Last week, we talked about some of the things you can do to set yourself apart from other agents in your area while utilizing websites, newsletters and trade magazine articles. This week we are going to go a little deeper into the concept of branding yourself and setting yourself apart by discussing the creation and implementation of your brand.

Create your brand. When we say this, you may automatically think, “I need a logo!” But that is only one part of the process. Your brand needs to tell your client who you are, what you do, and what they can expect from you. Create a tag line and mission statement that reflect your brand and purpose and think about how to incorporate it into all aspects of your business.

Maintain a professional website. Whether you use a professionally designed website or a free Wordpress template, it needs to look professional. All graphics and design elements should be crisp, orderly, inoffensive and sensible. The content on the site should be professional and informative with no spelling or grammatical errors. Lastly, the content and the design must cohesively represent your brand. It should have the same colors as your logo and the content should carry a voice consistent with your tagline and mission.

Add a blog. Blogs allow you to post relevant content on your website while responding to current events and keeping your clients and potential clients informed. In addition, it gives your readers the opportunity to communicate with you through comments and develop a relationship with a foundation of trust. The blog should support and enforce your brand.

Be committed. One of the best ways to create, build and solidify your brand is to be committed to it. Always strive to represent the things your brand stands for. Remember, it’s not just a tag line and a pretty picture—your brand is you.

One trip to a grocery store will tell you that there are a lot of choices to be made each day. If you want “o” shaped, fruit-flavored cereal for breakfast, it’s no longer a matter of running to the store and grabbing a box. It’s now a matter of going to the store, finding all the fruity-O possibilities and comparing ingredients, vitamins, calories, quality guarantees, etc. Often, tired consumers without the time or inclination to compare will just reach for whatever product they are most familiar with, thanks to that company’s tireless branding and marketing efforts.

In the insurance industry, many agents in a territory compete over the same clients. They may have insurance offerings that vary wildly from each other, but often the only agent who even gets a phone call to meet with a client is the one whose name (or brand) is recognized by the prospect. There are a few very easy ways for you to start edging out competition by promoting brand YOU in a memorable way.

1. Create a website and promote it locally. A website gives your potential clients an easy, electronic format for meeting you. Think of your website as an introduction. A professionally designed website with relevant and educational content that shows up in local online search results and is promoted at local events and club gatherings will help to create a place for your information in the minds of your potential clients.

2. Send a regular email newsletter. Of course, visiting your website once certainly brings about brand YOU awareness, but it doesn’t provide any reminders about the importance of insurance and it doesn’t strengthen your brand recognition over time. By offering a newsletter sign up from on your website, you give your prospect the opportunity to be reminded of you every month in their inbox. With a newsletter, they receive a reminder of your presence as well as a strengthening of their opinion of you as a caring and trusted authority.

3. Create articles that can be published as advertisements in local papers and on local websites. You can purchase pre-written insurance content and personalize before submitting them to the editors of local online and print publications. This gives potential clients who read only print materials access to your brand and those who read both print and web materials extra doses of your brand.

Used together, you have a three-pronged approach to branding that hits all the major communication angles: web, email and print.

You may not dream of seeing your name in the lights, but to have your byline appear in an industry recognized trade magazine could be lucrative for your agency. The authority that comes with a published credit in a respected industry journal is undeniable and the potential marketing opportunities are impossible to ignore.

Luckily, trade magazines are always looking for new contributors. While they may have some staff writers, most trade magazines accept articles every month from guest writers, industry experts and freelancers. Often, in an effort to cut costs, trade magazines will run articles written by industry professionals who are not asking for pay. By not asking for payment for the article, the professional has a greater chance of the article being accepted and their byline appearing in next month’s issue.

But not everyone has the ability to write the kind of article that trade magazines or online publishers want to print. Sometimes, you need a little help—help that a ghostwritten article can provide. Ghostwritten articles produced by industry professionals are accurate, interesting and lay the groundwork to define you as an industry authority. When you buy our pre-written insurance content, you get industry-relevant and timely content written by professional ghostwriters that can be personalized by you to promote certain points that you want the article to convey.

When you market your agency, you leave no stone unturned. You network, cold call, send newsletters, gather leads, create a web presence, advertise—you do all the things you are supposed to do to attract new clients. Buying articles for use in trade magazines is just one more step in cementing your place as an authority and getting your name out there—even if it isn’t in the lights.

If you aren’t keeping your clients happy and informed, there are thousands of other agents waiting in the wings to fill in for you. The one trick up most successful agent’s sleeves is building loyalty. When you work to create client loyalty, you take action that keeps clients happy with your work and the information you provide and makes them say “not interested” when approached by other agents. One of the easiest and most effective ways to create loyalty with your clients is to offer a newsletter.

1. Newsletters provide professional and informative content.

   We’ve said it before, we’re saying it now—and chances are we’ll say it again later. Content is king on a website, blog or newsletter. If you aren’t giving your readers content that informs and engages, you are going to breed contempt instead of loyalty.

