Simply changing your marketing and sales messages from personal lines to commercial is not going to help drive you any more business.
While insurance is insurance, commercial insurance will involve a lot more hand-holding, and with online marketing, you need to make sure that you maximise the effectiveness of your web processes to ensure you can nurture leads into sales.
Our first article in this months newsletter invites you to check out HubSpot as a tool to put all this together, but in this article, I want to share some ideas of what actually needs to go into that marketing element to drive enquiries.
Firstly, you will need to find ways to drive leads. A good long-term approach using inbound marketing techniques such as creating and sharing useful, relevant content to your target audience is the best way to drive leads that convert.
But only if you have follow-ups funnels, calls, emails, and follow-up content all in place.
There will be options to buy-in leads but from experience, these tend to be multi-sold or lower quality as the aim of the lead generation marketing is to drive leads, not the product itself. So there is little to no pre-qualification.
With content and inbound marketing, this is turned on its head. You put out prequalifying content to your relevant audience, and then they raise their hand for help by coming to you.
Why do they do this?
Because your content positions you as the person or company to help them. This takes planning and commitment for around three months to see a meaningful return, but once it starts it then grows and grows. The lead quality gets higher, and you can then take those learnings and expand your marketing.
You are not reliant on one single lead source.
Other options include putting out lead magnets for your potential customers to subscribe to – maybe an industry newsletter or maybe in-depth content / views to help your industry.
One of the keys of commercial insurance success is picking a niche. And this niche should be chosen on your knowledge, expertise and the identification of a gap. Not simply choosing a product because it pays the most commission.
Everyone else does this, as it is lazy, and seen as a quick way. Sadly, this forces up marketing prices and turns specific SME niches into commodity-based products.
That’s why we moved from personal lines in the first place isn’t it?
If you are interested in taking more business from commercial lines and need help understanding how this can work for your brokerage, we’d love to talk to you.
