Let’s say your small brokerage makes an average of 20 sales each month as a result of digital marketing, including social media campaigns.
Say the average cost for the policies you sell is $1,500 each. Factor in your 15% commission and that’s $225 per policy. So that brings in about $4,500 a month through your social media campaigns. Would you say yes to an additional $54,000 annually?
What if it cost you only the amount it would take to obtain your online marketing prizes? Say $10,000 in total for four major campaigns in a year. You might even throw in a quarterly online Q&A video at a cost to make of $1,000 a pop.
Subtract these costs, and you’re still looking at an extra $40,000 a year through digital marketing. Who in a small brokerage is going to leave this kind of money on the table when social media is available universally?
Brokers are increasingly dabbling in the online space, looking for ways to improve their bottom line.
“It is a consumer’s market today,” said Bryan Yetman of First Durham Insurance. “There are other options for consumers [to purchase insurance] and we need to adapt our approach to what today’s customers want.”
And what do consumers want? (continued.)
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Determining the answer to this question is a crucial component of any brokerage’s digital marketing campaign, said Peter Da Silva of Cornerstone Insurance Brokers Ltd.
Da Silva said Cornerstone took about a year to dabble in social media, trying various different experimental projects. One early Facebook campaign involved donating 50 cents to the brokerage’s charity of choice for each time a person clicked ‘like’ on the brokerage’s Facebook page.
“That didn’t work so well,” Da Silva said. “We got a couple of hundred likes, a couple of hundred Twitter followers out of that.”
The brokerage thought about what happened, and concluded that customers didn’t care about the brokerage charity as much as the brokerage did.
So the brokerage turned its focus on the consumer. What did consumers want?
Maybe winning prizes like a mini iPad.
So the brokerage recalibrated its campaign at Christmas, launching its 12 Days of Christmas campaign. In that campaign, each person who clicked ‘like’ on the brokerage’s Facebook had their name entered into a draw. Starting on December 12, the brokerage awarded a prize to a person randomly selected in the draw. They did the same on December 13 and so on, through to December 24.
Suddenly 200 followers from the first campaign ballooned to 3,500 followers during the 12 Days of Christmas campaign.
Which leads to another key element in the success of digital marketing campaigns – tracking results, said Da Silva. “You have to track what you do,” he said. “Otherwise, you have no idea.
“These are the kinds of things you have to track: How many people are going to your website? How many people are quoting on your website? How many sales you are getting from your website?
If you want to be successful, just tracking it can give you an idea of drawing people to your website.