2. Newsletters show how dependable you are.

   Believe it or not if you set a schedule for your newsletter releases, your clients will notice. When you fail to deliver on that schedule—they’ll notice that too. By making yourself dependable in a small way, you show that you will be dependable in more important matters as well.

3. Newsletters give you a platform for communication when times are tough.

   Clients are likely to be fearful when there are negative news stories about insurance companies—even if their insurer is not mentioned. It’s almost impossible to call all clients every day something happens that might concern them. A newsletter allows you to keep in touch with clients during the bad times, choose articles that will calm their nerves, and shows that you have the courage and dedication to deal with the issues head on.

4. Newsletters separate you from your competition.

   Not all agents or agencies offer a newsletter to their clients. In fact, some agents have very little, if any, communication with their clients after they sell a policy. Many of your clients will have dealt with this type of agent in the past and will be grateful for your level of communication and accessibility via newsletters. Not only will that help keep them loyal, but it’s something they’ll tell their friends about when they complain about never hearing from their agent.

Insurance is a business based on relationships. People want to buy insurance from agents that they know and like; agents who are active in the same communities and social circles and agents who have just six degrees of separation from themselves. While the internet has brought access to a wider circle of clients, it has hurt our ability to meet some of the social circle requirements set deep in our client’s subconscious. One way that many agents are trying to bridge this gap is through daily or weekly blogging—which is a great idea—if you know what you are doing.

Have a Clear Message

Your blog posts should have a clear, easy-to-read message that your prospects (and other readers) will understand. If you aren’t sure how to keep your posts focused just pick three main points for each and write around them. Do not try to use words you aren’t familiar with to impress—it’s okay if the posts just sound like you.

Give Solutions

While your posts may contain the discussion of certain problems—like the problems caused by not having health insurance—they should not leave your reader with nothing more than a review of everything that could go wrong. Instead, they should contain solutions so that your reader has some actionable advice to take.

Set a Reasonable Posting Schedule

Once you decide how often to post on your blog, you need to stick to that schedule. When you are consistent it will boost your traffic and show how seriously you are taking the blog—which helps your readers to take it more seriously. If you are planning on taking a vacation, you can always write your posts ahead of time and schedule them for posting.

Be Authentic

Imagine what this blog would look like if we thought we should put on artificial airs when we wrote it:

Thou shall writeth thou blog posteth whilst avoiding ratolorum.

While Elizabethan words are a bit of a stretch, any language or sentence structure you use that your prospective clients don’t identify with might as well be Elizabethan. It’s okay to be yourself even if you don’t have any formal knowledge of the writing craft. Your message is what matters most—not your mastery over the use of the semi-colon.

In these days of political correctness and overly cautious legalese, many agents think their newsletters must toe the line of boring to keep them out of trouble. This concern with doing the right thing can create newsletters that are uninspired, stale and so safe they might be used as floatation devices.

Well-written newsletters with evergreen content and viable solutions can be interesting to your readers while still serving as a sales tool if you know what steps to take to keep them from boring your readers.

Use your newsletter as a tool for prospecting—not an announcement board.

Chances are your reader is very interested in articles that can improve their quality of life, educate them about financial security and wealth accumulation, and help them make informed decisions. What they aren’t interested in are the everyday workings of your office or insurance companies. Now, A.M. Best and Standard & Poor’s ratings changes are the exception since those help to cement the insurance companies as trustworthy and reliable.

Help your clients identify with the newsletter by including some testimonials—from people like them.

Nothing will move your potential clients more than seeing testimonials from people in similar situations who worked with you on a problem’s solution. Be sure to ask your former clients for testimonials that you can print in your newsletter. Ask them to thoroughly discuss the problem they had that you resolved and get their permission to print it with their name.

Provide your clients with actionable steps—ones that they can easily take with your help.

Your clients want to know how to fix their problems. They want relatively painless solutions that you can help them with. Make sure your newsletter articles explain the solutions you can offer and give your clients some knowledge base and help them to understand why they are viable solutions.

Every day, whether they like it or not, your clients are bombarded with news about the troubled economy. They sit and watch as CEOs are replaced, new policies are discussed, and stock values rise and fall. Some of these events are truly cause for concern and others are simply fear mongering tactics used to create news channel profits. But the fear mongering doesn’t just create profits for television stations and it isn’t just perpetrated by the television station your client favors; it is also used as a tactic of other agents to help turn your client into their client.

Through selling fear to your clients, another agent could convince them that the insurance company you sold them a policy for will not be able to pay claims or they may convince your client that the policy you sold them does not offer the best value or benefits for them. If your client is uninformed, they may easily buy into the propaganda.

The only way to combat this is through educating and staying in touch with your client on a consistent basis. Depending on the size of your client list, you and your staff may not be able to call each client regularly to stay in touch, so you must find other methods of creating consistent, valuable contact. By educating your client often with newsletters, blogs, and websites, you help to create a strong foundation of trust and education within your clients. This foundation can help them avoid the lure of an agent who capitalizes on fear.

