Insurance Broker Archives

The insurance industry – like many others – is rapidly evolving. It is no different whether you sell auto, business, or home insurance. Thankfully, there is more consumer data available for insurance companies to innovate new products and better ways to serve customers.

The rapid evolution we are seeing in the insurance industry opens exciting prospects for the sector, but it also presents marketing challenges for insurance brokers. The challenge is consumer needs are evolving just as fast as the insurance industry itself. That calls for new ways of attracting prospects and retaining customers.

The regulatory environment has also changed a lot over the years, with new laws that protect consumers against invasive marketing tactics. The challenge of trying to stay on top of all the changes in the insurance industry is one that should concern every insurance broker looking to grow their business in Toronto’s competitive market.

This article identifies three main marketing challenges insurance brokers in Toronto face today. We will also propose a quick digital marketing solution brokers can use to generate leads and roll with all the emerging marketing challenges.

Changing Demographics

Insurance is one of those things that consumers know they need but never actively go out to purchase unless they are forced to. For example, when buying a car or when applying for a mortgage loan. That makes it a hard sell, especially when you are using the same marketing tactics for consumers whose demographics have changed.

Generation Z consumers will, for example, overtake millennials as the most economically active age group in the developed world. But the two generations have different tendencies and expectations, to the extent that insurance agencies cannot successfully target them with the same marketing messages or channels they have always relied on.

Generation Z consumers are more technologically savvy and more conscious of their evolving needs than millennials, which means they present a greater marketing challenge. The global Covid pandemic has also had a big impact on consumer behaviour, including how and where they prefer to work and live. This again has forced the insurance industry into a state of flux.

The overarching effect of the shift in demographics is the increasing dependence on digital media. Whether baby boomer, millennial or Gen Z, consumers will do most of their research and purchases online. This demands a shift in marketing strategy from offline to online channels.

Greater Demand For Personalized Products

Consumers today have more options than they need for almost every need. If you don’t serve their needs to their satisfaction, they will switch to another insurance provider. And it also happens that consumers are more demanding than ever, with an increasing abhorrence for one-size-fits-all solutions. In a way, insurance has effectively been de-commoditized.

To stay relevant in today’s marketing landscape, insurance providers have to innovate with more personalized, flexible insurance options. Selling those policies will also demand addressing consumers as individuals and not as large homogenous groups.

As an insurance broker, you have to show a deeper understanding of the challenges your prospects face so you can target them with relevant content and offers. You will need to aggregate data from multiple sources and draw insights on how to structure your marketing messages in a way that appeals to the needs of increasingly diverse prospects.

The Challenge to Constantly Improve Customer Experience

It is no longer enough to just gain a customer and make a sale. In insurance, the ultimate value in a client shows in how long you are going to retain them. The bigger goal should be to ensure current customers renew every year.

Insurance brokers should, therefore, spend as much or more time serving the needs of current customers in a way that makes them feel heard and appreciated. This produces a customer who is more likely to renew and is more amenable to upselling. In short, it is essential to constantly work on the customer experience.

The best way to improve customer experience is by understanding who your customers are and what their pain points and goals are. That is only the start, though. It is essential to manage your ongoing interactions with policyholders throughout their customer journey.

Yes, great companies do not fixate on attracting new clients and invest a greater effort and resources in retaining old customers. But customers only stay with brands they are happy with. And it takes only one bad experience for some clients to leave you. So it’s critical to cultivate a great experience for customers. Avail yourself more, respond to queries faster, and be generally helpful.

How Insurance Brokers Can Meet The Challenges Of A Dynamic Digital Marketing Landscape

It is not an exaggeration to say that the modern consumer is hard to please. They don’t feel any obligation to stick with a brand, no less brands that don’t prioritize them and effectively respond to their evolving needs.

To survive this challenging marketing landscape, insurance brokers have to rejig their marketing and ditch outbound for inbound tactics. This demands a shift towards channels that consumers prefer. In other words, you must serve customers and find prospects where they prefer to hang out, which for many is online.

Being active on social media helps to tap into conversations people are having about insurance, which informs your decisions on both old and new products. Learning SEO will open a window into the needs and pain points of prospects, including their knowledge gaps. All this is intelligence you can use to craft more targeted content and product offers.

An All-in-one Digital Marketing Solution

We can think of other digital marketing tips for Toronto’s insurance brokers, including email marketing and PPC. But for a tactic that can pay off right now and for which you need minimal investment, where most of the legwork has already been done for you, nothing beats joining an online marketplace like Souqh.

Souqh is a platform where homeowners and homebuyers come to find solutions for specific problems. Souqh gives you a digital storefront and a pre-segmented audience of warm leads that are actively shopping for specific service providers. This makes it a great place for home insurance brokers to find leads.

We are the digital equivalent of a shopping mall where store owners are guaranteed foot traffic almost as soon as they open up shop. With this digital storefront, most of the SEO and promotion are already done for you, unlike building a brand new website that will take time to rank for your target terms.

Souqh has features for electronic document sharing and signing, chat, and data protection features that streamline customer interactions and promote safe commerce. We believe ours is one of the fastest ways of building your digital brand and generating leads online.

Listing on Souqh now means you get in and build authority before others wake up to the opportunity. Explore Souqh’s excellent features and register here.

A constant stream of free organic leads is the marketing holy grail. But in a mature insurance market such as Toronto’s, the very concept of free leads can be easily dismissed as fanciful.

