The Value of Strategy and Execution for Successful Insurance Agency Marketing

A lot of businesses, including insurance agencies, invest a lot of time and money into marketing. From digging into analytics to determining which tools should be included in your marketing stack, developing a strategy that's built for performance takes a lot of work. It's so much work that by the time a strategy is put into place, so many resources have been put into the development that there isn't enough left over to see it through. The bottom line is that the best marketing strategy in the world is only as good as your ability to bring it to life through effective execution.

Unfortunately, this is something that some insurance agencies don't realize until it's too late. They see all their hard work producing little results and then frustration sets in. To protect you - and your agency - from such a fate, we've put together a short Marketing 101 guide on the difference between strategy and execution, and how to optimize both of them.

The Foundation of a Winning Marketing Strategy

Strategy is what forms the foundation of your marketing success. When you first start thinking about marketing, the concept seems simple enough - become more visible to your audience in an effort to generate more leads and conversions. While the goal shines brightly on the other side of the finish line, there so many paths to get there that it can leave your head spinning.

This is why strategy is so important. It's about recognizing your goals, and the processes that will make those goals achievable. A strategy includes the various marketing tactics you plan to use and the digital tools that will help you along the way. We refer to this as a marketing stack.

For example, after looking at different demographics and analytics, you've determined who your primary audience is for your marketing campaign. You've decided to leverage a combination of content marketing, social media growth and email targeted at new leads. This is a great start.

But, take a step back and look at just how much work is involved in all of this if you were to do it without any help, either from technological tools or a professional marketing team. Countless hours would be spent each week creating and publishing content, posting and engaging on social media and managing all the aspects of a successful email campaign, like list building and segmentation. It's exhausting just thinking about it, not too mention that it's probably not the best use of staff resources.

The Importance of Tools

One solution is to put together a "stack" of tools that will streamline these processes for you and significantly reduce the time spent on executing your strategy. Tools like a content management system (CMS), which is a software application that helps create, distribute and manage content, can take a typically laborious task and make it manageable. Likewise, an email automation tool can generate lists, segment them based on your specifications or consumer actions, and then send out relevant emails to each customer on those lists at the exact moment that's most likely to generate a response or action. For example, information about new driver safety for a parent with a soon to be new driver in the home.

Some businesses have dozens of tools in their marketing stack, while others just stick to a few. How many you have depends on a combination of the complexity of your marketing strategy and the size of your agency's needs. A new agency just starting out is going to want to work with a smaller stack and adapt it to fit their growing needs, while a national insurance company is going to have the reach that demands more tools.

But what happens once you have your strategy and tools in place? You get started on the execution.

Bringing It to Life - the Art of Marketing Execution

Strategy is planning, but execution is the art of making it happen. It's in the execution of the strategy that results are created, but unfortunately, it's also the place where well meaning agencies trip and find themselves stumbling to recover. This is because successful marketing is never as easy as it seems.

You know all that time you spent segmenting an audience to target on social media? What happens if the results of your first attempts don't meet your expectations? Is it that you have the wrong audience? The wrong approach? Content that falls short of generating engagement? Execution of your marketing tactics isn't just doing, but also knowing how to analyze and problem solve to fine tune your approach.

Earlier we mentioned the importance of a marketing stack to carry you to the point of execution, but the tools alone aren't enough to make it happen. You also need to know how to leverage them for optimizing your results. Some tools make this process easy for the average insurance agency. Take for example, an email automation tool like MailChimp that makes small email campaign management so easy that even someone new to the concept can generate some success.

But, the question is if "some" success is really what you're looking for. Is marginal success the reason you spent so much time developing your strategy? Probably not, so it becomes important to look at how to effectively execute your strategy to produce results that will blow you away.

Sometimes, it's best to step aside and let someone whose passion is marketing take the reins and steer you in the right direction. You're an insurance expert, it's perfectly acceptable to admit that you might not be an expert on digital marketing and technology as well.

An outside marketing team can bring a fresh perspective to your strategy, reduce your overhead, allow your employees to focus on what they do best and produce a more impressive ROI at the end of the day. A professional team knows what to look for in developing a strategy, and they know how to execute it smoothly and effectively. Plus, they have experience with marketing tools that allows them to quickly adapt their execution to generate more impressive results.

It's Time to Execute Your Marketing Strategy

What's your current strategy for marketing your insurance agency? If you're looking for a team that can help fine tune your strategy, execute it and produce results, we're here to help. As a specialist in insurance agency marketing, we know the industry well, and we're waiting to help your agency grow. Contact Confluency Solutions today to learn more.