In addition to providing a resource that helps keep your client persistency up during a bad economy, the regular contact provided by newsletters and a strong web presence helps your client feel connected to you and gives the impression that you are available to them as a resource—not just as a salesperson.

Help your clients feel safe and secure—as though you are their life raft on the choppy water of this economy. Stop their roving eye and help them avoid the complications that can accompany unnecessary insurance policy changes. Provide them with an easy to create educational resource that keeps you available and in demand.

The economy can be like a speed trap for your business. As soon as the economy starts to tank, your phone stops ringing and your business suffers. Initially, you may try to convince yourself that it’s a temporary dry spell. After a few weeks, you start looking at the calendar to see if today if a holiday. Eventually, you realize that this slump might be here for the long hall and you begin to think of ways to reduce expenses.

Ironically, one expense that many business owners consider reducing to cut costs is their marketing budget. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, your marketing budget is a big piece of the pie and for many agents, that means it has a big bull’s eye positioned over it; but a bad economy is the worst time to stop or drastically reduce your marketing costs. Why would you stop these sales-generating methods right when you need them most?

Reevaluating your marketing budget to allocate your funds to a more targeted and results-oriented method of marketing is a smart way to work your budget during a bad economy. One of the ways you can do this is by creating a website and starting a newsletter. By focusing your marketing efforts on highly targeted leads, you know you have quality prospects who are proactively looking for your help. They seek you out and contact you—which means no more frustrating cold calling.

When you combine the power of a well-written, educational and targeted website with regular newsletter mailings, you focus your budgeted spending on value-added marketing. This allows you to provide a service to potential clients through the very materials you use to generate sales—an extreme cost-saving measure.

Marketing does not become less important as your sales dwindle. Instead, it becomes increasingly vital. By marketing smart you not only save yourself money, you also increase your sales and create a winning formula for any economy.

Sometimes, marketing techniques reach a point when they are no longer as successful as they once were. In these days of racing technological advances, digital marketing techniques fall in and out of fashion so quickly, it can be difficult to keep up. With all this change buzzing around you it stands to reason that you might wonder if newsletters are still an effective form of marketing for your insurance agency.

Marketing Sherpa, a research firm that tracks marketing trends to figure out what works and what doesn’t, recently studied some technology decision makers to find out if they still read email newsletters. Turns out they do—in greater numbers than they read traditional newspapers and other print publications. In total, they found that 70% of these decision makers read emailed newsletters.

How to Make Newsletters Work for You

Seventy percent is a powerful number. So, what are the newsletters that these professionals read doing right? For one, they emphasized direct-response marketing using highly targeted articles. This is easy enough for you to do within your newsletter, as we’ve mentioned before in this post (Choosing the Right Articles for Your Newsletter) you simply need to choose articles that contain content applicable to the lives of your readers. As for direct-response marketing, as long as your name and contact information appear on your newsletter, you have that covered.

Another tactic the successful newsletters took was to make sure there was a website for the readers to visit. The newsletters were not the only form of marketing and information the firms were providing. They had a web presence that also informed and added value to their services.

Lastly, they chose high-quality content. The content was professionally written, interesting, informative and authoritative. In short, it was content that provided a value in being read.

The Power is Yours

Newsletters still stand as one of the most successful and often read marketing techniques around. They are flexible enough to be produced both digitally and in print, and they give you a platform to suggest a wide variety of products to your prospects. Whether or not yours works will depend on how well you execute it. We’ve given you the tools you need for a high-quality, informative newsletter, but it’s up to you to target it.

When you start a direct marketing campaign, you must design the perfect pitch. Think about it, you have one shot to dazzle your potential client with your copy. With the amount of money you spend on designing the campaign, writing the campaign, printing and mailing it—that is one risky proposition and if you haven’t chosen your target market properly or haven’t crafted your message perfectly, that’s a lot of money wasted.

Instead of opting for an advertising method with such a limited scope, why not consider a newsletter as your direct marketing campaign? With a newsletter, you can reach a wide variety of prospects with a single printing. Not only do newsletters give you multiple pitches within a single mailing, they also add value to your service—can you say that about your last direct mail campaign?

Newsletters educate and inform while selling the need for the insurance products you carry. Thanks to their format and the way their content is written, they are considered more of an information tool than a sales piece. This can help you build trust with your prospects. Because newsletters don’t look like the average sales postcards and brochures, they have the power to reach those people who normally throw away direct mail marketing pieces without a second glance.

Direct mail isn’t the only way to capitalize on the advertising power of a newsletter. When you meet with a potential client, what is your leave-behind piece? How about a newsletter? Not only can it help your potential client decide to go with you as their agent, it can also make them start asking the kinds of questions that lead to additional sales. “Do I need an annuity?” “Maybe we should consider EPLI coverage.”

No matter how you look at it, a newsletter is the most flexible marketing tool your agency can have. It’s good for prospects, good for potential clients and good for existing clients. It adds value to your service while introducing need into your client’s thought process.