As an independent agency principal, it can feel like a real challenge to maintain and grow your business. The challenges come in many forms: soft markets, direct insurance sales competitors, and changing government regulations to name a few. To counter this, it’s important for agents to have at least a general plan for moving forward.
New Opportunities
While the challenges are real, there are opportunities for smart independent agencies. Consumers are showing a desire to consolidate their financial and insurance relationships. If you can position yourself as a central point for all of your prospects needs, you can win (and keep) new business. At the same time, marketing technology is allowing you to reach prospects using the same channels that major companies utilize.
Five Tips to Diversify and Thrive
How can you develop a strategy that helps to diversify your agency’s revenue stream and maintain profitability during market swings?
1. Analyze your roster of clients to make sure that there isn’t an unreasonable exposure to one client or industry.
2. Make sure that your agency’s revenues are not overly influenced by the government, leaving you vulnerable to any changes in regulations.
3. Regarding the property and casualty segment, move beyond a general base of customers. Consider consumer niches like affluent homeowners, and commercial lines like self-storage and collectibles.
4. In line with the above, create a “market need” for your services. Your unique knowledge of specific risk classes, mixed with trusted advisor status, adds value. This helps to reinforce the prospect’s “need” for you.
5. Finally, develop a marketing strategy that helps to generate new leads and nurture existing relationships. Online marketing can be a cost-effective place to start, as well as offline events and networking.
While it isn’t always easy to be an agency owner, by diversifying and taking advantage of emerging opportunities, you can help your business to reduce risk – and get ahead.