If your insurance business has multiple locations and remote employees, it can be difficult to get everyone on the same page. That’s especially true when it comes to your marketing messages and materials. Brand management software helps insurance marketers. You’ll increase productivity, maintain brand compliance and consistency, enhance local marketing, and improve marketing ROI.
When you’re looking for insurance marketing solutions for your brand, it’s important to have the best brand management software for your distributed teams. Let’s discover some of the benefits so you can make an informed choice.
Put Yourself in Your Customer’s Shoes
Before you can coordinate your marketing messages and materials for each of your locations, you need to know more than a thing or two about your potential customers. That’s because you’re marketing to consumers who typically don’t enjoy buying your complex product. They view insurance as a necessary evil more than something they’re looking forward to buying. It’s a reality you can overcome, though.
Most consumers don’t form an emotional connection with their insurance provider—save for a select few brands. That’s a detriment to sales in many industries, but if you’ve been in the insurance game a while, you’re probably already aware of this stigma. In fact, statistics show that four out of five consumers are disappointed with their insurance company for one reason or another. That’s why the churn rate is so high (more on that in a moment).
Insurance Marketing Solutions: Customer Satisfaction Comes First
Knowing that your customers tend to be wary of insurance salespeople, your first goal should be customer satisfaction. You want to gain customer trust and loyalty. Naturally, that’s a broad topic that’s more suited for a post all its own, but it will help your marketing efforts to be aware of it upfront. That way you can focus your marketing efforts on solving their problems. Here are some of the things your prospects typically ask, via a brand equity study:
- Will you pay my claims fairly and quickly?
- What are your rates?
- Do you have honest, trustworthy representatives?
- Are they available and knowledgeable?
- Are your policies easy to understand?
- Is your company financially stable?
If you can answer these questions via your marketing efforts, you’re already at an advantage over your competitors. The trick is to do so consistently across all your locations and channels. That means all your distributed sales agents and marketers have to understand and execute the proper strategies.
What’s the best way to ensure your brand is both consistent and compliant throughout your entire network? A brand management software platform. Let’s dig into the benefits. That should convince you that the best brand management software is more than just a good idea. It very well could be one of your top insurance marketing solutions.
Brand Management Software Improves Brand Consistency
A brand builds awareness and develops trust and loyalty with its customers by staying consistent. This is something the insurance industry desperately needs. After all, the retention rate for most insurance companies is around 80%. That means you’re losing roughly 20% of your customers each year.
This doesn’t need to be your insurance brand’s fate, however. By achieving consistency, you’ll not only create more loyal customers, studies reveal that you’ll also have a higher value.
Develop and Enforce Brand Compliance Guidelines
The best brand management software can help you develop and enforce brand compliance guidelines. Many businesses have these instructions in place, but they don’t take the time to enforce them. That’s a key element. Otherwise, it’s like knowing what to do but not doing it.
Of course, you don’t want to take valuable time out of your schedule to check up on your local marketers. But you have to make sure they’re compliant with your brand standards, otherwise the brand as a whole suffers. Brand management software helps with this process by creating space in “the cloud” to post your guidelines, customizable templates, content library, and more. It’s called a Brand Marketing Center. Distributed marketers can access your brand’s guidelines 24/7 to make sure their marketing efforts are always compliant. You have control over what your distributed marketers have access to and what they’re allowed to use. This puts everyone on the right path from the start.
Lastly, don’t rule out a complete brand compliance review. Some insurance marketers look at this as a last resort, but it does provide the necessary research to uncover any compliance issues.
Brand Management Software Increases Productivity
How much time do you spend on “everyday” tasks? These are the things that take up your time, but don’t offer a lot of value in return. As an insurance marketer, it could be a mundane task like fulfilling email requests from distributed marketers for brand assets. It could be working with your graphic designer to create a brand-compliant ad for a local agent. What happens when you roll out a new marketing campaign? What’s your strategy there? Are you sending a mass email with attachments? These are all examples of time poorly spent.
If you’re going to have a productive insurance brand, you need to answer these questions with a solution. Otherwise, you’ll spend your days wallowing in unnecessary day-to-day tasks that detract from your goals.
Digital Asset Management Puts Your Marketing Materials in the Cloud
Brand management software features an important ingredient: Digital Asset Management (DAM). This gives you a place (again) in the cloud for all your marketing collateral. In turn, it also increases your brand’s productivity by greatly reducing those pesky Q&A email sessions with local marketers. Now you have time to work on other, more important tasks. So here’s how it works.
