Even in this age of digital marketing, old-fashioned techniques still make for effective life insurance marketing. Many consumers appreciate how marketers leverage technology to enhance the speed and convenience of delivering services they need, but some may feel an important element is missing. While it’s important to leverage digital tools to market your life insurance products, even the best marketing plans will not be effective without that personalized touch.
In this article, Insurance Business provides useful marketing strategies for life insurance companies, smaller brokerages, or even brokers with solo practice. We’ll talk about effective marketing strategies that use digital tools along with tried-and-tested techniques. We’ll also provide some life insurance marketing examples to help you come up with ideas for your own marketing campaign.
Marketing in general encompasses the promotion and sale of products or services by identifying and meeting customer needs, building relationships, and creating demand via various strategies. The classic marketing strategies include a mix of advertising, pricing, distribution, and promotion.
Although there is no cut-and-dried, universal marketing strategy, there are basic principles you can use to customize your insurance marketing campaign against. Keep in mind that your customers’ needs change as they go through the different decision-making stages.
To help you apply the appropriate marketing strategies for each phase, consider the following stages in your customer’s buyer journey:
Your target customer is out there, but they are likely unaware of your product or that they need life insurance. At this stage, your company should educate potential customers about life insurance, its basics, its purpose, and the importance of having financial safeguards. Here are some life insurance marketing strategies you can adopt for customers at this stage:
These days, marketers must become more digital savvy, harnessing social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, X, and BlueSky. These are very popular across a wide range of demographics and are excellent channels for you to advertise your life insurance products.
But while the vast social media landscape offers you the opportunity to cast a very wide net, the challenge is rising above the clutter.
Here’s an example from Allstate. This is a video uploaded on YouTube which they share on their other social media accounts:
The video expounds on the importance of having life insurance. This includes the advantage of having tax-free payouts that customers’ beneficiaries can use for paying debts, funeral costs, and other essential expenses. It’s simple, yet informative items like this that get consumers thinking about insurance, and your products specifically, so it’s important to present relevant information creatively.
Search engine optimization (SEO) primarily focuses on attracting individuals actively searching online for information or services related to life insurance, with the use of search engines. Here’s how you can make the most of SEO for your life insurance products’ website:
Do comprehensive research on keywords and identify the search terms and phrases customers use to look for life insurance.
Insert these keywords and phrases strategically and naturally into your website’s content. Don’t forget to use the right meta tags, headings, and URLs to show relevance and value to search engines.
Use local SEO strategies if your target market is in a specific geographic area.
Optimize your Google My Business profile with location-specific keywords, so it appears in relevant local business search results.
To help you choose the right keywords, you can use tools like Ahrefs or Semrush. Keep in mind that SEO is a long-term strategy that involves continuous monitoring of data and metrics. If you did your SEO correctly, you would see noticeable changes and improvements in your website’s SEO rankings after several months.
Influencers, or people with a strong social media presence and following, can give your insurance company a good opportunity to tap into their loyal community and expand your online footprint. Industry professionals can make life insurance marketing campaigns by recruiting influencers in relevant spheres like lifestyle, finance, and family-centered content.
A good example of this was when Allstate partnered with Sundae to sell life insurance to motorcyclists, more specifically, new riders. Rather than imparting the predictable message of “here’s why you need insurance”, Allstate simply let motorcycle enthusiasts do most of the talking, sharing their personal journeys. These influencers talked about their love of freedom, discovery, and the thrill that comes with riding, and how insurance helped make these experiences safer.
The results were more than Allstate predicted – 91 million impressions, 5.6 percent improvement on brand recall, and 10.8 million video views were solid proof of how well the content connected with new riders.
Trade shows and industry events offer great opportunities to expose your brand, lead generation, and forging partnerships. Have a lot of business cards ready, since these are where you can connect with a relevant and engaged audience. This includes potential clients, industry professionals, and members of the media. You can look up the insurance conferences happening this year and attend.
At this point, people gather information, pool and assess their options, and consider different factors that will affect their buying decisions. When insurance professionals catch the attention of would-be buyers, it’s important for them to provide extensive information about their products. This should include coverage options and their products’ unique value proposition (UVP).
While not mandatory, having a website for your insurance business makes a huge difference. It’s an essential part of doing business in today’s fast-paced industry. A website is an essential platform for showcasing your products, providing information, and customer support.
Make sure that your website is easily accessible and navigable. It should also load quickly on users’ web browsers, since reports show that users leave websites that take more than three seconds to load. Remember that for every second that's shaved offloading time, your website has a 7 percent greater chance of converting your website visitor into an actual buyer.
You must also ensure that your web design is such that it makes the site work well on mobile devices. This is crucial, since another study found that a whopping 62 percent of internet users in the US use their smartphones to search for products online.
There are various formats you can use as persuasive content, like infographics, videos, brochures, blog posts, and helpful e-books. Make sure that whatever content you create is of a high quality and tailored to meet the interests and needs of your target audience or market.
A good example of compelling, creative, and original content is Allianz’s The Fountain of Life, a video where getting insurance was compared to learning how to swim.
Life insurance marketers must realize that they shouldn’t focus only on providing support during life’s challenging moments. Establishing rapport with customers even during good times is crucial. That’s where email marketing can be useful.
