Step by Step Approach to Digital Marketing for Insurance Agencies
Growing up, and even still to this day, my mother is a huge puzzle fanatic. Every time our family was on a vacation she would break out a 1000 or 2000 piece puzzle for us to work on in the hopes we could complete it before the vacation ended.
When you’re a kid, you just start trying to find pieces that fit together and don’t really put much thought into any sort of strategy. As I got older I began to realize how ineffective and inefficient that was, and my mother’s tactical approach made a lot more sense.
As an adult and several dozens, maybe even hundreds of puzzles later, it seems quite obvious that you start with the edges for your framework, then group by colors, and for the most complex puzzles you then group by shape. This way you’re not sifting through thousands of pieces for days looking for that one piece only to get lucky enough times to be able to complete the puzzle.
Now, of course I know you didn’t come here to read about my puzzle prowess, but the application of this analogy to digital marketing is appropriate. Trying to complete the digital marketing puzzle with thousands of pieces of information online, while simultaneously hoping you get those pieces in the right order on the first time to avoid wasting potentially years of time and money is a task so daunting it causes many to simply avoid it altogether.
The fact is, digital marketing is not more complicated than being an insurance agent. It isn’t a harder puzzle. It is just a different puzzle. Any person that sets out to own and operate an insurance agency and is capable of understanding the complexities throughout the insurance industry is more than capable of piecing together the digital marketing puzzle- but you need to find the edge pieces. The cornerstones are Website, SEO, Ads, and Social Media…and the rest of the straight edges would be extending those pillars to include mobile friendly messaging and presentation. You also need the picture that your puzzle is supposed to look like. What are your goals from each of these channels? What expectations are reasonable and realistic based on averages in the industry? This is the picture that Markit Pulse provides for you, so you have something to compare your pieces to.
Digital Marketing is daunting because the topic seems like a bottomless pit, but it’s not an unsolvable problem. Pick a starting point, find your corner pieces, build a framework, and start measuring steady progress according to your own goals. One piece at a time, the picture will start to get a little clearer, and before you know it- you’ll be generating prospects effortlessly!
