Like most independent Insurance agents, you now have more tools and avenues than ever to market your business. At the same time, you may have an overwhelming amount of new email contacts and social media relationships to keep track of and nurture. While all of these new marketing technologies are helpful, it can also dilute your focus, spread you too thin, and challenge your organizational abilities. Enter marketing automation, an approach designed to help with many of these issues.
What is Marketing Automation?
Generally defined, marketing automation is any technology or process that helps marketing and sales increase revenue and maximize efficiency. This can include streamlining your lead qualification process, creating a hub for digital campaign creation, and automating follow-up.
3 Simple Steps to Make Marketing More Efficient
While there are a number of tools available that are labeled as marketing automation software, there are simple things that you can do to help automate your marketing process:
Use A Marketing CRM
Trying to keep track of disparate sources of marketing contacts at your insurance agency can be inefficient, and some tasks are at risk of falling through the cracks. Using a customer relationship management (CRM) tool can help greatly. A CRM is a system for managing your company’s interactions with current and future customers. There are a number of inexpensive options available, with varying features and complexity.
Nurture Prospects With An Email Drip
By using an ongoing email drip, you can send out a series of messages on a pre-determined course. Since many of your opt-in prospects will come from a standardized source, such as a website form, it makes sense to make the responses as efficient (and relevant) as possible. Plus, you can use the same email provider to send out your monthly newsletter.
Schedule Social Media Posts
Although social media is thought of as a real-time form of communication, you can still keep it timely while also planning ahead. There are key benefits to creating a social media calendar for your insurance agency: it helps you to maintain a consistent output, and you’ll make sure you don’t miss out on posting time-sensitive content. To implement a schedule, you can use a web-based social media management tool, or you can simply create a monthly spreadsheet of social posts.