The loyal customer posted about it on Twitter, which garnered thousands of views. Lemonade followed up by sending a birthday cake to the customer. This then garnered a post featuring a picture of the birthday cake, netting Lemonade to even more people who thought positively about the company.
Don’t forget to look up our guide on common misconceptions about email marketing when you formulate your own marketing strategy.
Insurance comparison websites, aka insurance aggregators, are online platforms that allow users to compare the products of various insurers. Consumers and insurance marketers alike can use their comparison features to highlight their products’ competitive pricing, comprehensive coverage, extras, and other benefits.
An added advantage of using comparison websites is that users can leave questions and their contact information so insurance companies can answer their queries. When used in this manner, comparison websites become excellent ways to generate more life insurance leads. If existing clients use this feature, it can work as an additional customer support platform.
At the tail end of the buyer’s journey, the potential client has a good grasp of their life insurance needs and a good idea of the sort of insurer and products they want. As a life insurance professional or entity, it’s your job to ensure that your brand is top-of-mind when they arrive at their purchase decision. Here’s how your life insurance marketing can influence this crucial decision:
After completing a transaction with a client, remember to request an honest review. Whenever clients have a positive experience and are pleased with your product or service, they’re more likely to share their thoughts on your website.
This practice can help widen your reach and provide others with valuable insights, but only if you show them prominently on your website. We have a guide devoted to using online reviews to generate leads, so be sure to check it out.
Google and Facebook ads are among the most cost-efficient and powerful ways to advertise and target potential clients. Both platforms allow you to identify and target audiences based on their specific user behaviors, like abandoning a quote form or visiting certain landing pages or websites.
These PPC ads’ performance can be evaluated with tools like WordStream. For a clearer picture of your PPC campaign’s performance, you can use the app to measure metrics like cost per click, cost per conversion, return on ad spend, and ad impressions.
Once a customer has bought a life insurance policy, it doesn’t stop there. Part of a good life insurance marketing strategy is providing effective aftersales service to ensure customer loyalty and get more business from referrals from satisfied customers.
There are a few better advocates of your insurance agency or company than a satisfied customer. If they are happy with your products and services, they are more likely to refer your company to their friends and relatives.
When referred by someone they know and trust, potential customers have higher conversion rates and start off with greater trust in the company. A good example of an effective referral program is one implemented by life insurance provider Ethos.
In their referral program, they reward current customers with a $50 gift card for every person they refer, applies via a provided link, and gets approved.
When applied to life insurance, marketing strategies are mostly similar, but with some key differences in their approaches to communicating and providing value to customers. Life insurance marketing is different from the marketing of most other products, mainly because life insurance is intangible, complex, and can be an emotionally sensitive financial service.
When choosing or formulating insurance marketing strategies, it’s important to keep in mind their key differences from marketing other products, such as:
Life insurance is more of a service than a product. It’s an intangible promise of financial protection in the future. Unlike physical products your clients can see, touch, or try before buying, the intangibility of life insurance makes it harder to demonstrate its immediate value and benefits.
Marketing life insurance requires insurance professionals to focus more on educating their clients and building trust with them.
Life insurance deals with unpleasant topics like death, sickness, risk, and loss, which potential clients may find off-putting. This emotional barrier means that your marketing must be sensitive, empathetic, and often sufficiently persuasive to overcome denial or avoidance. You can check out our picks for the best insurance ad campaigns for inspiration.
Compared to purchasing a car or clothing, buying life insurance involves having clients think about their mortality, which can be a significant psychological hurdle.
Unlike essential items like food or home appliances, life insurance is not a product that is typically or frequently sought-after. Most consumers do not actively seek insurance or see it as an immediate need. Because of this, life insurance requires more intensive and aggressive awareness-building and education to generate demand.
Since life insurance must be tailor-fit to individual financial situations, family needs, and life stages, its marketing involves a higher degree of involvement on the customer’s part. Marketers must listen, understand client priorities, then offer custom solutions rather than one-size-fits-all messaging.
Life insurance marketing is often timed to coincide with specific life stages or events like marriage, buying a home, or raising children – these are when consumers are more receptive to buying. This contrasts with many products that can be marketed regardless of consumers’ life stage. Marketers must layer demographic and behavioral data to deliver the right message at the right time.
Since life insurance policies are long-term commitments, it’s important for insurance professionals to build trust and long-term relationships. Life insurance marketing efforts must focus more on sustained engagement, as opposed to most product marketing that focuses on transactional sales and repeat purchases.
These days, marketing of life insurance policies uses different digital channels as a means to educate consumers. This is especially useful, since consumers do extensive research online before purchasing. The complexity of life insurance means marketers must supply clear, accessible information and digital self-service options to meet consumer expectations. You can read through our general guide on effective insurance marketing strategies for more ideas.
While digital marketing offers cost-effectiveness, wider reach, and data-driven personalization, the insurance industry affirms that technology still needs traditional personalized sales techniques and human interaction. It’s this combination that leads to the most effective life insurance marketing outcomes. Although digital tools proved very effective when no one could leave their homes, the need for human interaction in insurance marketing remains, due to the trust-based nature of life insurance purchasing decisions.
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