly their planes. Each new plane and equipment update is accompanied by a checklist. However, each airline modifies those checklists to suit their own needs and procedures.
And finally, don't forget checklists for your checklist
The marketing checklist we have been discussing is designed primarily to help insurance agents make better decisions when designing a marketing plan or campaign. It will even give you a jump on campaign implementation but you should develop an implementation checklist focusing on:
- The 'doing' of the tasks (who, what, when)
- Who will provide management oversight to make sure tasks are carried out? Will these tasks become part of a job description and performance requirements?
- How often will you review data review for success?
Who Are We Targeting
- Will this tactic attract new clients?
- Will this tactic attract the right kind of clients?
- How do we know? (data)
- Will this tactic improve referrals from clients?
- Will this tactic improve retention?
- Will this tactic improve account sales?
Measuring Success
- How soon?
- What metrics?
- How are these metrics tied to revenue growth?
Care and Feeding
- What will my staff have to do to get this set up?
- What kind of effort and time commitment will be necessary to keep this running successfully?
- Do we have the skills on staff to do that?
- Does he impacted staff know about this potential initiative?
- Will the changes and updates be one time or ongoing? (Project vs. process)
- Do we have the time on staff to do that?
- Do we have the management wherewithal to do that?
- Will the vendor take care of care and feeding for us?
Influence and Influences
- Is this marketing tactic a duplication of another tactic?
- Will this tactic diminish the results of another tactic?
- Will this tactic improve the results of another tactic?
Checklists for Checklists
- Do I, or will I have a checklist for the tactic?
The list can be too long, checklists need to be reduced to the most important items to be effective. And when you are modifying your checklist make sure to involve the right people, not just the decision makers but the employees who will have to implement the plan.
FAQs:
Q: Do insurance marketing plan templates include checklists?
A: There are many good marketing plan templates available and many of them are in checklist format. But these templates almost never include the kind of detail an insurance agent would need to select and coordinate specific marketing tactics.
Q: How can a checklist make good insurance marketing ideas better?
A: A marketing idea, no matter how good, won't help an insurance agency become successful unless it can be coordinated with other marketing tactics and actually implemented. A checklist can help with that.
Q: Are marketing checklists different for digital insurance marketing than for other types of marketing?
A: On a certain level marketing is marketing, whether digital, print, broadcast, or other traditional marketing. The thing that makes digital marketing plans and checklists a little different is the wide array of options available to insurance agents, the relative lack of familiarity with those options, and the chance that different digital tactics can both amplify one another or clash.
Q: Is an insurance marketing plan the same as an insurance sales plan?
A: Usually the answer is yes but a minority view might focus on a more nuanced answer. Sales can be thought of as a subset of marketing and a marketing plan should answer questions such as:
- Who is our target customer?
- What products or services can we provide them that they would value?
- Who is our competition and how do we position ourselves vs. that competition?
- What are the environmental factors (regulation, technology shifts, etc.) that could determine success or failure?
Marketing plans should generate leads that sales people and insurance producers can then turn into clients. Producers should also provide feedback to marketing management as to what is working and what is not working.