First, you upload your insurance brand’s digital assets to your Brand Marketing Center. Now all your authorized users have access to them. If and when a new version of a file becomes available, it quickly overrides the previous version. This process applies to all your digital files—such as pictures, graphics, PDF files, email signatures, or any other type of electronic file.
To prove how valuable a digital asset management system is, we’ve collected some DAM stats for you. For every DAM dollar you invest, you’ll get (on average) a 700%-1,300% return. How’s that for marketing ROI? Plus, you’ll save on:
- Workflow performance
- Asset re-creation
- Digital resource management compliance
When you eliminate a lot of unnecessary work in your daily routine, you’ll increase your productivity and save money.
Empower Distributed Marketers to Focus on Their Customers
Allstate Insurance is the largest publicly held personal lines insurer in the U.S. They have over 12,000 exclusive Allstate agencies and financial specialists. Each of these local agencies views its business as its very own. That’s how Allstate built its success—around local agents. So, the more effort the agents put in, the more results they get out. Yet they have the marketing support of a major brand. This includes a customized website and local marketing plan, plus print, direct mail, and radio ads to promote the agency to local customers.
The goal with this type of support is to take away the marketing guesswork and worry from local agents. That way they can focus on providing their customers with the insurance solutions they need. And with Allstate’s more than 113-million proprietary policies, the agents have enough to keep them busy. They could use the marketing support.
Distributed insurance marketers thrive with brand management software because they’re empowered to run their own business. It’s a tried-and-true formula that has worked in the past—and will continue to work far into the future.
Reduce Marketing Waste with Web-to-Print Tech
We’re living in an age of Zero Waste. It sounds promising, but what does it mean? The Zero Waste International Alliance defines it as a process of:
“Designing and managing products and processes to systematically avoid and eliminate the volume and toxicity of waste and materials, conserve and recover all resources, and not burn or bury them…”
It’s a goal every business should strive for, not just the insurance industry. The reality is that many businesses are still producing too much waste. The average office worker is responsible for approximately two pounds of paper products each day. They use about 10,000 sheets of paper per year. Not to mention the general waste (over four pounds per day), plastics (2.5-million bottles per hour), and food scraps (23 pounds per month).
In marketing circles, waste refers to, in part, the overproduction of printed materials. Let’s look at an example. If you’re randomly sending marketing materials to all your local agents, you run a much higher risk of waste than the alternative. With a brand management system in place, local agents can order only what they need via print-on-demand. This produces far less waste and helps your insurance business become a Zero Waste hero. You’re helping to save the environment and you’re saving money in the process.
Your Insurance Marketing Solutions Begin with Brand Management Software
The notion that you can increase productivity, maintain brand compliance, enhance local marketing, and improve marketing ROI is a tempting one. If someone told you that you could accomplish those marketing goals with a software solution that’s easy to use, you’d be immediately interested, right? Well, that’s exactly what we’re telling you.
BlueSky ETO provides a brand management solution that’s all of these things—plus it’s engineered to order specifically for your business. If you’d like to test-drive the software with a personalized demo and/or speak with a BlueSky representative about your marketing goals, schedule a free consultation. You’ll learn how the best brand management software can help your insurance business today.
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I’m going to pass this on to some insurance friends!
This is great reference for any blogger or small business owner!
Very informative. I never paid much attention to marketing materials given to me by banks/insurance companies. I never found the items to be useful. I can imagine how wasteful that can be. I did however find one of those padded cooler things you use with cans/cups to be useful. I still use mine. And it gets noticed wherever I go.
This is a very informative article. And you are right that customer satisfaction always comes first. It totally sucks when the customers are terrible, but at the end of the day happy customers is what makes a business thrive.
All of this is incredibly helpful. I have been working really hard on my brand this year and I will take this all into consideration.
very informative, thank you for sharing.
This is very helpful information for brands who deal with insurance. They should all have a very good marketing strategy.
My SIL has an insurance business! This might be useful for her, I’m totally sending this to her. Some really great info here.
Such helpful info! Thank you so much for sharing
oh this is awesome!!! I will flip this post to my CIO, i am sure she will find it very helpful. Thank you so so much.
This sounds incredibly helpful! I think it’s great to try and eliminate so much waste.