5 Tips to Optimize Your Tech and Grow Your Benefits Business

Over the past decade, we’ve seen technology introduce new ways of advertising to consumers. Companies large and small use data to segment and target specific audiences. Now that advertising has become so personalized to the individual consumer, we’re extremely sensitive when advertising isn’t relevant to us. Just think back to the last time you got a promotional email that didn’t apply to you. You couldn’t hit “unsubscribe” fast enough!

It’s critical to ensure you are marketing to the right audience, and make sure they understand why they are the right audience. For example, insurance is extremely complex, so many customers and prospects may not know that they need a particular type of coverage. Agents must ensure they are not only advertising the policy, but they are educating their customer or prospect why they need that coverage.

As the owner of a small insurance agency, I decided my business needed marketing automation so that my team could use the data in our management system to market better to prospects and customers. We tried several different marketing automation platforms – including one we created ourselves – and finally implemented Applied Marketing Automation™.

As you get started on your journey in adopting and implementing marketing automation for your business, here are five tips that you can use to get started:

1. Educate your customer. As a trusted insurance advisor, it is important to educate customers and prospects on the various types of coverages they need for themselves and their businesses. But like most independent agencies, our agency does not have the resources to create our own educational content. Having access to a content library containing insurance-specific articles, infographics and more for both P&C and benefits enables us to engage with prospects and customers and offer information that is relevant to them without having to assign resources to manage it.
2. Integrate with your management system. Before using our current marketing automation platform, we used an application that did not integrate with our management system. We struggled to keep all departments up to date on where customers were in their buying journeys, and we even lost sales because we couldn’t properly track them. Now, our marketing automation platform integrates with our management system, allowing every team member, regardless of department or role, to see what communications a customer has received, clicked through, and responded to.
3. Know when to use branding. Branding can be tricky. There’s a fine line between looking salesy and being professional. When deciding when to use branding, it’s important to think about the message you are sending and who you are sending it to. When sending content, I have found that our customers and prospects are much more likely to open and read content that is branded to our agency. Our marketing automation platform has made this extremely easy; we just select a piece of content and instantly brand it with our agency’s brand colors and logo.
4. Boost benefits sales by filtering for workers compensation. One of the best ways to increase revenue is diversifying your book of business. Marketing automation is a great tool to help cross-sell to current customers. However, a common problem for agents is not knowing who to market to. My advice is to start with your workers compensation customers because you know they have employees.

Read the full article I wrote on Rough Notes for my last tip to consider when adopting and implementing marketing automation for your business.

Sales & Marketing, 2021, Industry Trends