If you are an insurance broker trying to hawk home insurance policies in Canada’s most populous city and economic hub, you will know leads rarely ever call you up out of the blue. You canvass and work your socks off for them.

But if there could really be such a thing as free leads, digital marketing is the most viable way you could get them:

Digital Marketing For Home Insurance Brokers

Every type of business is looking at digital marketing as a way of scaling their lead generation and reducing their overall marketing spend. In terms of reach, no other marketing channel has the reach of digital media.

Traditionally, insurance brokers have found leads by going door-to-door selling policies. That is a hard way of selling. Just as hard is cold calling homeowners, many of whom grew resentful of these calls.

Again, traditional insurance brokers were always pressed for time as most of their selling happened face-to-face with prospects. To increase the lead count, they focused too much on their products and offers and generally ignored the customer. That again made selling harder than it should have been.

The insurance agent of the future nurtures their leads and waits until they are ready to consider their offer. They feed the prospect with enough informational content so the prospect can make a more informed buying decision.

When properly identified and nurtured, leads convert into better quality, long-term customers. Yet this is impossible to scale using offline channels, which is why digital marketing is a natural fit for Toronto’s insurance brokers.

The insurance brokers who will ace their digital marketing will disrupt the market to their advantage because the insurance industry has been built on gate-keeping tactics that are underpinned by a strong resistance to change.

The staid nature of the insurance industry is a market opportunity that has been exploited by insurtech startups but which still has wide scope for innovation. But you don’t need VC backing and fancy software to cut your own slice of this large cake. You could do that by simply following an intentional digital marketing strategy.

Let’s look at how a digital marketing strategy may look like for a home insurance broker:

1. Develop A Buyer Persona

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. When properly researched, your buyer should show the prospect’s demographic profile, goals, and challenges. As an insurance broker, you can even segment your buyer personas according to the different policies you sell.

A buyer persona focuses your market research and allows you to create more targeted content. It helps you identify the challenges specific subsets of homeowners face when shopping for insurance. That way you improve your appeal and are in a better position to sell more policies and build a brand.

Speaking of content:

2. Build a Website

After developing your buyer personas, building a top-notch website is the next logical step. A website serves as your digital home. This is the hub through which all your digital marketing goes through. If you have Paid Per Click (PPC) ads as part of your marketing stack, your website is where prospects will land to be sold to after they click on your ad.

Your website is where you showcase your brand and publish your content and display all the information prospects may require about your insurance brokerage. Armed with all the data you gathered when you researched your buyer personas, you should develop a website that makes it easy for people to find what they are looking for.

Above all, a website helps to portray a professional image of your business. It is a trust seal that says your business is a going concern that can be relied on for consistent service quality. But if your website is not going to end up as one of the 100s of millions that no one visits, you need to have a clear SEO strategy:

3. Implement an Effective SEO Strategy

There are an estimated 1.7 billion live websites that are all vying for consumers’ attention. To have any success with digital marketing, even when you are paying for traffic, your website content must be optimized around topics people are searching Google and other search engines for.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO in short, identifies the insurance topics that target prospects are most interested in. It surfaces their FAQs and helps you map their buying journey. With 71 percent of consumers saying they research online before buying insurance, there’s no shortage of search data with which to optimize your content and make sure it’s targeted to the right prospects.

Content that is optimized around topics and answers that people are searching Google for has the greatest chances of being read by the right people. Otherwise, you will just be creating content and just pushing it out there without any idea of the potential size of the audience it will get or if it will get read at all.

Insurance brokers will do well to add SEO to their skills-to-have list. But SEO is a long game. It may be a while before you see your web pages ranking for your target search terms and prospects signing up to your email list. What if you don’t have the time to wait that long? And because SEO isn’t entirely free, what if you don’t have the budget?

A Free, Done-For-You Digital Marketing Tool For Insurance Brokers

A landline and word of mouth have long ceased to be effective ways of acquiring leads for insurance brokers. Consumers now trust Google more than their neighbors for their research before making important buying decisions.

Even better, instead of pogo-sticking between the SERPs and different providers to find an actual insurance broker and not just a piece of content that ranks for the term, homeowners would rather go to an online marketplace that is specifically created with their needs in mind.

Get Warm Insurance Leads on Souqh

A marketplace like Souqh gives prospects the benefit of choosing among many insurance brokers who are segmented by location. They can compare quotes and offers from multiple insurance brokers without leaving the platform. They can do this without any obligation and only make an inquiry after determining that a specific broker more closely matches their needs. Consumers love this.

By listing on Souqh, you get a digital storefront and access to warm, pre-segmented leads. You save yourself the time and expense of building a website and learning SEO if you choose not to. At the very least, Souqh gives you a digital marketing tool you can use immediately while your website content ranks for your target keywords.

On Souqh you have the guarantee that homeowners will come, oftentimes to buy the very thing you are selling. Even if they are looking for something else, they may discover you and make a mental note for when they need home insurance, which is as good as a lead.

Because the digital marketing infrastructure and SEO is already in place for you to use right away, Souqh saves you time, cuts your costs, and enhances the overall client experience. It is the closest you can get to acquiring free leads for your home insurance brokerage.

Discover the digital marketing secret other insurance brokers are using to find prospects and sell more policies in Toronto by listing on Souqh. Get started here.