Let’s get digital! 5 Digital Marketing Trends for 2015

Jennifer Fitzsimmons AgencyBuzz Product Manager

Digital Marketing ExplainedThe marketing of products or services using digital channels to reach consumers to promote agencies through various forms of digital media. Digital marketing extends beyond internet marketing to include channels that do not require the use of the internet.

Micro-Targeting

• What is it? – Micro-targeting is a type of data-mining technique that involves deeper segmentation to target niche audiences.

• Committing to developing your customer profiles lets you get into the true needs, lifestyle, and motivations of your policy holders making for easier cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.

• Will require agents to break data into smaller chunks (clusters) to create the kind of communications needed for successful micro-targeting

Mobile Domination

• What is it? - Mobile marketing is marketing on or with a mobile device, such as a smart phone or tablet. Mobile marketing can provide customers with time and location sensitive, personalized information.

• Consumers use mobile devices all day long and in many different ways.

• In order to stay effective, agency owners should be prepared to respond to the preferences and behaviors of their targeted audience in their daily use of the web

Content Marketing

• What is it? - Content marketing is the creating and distributing of relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience.

• Creating more relevant and inspiring content will be the key to your agency’s success. Agencies will need to pay more attention to their customer’s experience and think of website, email and social content in a more client-oriented way.

• Personalization is expected to become a widely adopted practice in 2015, leading to the growth of 1-on-1 marketing.

Videos, videos, videos!

• What is video marketing? - The use of short videos used either on web sites and social media, or distributed via sites such as YouTube, to promote products and services. One of the primary advantages of video marketing is that search engines such as Google are eager to include videos in their search engine results and, hence, videos are indexed very quickly.

• Videos are perfect for engaging and nurturing policy holders and make it easier for you to communicate your agency’s brand and philosophy.

• Ideas for videos your agency could make – Line of business explanations (what is umbrella insurance?), tours of the office, how-to videos for easy home or auto DIY repairs or maintenance, agent and CSR profile videos to get to know your staff, or customer testimonial videos.

Automation

• What is it? - Marketing automation refers to software platforms and technologies designed for agents to more effectively market on multiple channels online (such as email, social media, websites, etc.) and automate repetitive tasks.

• Commercial agencies have lead the way in marketing automation. Many smaller agencies have struggled to take advantage of all the bells and whistles automated marketing offers.

• Once you know what you’ve got, find opportunities to integrate them a bit better, assess where you may have redundancy in your marketing tools because you may want to find one comprehensive tool as opposed to several different tools that create repetition in work flow.

• Many agents will look to third parties to manage these tools and help manage strategies so they can focus on selling insurance and running their agency.