Creative Insurance Marketing Ideas to Try: Insurance Agents’ Ultimate Guide

You’ve tried the usual insurance marketing ideas like advertising on Facebook and starting a blog, but you’re not sure what else to do. Are there new marketing ideas you can test out? Odds are, the answer is yes.

Even if you’re not a marketing expert, there are plenty of creative insurance marketing ideas to try. In many cases, agents can easily implement these insurance marketing ideas. Many of these insurance marketing strategies require little-to-no budget. So don’t worry if you have a limit to how much you can invest in testing out insurance marketing ideas.

In this guide, we’ll cover several types of creative insurance marketing ideas across areas such as:

• Email Campaigns
• Social Media
• Content Marketing
• Local Marketing 
• Offline Marketing

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Creative Digital Marketing Ideas for Insurance Agents

You may already be using digital marketing channels for your insurance business, such as email, social and blogs. But it’s not always easy for insurance agents to have success with their marketing strategies in these areas. So, if you’re looking for creative ways to break through to your audience, consider the following digital insurance marketing ideas.

Insurance Email Marketing Campaign Ideas

Creating email marketing campaigns, rather than just sending one-off emails, can help you engage prospects and customers. Email newsletters can be effective, but to stand out from the crowd, you might also try to implement insurance email marketing campaigns like:

• Business “Tip of the Week” Emails: Your customers are busy. A long, complex email could get passed over. Instead, try creating campaigns that will quickly hook them. If you’re trying to attract business owners for commercial insurance, you could send out “tip of the week” type emails with concise business advice.
  
  For example, one month you could create a campaign where you send out weekly emails, each with a quick tip on budgeting. These could then link to longer content for those looking for more. Another month you could center your campaign around customer experience tips.

• Whitepaper Drip Campaigns: One insurance marketing idea you may have already tried is to create a whitepaper or similar type of long-form asset. These assets can be valuable, but the challenge can be getting traffic and engagement. One way to promote these assets is to create a certain type of email marketing campaign around them, known as drip campaigns.
  
  These campaigns “are automated sets of emails that go out based on specific timelines or user actions…Each time a drip email is sent out, it comes from a queue of already-written emails—there’s no need to manually write and send each one,” explains Zapier, an automated workflow company.
  
  So, when a prospect signs up for your email list after reading a certain one of your blog posts, for instance, that might then trigger a drip campaign. To keep them engaged past that blog article that first hooked them, you might release snippets of information from a higher-value whitepaper in a series of drip emails. Hopefully, they then download the whitepaper and come to trust you more as an expert. But even if they just engage with those drip emails, that could be a marketing win.

• Content Marketing Repackages: Similar to using some of the information in a whitepaper for drip emails, another insurance marketing idea is to repackage other content marketing into email campaigns. For example, suppose you’ve tried creative marketing ideas like podcasts. You could take a few quotes from an episode and create graphics with that quote using a content creation tool like Canva.
  
  From there, you could repackage that content into an email campaign. Over the course of a few weeks, you could release those graphics, each with a little surrounding text. The end goal might be to increase your podcast subscribers, get your audience to book a consultation with you, or whatever your marketing goal may be for that situation.

Insurance Social Media Marketing Ideas

In addition to email, you can also try out new insurance marketing ideas on social media. If what you’re doing so far on social isn’t working, you might try creative insurance marketing ideas like:

• Joining Twitter Chats: Instead of being promotional on social, try being conversational, such as by joining Twitter Chats. These live conversations, which usually last around one hour, don’t have to be about insurance but could still connect you to valuable contacts. For example, if you work from home, you could join #RemoteChat to connect with other business professionals who work remotely. 

• Creating Your Own Group: Social media groups can be hit-or-miss, but you might have better luck creating your own group. If you’re not seeing much group activity on social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn on a business topic that you think you can share some insights on, and which you think others would want to engage on, try creating a group around that topic. Your group could be anything from a networking group for other insurance agents to an entrepreneurial group for discussing marketing ideas.

• Posting Native Video Content: Growing your own YouTube or Vimeo channel can be tough, especially in an industry like insurance that may not have as much mass entertainment appeal. But you can still find success with videos by posting them directly to social media sites. Doing so can also help your engagement, as someone scrolling Twitter might prefer to watch a video within the platform, rather than clicking out to a third-party video site. Your video content could range from documenting your business travels to repackaging your “tip of the week” email campaigns into related video content.

Insurance Content Marketing Ideas

Content marketing can also be a ripe area for connecting with insurance prospects and clients. And while you may have already started with content marketing ideas like launching your own blog, you could try other creative insurance marketing ideas like:

• Guest Blogging: To expand your reach, and to potentially gain valuable backlinks to your website for SEO, try submitting guest blogs to other publications. From B2B industry publications to marketing blogs, the possibilities for guest blogging vary widely. When you read articles online, look at those sites to see if/how they take guest blog submissions.

