Marketing Basics

As I define it, marketing is all those things we do to get and keep customers. It is an area of small business ownership that can often be the most difficult to do. Why is that true? Because marketing is about “getting and keeping” customers, it involves action, movement, execution and persistency…and a lot of patience at times.

It is the “block and tackle” part of the sales business; the foundational work from which all sales results are born. Without the hard work of marketing, nothing, absolutely nothing gets done for the insurance agent.

The following principles will help in building effective marketing processes within an agency.

1. Focus the majority of your daily energy on the execution of specific marketing activities. Compared with selling, marketing involves a greater degree of effort in order to be successful. Once a prospect is face-to-face with a sales professional, the great majority of them will buy. Insurance agencies never fail because of a weak sales force or poor individual salesmanship. Agencies fail because of inadequate or ineffective marketing execution. The secret to sales success is no secret at all; having enough opportunities to conduct a sales conversation with people is what creates sales success. The only way that can be accomplished is through executing a marketing plan. Don’t be distracted from the simple fact that marketing success is fueled by determined and consistent execution of a plan of marketing. Otherwise, it’s just a plan and nothing more.

2. A solid marketing plan has balance within and without. It has balance in terms of mining business opportunities from within the book of business and without the book of business. That is, there is oftentimes a “book within the book” when referring to additional sales to current customers. Take every opportunity available to you in order to cross sell and even “up-sell” your current customer list. A lopsided marketing approach common to agents is to market their current customers almost exclusively at the sacrifice of marketing outside the book towards new ones. That is a mistake in terms of missed opportunities for growth and stability.

3. A solid marketing plan has balance in creating awareness and in creating attraction. By marketing awareness, I am referring to broad based advertising such as billboards, radio and television ads, telephone book ads, fliers and posters, signs plus any other media designed more for market presence and identity rather than driving business to a specific storefront, website or phone number. Be discriminate with your marketing budget. Have a presence in both marketing realms. But use the bulk of your marketing dollars on processes that specifically attract and drive business to your transaction portals be it a brick and mortar storefront, an Internet site or a 1-800 number. The desire to feel good about buying billboard space or telephone book ads should be tempered by the reality that these marketing mediums do little in terms of creating an acceptable return on investment for the insurance agent trying to grow his/her business.

4. A solid marketing plan has balance between passive processes and active processes. The idea of passive and active processes fits well with our previous discussion about awareness and attraction. Many marketing awareness efforts are not “efforts” at all. They tend to be passive attempts at getting people in front of you. A billboard, for instance, is an extremely popular yet passive means of marketing. Many agents use billboards to market themselves. And sadly, many more use billboards and other passive methods are their primary means for marketing. These methods tend to be expensive, difficult to measure in terms of return on investment, and simply do not produce the predictable efforts of more active means of marketing. I will not discount the importance of billboard advertising and other passive-awareness methods in an overall, well balanced marketing strategy. What I will discount is the effectiveness of such advertising over more active methods such as cold calling and other telemarketing, leveraging centers of influence and other relationships, participating in civic and community events,

Copyright © 2010 - Tony Cefalu