Reaching Your Target Market at Different Steps in the Client Journey
Reaching Your Target Market at Different Steps in the Client Journey
Every policyholder you have today came to you via a journey from awareness to conversion. If you’ve successfully nurtured your clients, they may have even moved from convert to champion, advocating for your agency whenever they make a referral. Understanding the client journey ensures that each touchpoint along their path to policyholder is optimized for conversion. Successful insurance marketing campaigns take into account each stage of the client journey to maximize marketing spend and minimize prospects’ objections.
What are the stages of the insurance buyer’s journey?
The jargon may vary from one marketing guru to the next, but the client journey can be boiled down to four generally accepted phases.
Awareness: The consumer is aware of your insurance agency.
Consideration: The consumer is considering your agency.
Conversion: The consumer decides to purchase a policy from your agency.
Advocacy: The newly converted policyholder shares her experience with others.
How do agencies make the most of each stage of the client journey?
A savvy media strategy capitalizes on the unique opportunities of each stage of the buyer’s journey. They overcome prospect objections at each touchpoint.
They raise brand awareness.
Awareness consists of bringing new leads into the sales funnel via broad advertising tactics, such as digital banners or billboards. In addition to offering consumers information about your agency, these early marketing touchpoints offer new data to your agents. Tracking conversions at this stage provides new insights into consumer behavior and offers an opportunity to fine-tune your future awareness stage campaigns.
They pique curiosity at the consideration stage.
The consideration stage is about differentiating yourself from other agencies. You’ve already captured your prospect’s attention. Now, you court them. Blog posts, infographics, and other useful content offer compelling information to move consumers to the next touchpoint.
They consciously convert.
The conversion stage of the client journey can be as simple as a powerful call to action (CTA). However, agencies with more sophisticated portfolio options may need to provide hesitant consumers with additional nudges towards conversion. For commercial agencies, white papers, case studies and other undeniable enticements provide that last push across the brand barrier into the brand champion stage. For personal agencies, offering added value through services like those provided by our partner BeneTech boost conversion.
They encourage brand advocacy.
For a satisfied policyholder, the client journey may come to an end at conversion. For an overjoyed policyholder, the journey offers one more level: Brand Advocacy. Because word of mouth advertising remains the most effective form of marketing, brand advocates are the holy grail of clients. They use their influence with family, friends, and co-workers to boost your marketing return. Referrals require a better-than-average customer experience, which means continuously nurturing happy policyholders. Bring them into the fold with newsletters and emails and loyalty programs.
They never stop improving the journey.
Each touchpoint along your client journey should be assessed and reassessed as new data is delivered. By continually refining your clients’ buying journey, your agency becomes more relevant every year, but maintaining that kind of momentum can be a challenge for a busy agency. If keeping up with the client journey is proving too much to handle in-house, email the team at AgenciesOnline to learn how we can help.
