Insurance Agency Marketing Tools for Design, Social Media, Emails, and More

Learn how to efficiently and effectively advertise your insurance agency with these insurance marketing tips and tools.

Every insurance agency has a different approach when it comes to marketing. Because of this, you may focus your time, energy, and resources on certain tactics. Some agents focus on their websites while others prioritize social media. Some rely on referrals and others put together extensive email marketing plans to generate leads.

Whatever your goals and preferences, there are different resources you can use to support and streamline your marketing efforts. Consider adding these easy-to-use (and often free) tools to your arsenal to better promote your business and strengthen your digital presence.

Visuals Creation Tools

Visuals are a critical part of any and all marketing efforts–especially in today’s world. A lot of studies and statistics urge marketers to use more visuals. For instance:

• 50.5% of marketers rate visual content as very important to their marketing strategy, and 0% said it wasn’t important.
• In an analysis of over one million articles, BuzzSumo found that ones with an image every 75-100 words received double the social media shares than articles with fewer images.
• BuzzSumo also found that Facebook posts with images see 2.3 times more engagement than those without.
• Tweets with videos get 10 times higher engagement compared to tweets without.

Creating visual content can be a time-consuming task–especially if you’re not a professional graphic designer. Whether you’re creating an image for a blog, email, or social post, you need a quick and simple way to do so.

Canva and Easil are two easy-to-use tools. Both have free versions and offer extensive libraries full of images, graphics, and templates to help you get started–plus, their drag-and-drop editing functionality is intuitive, making the design process a breeze. 

Canva offers a Brand Kit where you can store your agency’s brand colors, fonts, and more, which makes it easy to keep your designs consistently on brand.

To keep your brand consistent, you can partner with companies like AgentMethods to design your insurance-specific website or use build-your-own platforms like Wix and Squarespace.

Social Media Tools

Social media is a great place to engage with both current and prospective clients, and you can use it as a branding and sales tool.

When you have many other important agency issues and client needs, it can be easy for social media to fall to the back burner. 

Thankfully, social scheduling and monitoring tools can help you post regularly. Buffer and Hootsuite are great options for scheduling posts, monitoring all of your profiles in one place, and more – and their drag-and-drop feature makes it easy to quickly schedule your posts.

Whether you use these tools or a different one, ensure you’re regularly sharing your own and others’ content that your target audience will care about: 

• Highlight your agency’s culture–social media users like to know the people behind the business!
• Share industry news and insights that could affect your clients
• Keep your followers informed of important dates, like when Open Enrollment Period (OEP) starts and ends
• Like and reply to comments and questions on your posts

Aim to share at least two to three times a week (although many businesses aim for more than that), and post at peak times to ensure your content gets seen. The 4-1-1 rule is a good practice: for every six posts you share, four should be educational or entertaining, one should act as a “soft sell,” and one can be a “hard sell.” 

Writing Tools

Writing skills are a hot commodity for many businesses–and insurance agencies are no exception. Blogging, client emails, website content, and more are all valuable client communication tools. 

Spending time carefully crafting a piece of content, just to find out later that it’s full of errors can be frustrating and doesn’t build trust. Use Grammarly to check your spelling, grammar, and sentence structure to avoid these mistakes. You can copy and paste your text into it or install the browser extension for real-time feedback.

You also don’t want to underestimate the power of a good headline–it’s the attention-grabbing part of your piece! You need a headline that explains the content well and is interesting enough to entice people to click. CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer can help with this.

Posting your content is just one part of the content marketing puzzle. You also want to make sure that it gets seen by searchers. This is where keyword research and search engine optimization (SEO) come into play.

When you use the keywords that people are searching for in your content, search engines recognize that it’s relevant to their query, and can rank your content higher in search results. Writing a blog that uses the keyword “health plans for employer groups” throughout it could help a local group benefits agency, for instance, rank for this query–getting them in front of prospects that are looking for their services. 

Keyword Tool, Google Keyword Planner, and other similar tools give you keyword suggestions to include in your content based on the main one to two keywords you’re trying to target.  

Email Automation Tools

Keeping consistent communication with prospects and clients is key–in fact, poor communication is the main reason clients leave their agency! 

Email marketing can help you nurture your relationship. Similar to social media, writing and sending emails can easily get crowded out of your busy schedule. Automation can help ensure you stay in touch with your contacts–and this is made easier than ever if you have an agency management system (AMS) that has automation capabilities, like AgencyBloc’s Automated Workflow. 

To get the most out of your automated emails, you first want to identify the best times to reach out to prospects and clients, like when their policy expiration date is approaching or on their birthday. Once you’ve identified your email cadence, you can set up emails to automatically send based on those “triggers.” This way, you don’t forget important dates and you also save valuable time and resources.

We have a ton of content on this subject:

• [Blog] Integrating Automation & Communication for a Killer Retention Process
• [Free Templates] Policy-Related Email Templates for Agents & Advisors
• [Free Templates] Client Retention Emails & Workflow Recipes
• [Free Templates] Open Enrollment Email Templates for Insurance Agencies

AgencyBloc’s Automated Workflow tool can help you with this. Use dates, status changes, and more as triggers to automatically send emails and/or assign tasks to agents. You can customize this setup according to your specific needs.

Lead Capture & Follow-Up Tools

If you don’t have a lead form on your website, you’re missing a valuable opportunity to connect with prospects.

There are a few things you can do to ensure your lead form is optimized for conversion. It should be placed near the top of your homepage with a clear call to action (CTA). Your CTA should tell visitors what to expect when they fill out the form. Common CTAs in insurance include:

• Request Quote
• Request More Information
• Learn More
• Contact Us

To create and place a lead form on your site, you can use AgencyBloc’s Lead Form feature–simply build your form, copy the code, and place it on your site.

From there, use Automated Workflow again to ensure leads are immediately followed up with by sending an email assuring them you’ve received their information and sending an “urgent” task to an agent. Then, you can manage the lead’s progression through your sales process in AgencyBloc’s Sales Pipeline. 

Since AgencyBloc’s agency management system (AMS) is tailored to life and health insurance agencies, you’re able to have all of the features you need and your lead data in one place–so that you can save time and stay organized.

Link Tracking Tools

Lastly, you want to make sure you can track how people interact with your content and which platforms they’re finding it on.

Link tracking tools, like Google’s Campaign URL Builder or Bitly, allow you to use UTM parameters so that you can add tags to the end of your URLs and track which platforms generate what traffic. 

There are three required parts, which you can see in the screenshot below:

• Campaign Source: The website where the traffic originates such as a social media platform. In this example, it’s Facebook, which is seen in the URL as “utm_source=facebook.” 
• Campaign Medium: The medium is basically a marketing channel–like Cost Per Click (CPC), social media, email, affiliate, or QR code. Below, it’s displayed as “utm_medium=18toolsarticle.” 
• Campaign Name: This identifies the campaign that the post is linked to. This shows up in the URL as “utm_campaign=contentpromotion.”

Source: The Ultimate Guide to Using UTM Parameters, Neil Patel

In addition, analytics tools like Google Analytics or other website monitoring tools can help you track all of these unique URLs and see which marketing efforts are paying off the most!

This blog was originally published on June 11, 2019, and updated on December 6, 2022.

Posted by Kelsey Rosauer on Tuesday, December 6, 2022 in Sales Enablement

1. marketing