Insurance is a fast-paced field with a wealth of opportunities to offer motivated professionals and talented salespeople, and having the right personal skills coupled with a great attitude and the proper credentials can make for a great beginning to a successful career in insurance. But there are other components necessary for launching or improving an effort in selling insurance, no matter the specific type or line involved. Among these, insurance advertising is a central necessity that can make or break a campaign, no matter how great or well-prepared its other elements may turn out to be. Understanding advertising as a standalone concept can be helpful in the quest to gain an advantage in the insurance world, but being able to apply advertising principles to insurance while staying up to date on the newest trends and ideas in both fields are sure ways to realize productive advertising campaigns.
Insurance advertising has typically based its primary methodologies and attributes on the type of insurance that is being sold. Because emotional content is an important part of selling insurance, it’s imperative to have a good idea of the feelings and thoughts associated with different types of plans. People interested in purchasing disability or final expense insurance probably won’t be as responsive to overly-enthusiastic, unsympathetic advertising, whereas those shopping for business insurance likely don’t wish to focus on worst-case scenarios, but rather have a positive spin put on the aspects of the plan or package they’re considering. There is ample market research available for studying the emotional triggers and associations involved with different types of insurance, though local surveys may be of use to especially ambitious agents.
As with the identification and proper usage of emotional content in insurance advertising, knowing where and when to place advertisements is crucial for making good impressions that last. Placing an advertisement in an inappropriate area or coinciding with a conflicting topic, time, or event may actually work against an agent or broker, creating a false impression of tactlessness or pushiness that can ruin a reputation from the start. The best time and place to reach insurance shoppers and obtain quality insurance leads is when they’re actively thinking about insurance or the risks of being uninsured, and meeting these ideas with an offered solution that seems well-suited to their individual situation.
Nailing placement and time context along with hitting all the right emotional buttons and avoiding the wrong ones are elements of insurance advertising that have been in place for decades, but which are receiving new faces thanks to the advent of the Internet and it’s effective use of acquiring insurance leads. With the number of insurance shoppers online growing at an exponential rate, the opportunities for increasing sales, creating agency or name awareness, and effectively carving out a piece of virtual real estate are abundant, and advertising methods are adapting at a wild pace in an attempt to keep up with the boom.
Today, information about insurance shoppers online can be quickly and easily accessed, and targeting various kinds of emotional content is easy with sites that are specifically related and may already have the shoppers in the right frame of mind to receive an advertisement. Likewise, online tools make it easy to achieve perfect placement at just the right time, greeting potential insurance leads when they are most susceptible to making a purchase or remembering a name. With classic concepts still intact, insurance advertising is growing quickly to meet the needs of promoting and selling all types of insurance online.