Insurance Marketing: The Silver Bullet That Attracts “A” Producers

If your company markets to insurance producers, consider yourself lucky. As a general rule, insurance producers are one of the most responsive marketing audiences you can target. Producers are naturally outgoing and love to be students (AKA guinea pigs) of the marketing process. They’re comfortable online, have more discretionary time than other target audiences and constantly strive to hone their skills.

However, despite all those positives, insurance producers can also be a fickle audience for marketing – particularly if you’re trying to get them to commit to a contractual relationship with you. Over the years, I’ve noticed that insurance producers tend to chase the “silver bullet.” They want fast, easy results. Despite the fact that most have never achieved fast, easy results, insurance producers are optimistic. They persist in the belief that fast, easy results are possible if you know the right secrets. As with all traits, always searching for the next best thing is both a strength and a weakness. It is the reason producers are great entrepreneurs but it is also the reason they can be reluctant to commit.

If you need to recruit producers with smart insurance marketing tactics, take a moment to understand the producer persona. This is who you’re marketing to. How can you make a producer believe that your offering is the next best thing? First, let’s define what we’re after. According to folklore, only a silver bullet could kill a werewolf. What’s the equivalent of that in the insurance world? Something simple, yet highly effective that conquers a producer’s most daunting challenges.

Below you’ll find five quick tips for discovering your organization’s silver bullet offering:

1.  Profile the characteristics of desirable producers. One of biggest downfalls of every company is spending too much time on unqualified prospects (or producers). As Sean Silverthorne, author of the Feb. 18 issue of Harvard Business Review’s Working Knowledge newsletter says, “By selling to anyone, ventures fragment their resources … Selling becomes a function of individual ‘heroic’ efforts, not a scalable platform for profitable growth.”

2.  Define the werewolf for desirable producers. Before you can solve a problem, you have first must recognize it. Take the time to know what’s interfering with your best producers’ productivity and results. Likewise, don’t waste time trying to solve problems for producers you don’t want to work with.

3.  Produce helpful content for the desired audience. If you want a certain type of insurance producer, write for that audience in your insurance blog, on your web pages and in your free downloadable insurance white papers. Offer the topics your most successful producers care about. This is exactly what I’m doing today. Some of my best clients are companies that need to recruit agents. However, for some odd reason, I’ve never before written a blog article for that distinct audience. What a mistake!  Now, you can learn from it.

4.  Offer instantly downloadable white papers tailored for your target audience. Regardless of whether your solution is truly a silver bullet (is there such thing?); your free report is a good start. Instantly downloadable guides, scripts, articles and insurance white papers give prospects instant gratification. Most producers are knowledge seeking, so if you write about the right topics, the gift of knowledge can become your silver bullet. Yes, it’s really that easy. Before you breeze by this paragraph, stop and realize that this point is huge. An instantly downloadable offer is THE ONE THING that makes websites generate leads and eblasts generate clicks. It really works!

5.  Nurture to commitment. A “one-hit-wonder” rarely exists in sales and marketing. Like it or not, marketing takes hard work and a lot of follow up and that’s certainly true while recruiting producers. When a producer downloads a report on your website, don’t let the relationship end there. Take the initiative to set up a series of auto-responder emails to connect back with the prospective producer every 20 to 30 days with more helpful tips and information. Every interaction (even if it’s digital) builds trust, extends the relationship and brings you one-step closer to a commitment.

I have a lot more to say on this subject, so make sure to subscribe to our blog in the top right-hand corner of this screen for more insightful insurance marketing ideas.