Marketing your business is a continuous process. A few years ago, a mailed letter and invitation to a presentation along with a no-obligation lunch was a great way to reach prospects. Today, your clients probably pay more attention to email than paper mail. You need to find ways to reach them where they live—online—without ending up in their spam folders.
To combat this, there are emerging digital marketing trends you should consider trying:
Marketing Analytics
Every business collects information about its customers, not just in formal customer files, but also via other means like email and online messages. There’s useful data in those information streams, but you need to invest time in analyzing them. Taking these data points and creating actionable insights is the key. If a customer opens or clicks an email on Social Security benefits, then they might be interested in having a conversation about retirement income planning and how Social Security fits into the equation.
Inbound marketing delivers 55% more leads than traditional outbound marketing.1
We Suggest: Easy-to-navigate lead-generation channels like email and content downloads to make these marketing analytics simple to understand.
Segmenting Your Audience
In order to make digital marketing work to your advantage, you first need to know WHOM you’re trying to reach. You need to get to know your ideal consumer so you know exactly how to attract them to your services.
Market segmentation lets you organize them into groups with homogenous needs. Different groups will have different needs and you might want to market to them differently. Your marketing analytics may have told you your customers have adult grandchildren who need insurance or financial services, but you’ll need to reach out to the grandkids differently from the grandparents.
We Suggest: Develop buyer personas or fictional buyer profiles to help visualize a targeted demographic and how they may interact with the services you provide.
Ease Consumer Fears with Right Touching
Right touching means getting to the right person with the right message at the right time for the right result. This is a challenge in any communications medium, but even more so with email.
Phishing scams that try to trick customers into revealing passwords to bank accounts have made consumers wary of emails from financial institutions, and many simply will not click a link in any email from a financial firm. This means you have to work to ensure your email appears professional and legitimate in order to trigger a response.
We Suggest: Include your phone number, social links and physical address in all emails, and be sure to encourage your clients to share the content with their friends and family. You never know where a referral can come from.
Social Media Marketing
Social media used to be just for younger people, but everyone uses it now. According to Fast Company, people ages 55 to 64—unquestionably a key market for insurance and financial services—is the fastest-growing user segment. 89% of marketers used Facebook last year.2 Every business needs to have a Facebook page and you should also be using LinkedIn to get your message out.
Once you have customers, one of the best ways of keeping them is to stay engaged. This means giving them ways and reasons to stay involved after the initial service is provided. You might have a blog or discussion forum that lets your customers connect with you and others. This interaction keeps your business on their minds and makes it more likely you’ll get repeat business.
We Suggest: Allocate time every day to share an article with your clients and prospects on your social media outlets or subscribe to a social media publishing service like the Social Media Elite program available through CreativeOne.
Web Presence
What keywords do you expect customers to use to find you? SEO, or search engine optimization, means having an effective web presence that makes your site rank high in search engine results. Ideally, your business will be on the first page of Google search results for relevant keywords. Google periodically changes its page ranking strategy in an effort to weed out junk content; it’s a never-ending battle to make sure your site remains visible. SEM benchmarking (search engine marketing benchmarking) will help you make sure your content is effective.
We Suggest: Consult with an SEO or SEM company to establish these benchmarks before implementing an optimization strategy or subscription. Establishing a web presence can depend on a number of different factors so be weary of excessive promises. CreativeOne offers SEM services to contracted producers and our experts frequently consult with you on relevant keywords and strategies for your site.
Keeping up on online trends is a great first step, but you need make these initiatives actionable and incorporate them into your marketing campaigns to keep your business growing.
CreativeOne can help you implement a strategy to gain exposure with the Social Media Elite program. Social Media Elite helps producers grow awareness by creating a social media plan to leverage your business by:
- Nurturing personal client relationships
- Sharing useful and relevant information with clients and prospects
- Developing online credibility, increasing web traffic and building brand awareness
- Enhancing your reputation by positioning yourself as a knowledgeable resource
- Easily generating new leads and referrals
- Standing out against your competition
Since everyone’s social media needs are unique, a discovery process is necessary to properly determine what strategy is most appropriate. Plans and packages are formulated to achieve results for practices of all sizes, and in any market.