• Blogging on Medium: While blogging on your own site can be valuable for SEO, thereby helping insurance prospects find your site, you might also want to experiment with blogging on a third-party platform like Medium. This doesn’t have to be your primary blog, but posting here occasionally could help you reach new audiences.

• Publishing an Ebook on Amazon: In addition to publishing blogs, another creative insurance marketing idea is to publish an ebook on Amazon. These ebooks would likely be longer than the whitepaper-style ebooks that you might share on your own site. But they don’t have to be hundreds of pages either. Perhaps you can put together 50-100 pages of advice on starting a business.

Posting that ebook for sale on Amazon can help draw in leads. You might not make much money from the book, but if you do gain some readers, they might then contact you to become insurance customers. 

Creative Offline Marketing Ideas for Insurance Agents

Digital marketing can be highly effective for insurance agents, but don’t forget about offline channels. Here too, you can try out some more unique ideas to see if that helps you break through from all the other marketing content that’s out there. 

Local Offline Insurance Marketing Ideas

Going local can be a great marketing strategy. If everyone’s focused on broad, online marketing, you may find success in your local community such as through:

• Local Partnerships: Doubling down on connecting with complementary businesses (think local credit unions, law offices, and accountants, etc.) can help grow both your brand name in the community and your reach.

• Local sponsorships: From little league teams to dog parks, your community may be in need of sponsorships. Advertising in these areas may help differentiate your insurance brand and gain eyeballs that may not have come across your digital ads.

• Hosting events: Putting together local events, such as hosting a speaker series where professionals hear from local business experts, can help elevate your brand image. You can also network at these events to find new insurance leads.

Writing op-eds: Similar to guest blogging, writing opinion pieces for your local newspaper could be a good way to reach new audiences. Plus, these articles may also get posted online, giving you reach in multiple marketing channels.

Offline Insurance Marketing Ideas to Use Anywhere

Besides local marketing, insurance agents can also find success offline using creative marketing ideas like:

• Mailing thank you notes: This may seem old-fashioned, but many customers still appreciate handwritten notes. This tactic may fall more into customer experience, but it can boost your overall marketing in the sense that strengthening ties with existing customers can lead to them spreading the word about your business.
  
• Collaborating on content: If you’re creating content marketing like blog posts, you don’t have to do everything online. You can collaborate on digital content offline at times to help you form stronger relationships. For example, if you attend a conference, you might get together with another attendee to interview them for your blog. Not only does this give you digital marketing content, but meeting face-to-face could help your long-term marketing, such as if that relationship leads to a referral down the road.

• Networking at coworking spaces: If you work remotely or travel often, you might find that using coworking spaces can help both your productivity and your marketing. Networking with other members at these spaces, whether that’s chatting at a happy hour or simply striking up a conversation with someone who’s getting coffee at the same time as you, can help you establish new contacts.

At times you might find these contacts need insurance and become your customers. Or they might just be good people to have in your network, such as if they help you amplify your social media content.

Implementing Sales and Marketing Ideas for Insurance Agents 

Putting these insurance marketing ideas to use can help you find new leads, but it’s also important to think about sales and marketing ideas for insurance agents in unison. That way, your marketing efforts actually help improve your bottom line, rather than just, say, growing your Twitter followers. 

For example, if you increase your website traffic by improving your SEO via guest blogging, you want to be able to turn those new visitors into customers. Using InsurTech platforms like Wheelhouse can help you close those deals. Prospects can easily generate bindable quotes from multiple insurance carriers, directly from your website, at any time. 

Working With Insurance Marketing Companies

In addition to using tools like Wheelhouse, some insurance agents also find that working with insurance marketing companies helps to ultimately increase sales. That’s because, while you may have the expertise to create your own content, for example, you may not be as familiar with how to promote that content efficiently through social media ads. An insurance marketing company may have the expertise that helps you not only create content to draw in leads but also to turn those leads into customers.

Learning from the Best Insurance Marketing Campaigns

Another way to get more out of your insurance marketing and close more sales is to learn from some of the best insurance marketing campaigns. Take a look at past award winners, such as from the Internet Advertising Competition (IAC). These other campaigns may inspire you to create your own marketing campaigns that better resonate with prospects, thereby turning more into customers.

Try New Insurance Marketing Ideas

Even when you’re looking at the best insurance marketing campaigns for inspiration, what works for one insurance agent/agency may not work for another. It’s also important to understand that marketing efforts are not silver bullets. All of these actions work together to promote your business. Keep in mind that you will need to try a tactic, analyze the results and then fine-tune what you did to improve the results for next time. Then, repeat this process over and over again. From digital marketing to local offline marketing, there are many areas to experiment in. Try your hand at several of these insurance marketing ideas and see what works best for you.