If you’re wondering how to improve your insurance business, the good news is that you’re already on the right track. Being curious about improving your insurance business helps you find fresh tips to connect with customers and reach new ones. As an insurance agent, you should always be looking for opportunities to improve your business. And, although improving your business is an on-going effort, you can start to make a difference in just 24 hours.
In this guide, we’ll explore how insurance agents can improve their insurance businesses both by getting quick wins, as well as by setting themselves up for future success. In just 24 hours, insurance agents can potentially improve their internal operations, find new customers, and build stronger relationships with existing ones. From there, insurance agents can continue to implement some of these tactics and strategies for continued improvement over time.
Step #1: Improve Your Time Management
Let’s face it, we all wish we could find more hours in the day. But time is finite and you have to make intentional decisions about your most precious and fleeting commodity, your time. So, if you can hone your time management skills, you will be well on your way to improving your business.
However, that doesn’t mean you have to accomplish everything in one day. Part of excelling at time management is knowing what’s realistic to take on over a given period. People who are great at time management take the time to plan ahead and act with intention. By doing this they are able to accomplish more in less time, and so can you.
Some of the ways to enhance your time management as part of learning how to improve your insurance business include:
Getting organized:
It’s hard to know how to improve your insurance business if you’re disorganized and always jumping to the next urgent thing that pops up at work. For example, if an email pops up from a client, you may feel the need to immediately respond. In reality, it may be appropriate to wait or even to hand off the task.
Or, if you don’t have a good system for managing where prospects are in the purchasing lifecycle, you might not know which ones need the most attention or what to do to convert them to sales. Getting organized with a system like a customer relationship management (CRM) platform could help. You also may want to improve how you organize your day-to-day activities, such as by using task or project management software.
Setting short-, mid- and long-term goals:
As you start to get organized, it’s helpful to set goals of varying lengths. A short-term goal might be to follow-up with five prospects you’ve identified through your CRM as needing a nudge; a mid-term goal might be to make your website more SEO-friendly over the next two weeks; a long-term goal might be to grow your business by a certain percentage over the following year. You can’t accomplish all these goals in 24 hours, but spending a day laying them out can put you on the right path.
Finding your rhythm:
Another key aspect of improving time management is to find a rhythm to your daily routine that works for you. While you might not be able to permanently redesign your schedule in 24 hours (it can take a few days or weeks to see what works), you can at least research various approaches that you think might align with your preferences and start to test some out.
For example, you could try the Pomodoro technique. This time management approach involves 25-minute work periods followed by three-to-five-minute breaks; after four of these cycles, you then take a 15-30 minute break. So, you could spend a day trying this approach. If you think it might work for you, keep it going following your initial trial run. If not, there are many other time management approaches you can test out.
Step #2 Improve Your Marketing
If you want to know how to improve your insurance business, you’re likely trying to gain more clients. If that’s so, then a key way to accomplish this goal is to improve your marketing to find new leads who ultimately become customers. Enhancing your marketing can be a long, ongoing process, but you can still find quick wins along the way. If you’re trying to determine how to improve your insurance business in just 24 hours, you can:
Create a social media ad:
Creating a paid post on a social media platform like LinkedIn or Facebook doesn’t have to be overly expensive. In fact, you set the budget. The more you spend, the more views and clicks your ad will generally have, but you could start small with, say, a $25 ad budget that runs for a day. Trying that may lead to a new prospect, and you can use this experience to build out more successful ad campaigns in the future. If few people engaged with the ad, for instance, you may want to try a different type of visual.
Find a networking group:
Finding a new networking group won’t instantly improve your insurance business, but it can soon lead to new opportunities. So, within 24 hours, you can likely find and potentially complete your membership for a networking group that will ultimately help you gain new leads. These networking groups might be in-person ones, such as joining your local Chamber of Commerce or another type of local business-oriented group. Or you might find a relevant LinkedIn group that you can join and start to engage with other members on.
Ask for reviews:
Another way to set your marketing up for success is to ask for reviews. Again, the effects may take time, but in 24 hours you can at least put these requests out and maybe even start to collect a few reviews. For example, you might ask recent clients to review you on Yelp. If they oblige, that can pay off handily when future prospects look for an insurance agent in your area.
Step #3 Improve Your Customer Experience
Related to putting your marketing on a better path in 24 hours is improving your customer experience. Sometimes your marketing and sales efforts should be geared toward existing clients, rather than just new leads. Doing so can help you get more renewals, reviews, and referrals to grow your business. So, if you want to improve your customer experience in 24 hours, you can:
Check in with your customers:
Checking in with customers from time to time can help improve your standing with them. For example, you might see that a customer is due for renewal soon. So, you could reach out to that customer over email or the phone (depending on your comfort level and how that client typically interacts with you) to check in with them. See how their business is doing and how you might be able to support them better as they consider renewing their policy.
Interact with customers on social media:
If you want to know how to improve your insurance business but don’t think your customers would respond well to formal check-ins, you might want to spend a day interacting with customers more casually on social media. For example, using a tool like a CRM, you might be able to see which clients have not engaged with, say, your emails recently. You could then look for their recent social posts, like them, and leave thoughtful original comments. Your clients are often trying to figure out how to improve their businesses too and might appreciate the support you show by engaging with their content. That could then lead to more engagement with each other moving forward.
Create a customer-focused blog post:
If you blog as part of your marketing strategy, you might find yourself trying too hard to sell within your posts. That doesn’t always work. If you want to improve customer experience, try spending a day creating a truly customer-focused blog post. That means creating content that your customers genuinely care about and want to read for their own benefit, rather than directly your own benefit. You might create a blog post on a topic like the most common concerns new business owners have and how to solve these common challenges. In the long run, that can lead to more customer loyalty and referrals.
Step #4 Keep the Momentum Going
Improving your business in 24 hours might seem like an impossible task. But, once you break it down into smaller tasks, you have a real plan for not just instant improvement, but ongoing progress as well. For example, you might start to take a new approach to how you manage your time, but you don’t want to fall back into old routines. You also might utilize tactics like creating a social media ad or a customer-focused blog post, but these can be even more effective if you build on your efforts over time.
No matter where you start, it’s important to keep the momentum going. There’s a lot you can do in just 24 hours, but many of these efforts only set you up for success if you keep going. Learn what your prospects and customers like and dislike so you can continually create more effective content. If you can do so, you’ll be on your way to improving your insurance business for the long haul.