6 Tips to Grow Your Insurance Business in 2020

Growing a successful insurance agency isn’t easy these days. As the insurance industry grows increasingly competitive, your business needs to remain flexible and adaptable to succeed.

Here are six tips that will help boost your agency’s performance in 2020 and get it to the next level.

Tip #1 Find your unique value proposition

A value proposition is designed to introduce you to prospects and helps you make a strong first impression. Basically, it should describe:

• how your product or service solves a client’s problems
• what benefits customers can expect
• why customers should choose you over your competitors

On your website, if you have one, your value proposition should be the main thing your customers see, as it helps you grab a visitor’s attention and communicate your message.

A value proposition is something that real humans are supposed to understand. That’s why it shouldn’t be too complex for people to read and perceive. Make sure your value proposition is designed in the language of the customer. To do that, you need to know the way your customers describe your product or service by, for example, interviewing your customers.

The way you speak about your services is oftentimes very different from how your customers describe them. Look for the answers outside your office.

Tip #2 Improve your personal skills

Yes, this is kind of touchy-feely for a sales growth tip, but you shouldn’t underestimate the power of the human-to-human approach. While you’re a representative of a business, you’re still a human who is dealing with another human.

You should upgrade such skills as empathy and curiosity if you want to succeed. You need to understand your clients’ needs very clearly before offering them any products or services. Professionals don't sell products or services. They ask questions and listen to the answers carefully. Put yourself in a prospect’s shoes before selling them. Listen, ask meaningful questions, and never multitask during a client call. For example, you can start with a simple question like ‘what has happened in your life that raised the need for life insurance?’. Once you understand the ‘why’, you'll be able to present a valuable solution.

The first 10 seconds of the conversation can make or break the conversation. Do not start with ‘How are you?’ if talking to a person you don’t know. Give respect to the person you are calling and avoid being too intrusive, direct, or personal. Your opening line should be clear, strong, and enthusiastic.

Tip #3 Standardize and systematize your business processes

While it may be not obvious how this is relevant to your company’s growth, it actually is. Making your processes transparent, standardized, and systematized will help you achieve:

• Better customer service for your prospects. Once you have documented procedures for contacting and following up with every prospect, they get the same level of service. A CRM with marketing automation can help you with this.
• Better customer service for your clients. Once a prospect becomes a client, you should take care of the frequency they hear from you. A well-chosen CRM with particular features will allow you to send your clients birthday greetings and holiday cards as well as reach out to them to ask about life events that may affect their coverage needs.
• Ease of outsourcing/hiring/delegating. If you need any help, it’s much easier to get it at a high level when you have documented processes. This can be as simple as placing templates, instructions, or specifications in a folder on a shared drive or in the cloud.

Tip #4 Invest in technology solutions that serve customer needs

Identifying what drives customer satisfaction and translating it into technical improvements requires deep insights about customer behavior and solid analytics skills.

These days customers prefer transparency and security in their interactions as never before, especially when it comes to insurance companies. That’s why insurers must adapt accordingly to a highly competitive insurance environment and offer technology experiences that are tailored to customer needs.

Tip #5 Embrace social media

In 2020, we bet you’ve already acknowledged the importance of using social media as a channel to grow and nurture your business. However, a common mistake among professionals in the insurance industry is posting “boring”, or let’s say ‘overly’ professional information about insurance. The key is not only to showcase the expertise you have but provide real value by speaking the same language your audience does. Do not skimp — provide real-life cases and helpful advice regardless of whether the readers are currently in the market for a policy or not. Make sure you do not only post content but also interact with people who are interested in your activity. This is a great way to engage with your prospects and clients.

Tip #6 Invest in marketing

To see streamlined results from any marketing campaign, you should set clearly-defined goals and metrics during an insurance marketing campaign. Here are some of the most popular goals for insurance marketing campaigns:

• rise in brand awareness
• a steady flow of qualified leads
• increase in the ability to cross-sell

You cannot perform a successful campaign without clear goals. So invest time in formulating a marketing goal(s) first that is going to be your star to light your way.

One of the biggest, yet most common mistakes insurance agents often make is performing marketing as their secondary role. Most agencies also do not realize their website is their most cost-effective marketing channel and is also a part of their sales efforts. The sales department will have much better chances of closing deals using the website.

An important component of growth is developing relevant and high-quality content that will help you communicate your message, showcase your expertise and provide value to your site’s visitors (=potential clients).

Link building is an integral part of the marketing strategy. It will help your website gain domain authority, and in some cases, establish relationships with other businesses. Without link building, your website won’t be able to rank properly for specific searches in the SERPs.

Conclusion

Running an insurance business successfully is not easy. It requires being able to adapt to changing priorities and industry trends. In the article, we’ve named six tips that you can consider to increase the growth of your business. Anyway, there’s no reason to start implementing all of them immediately. Instead, we recommend you focus on formulating your business goals first to figure out which tips will work best for your company.