The “traditional” ways of marketing your business are just not effective in the modern world, especially in the insurance industry.

With the change from billboard, country club, and TV advertising to social media marketing, you have a huge opportunity to make a name for yourself and your agency, and to directly reach and speak to your prospects.

This week on the Accelerate Your Insurance Sales Podcast, I share some common mistakes agencies take when marketing, why storytelling in your content is so effective, and some examples of agencies in this space who have taken the leap and seen amazing success.

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Video Transcript:

This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos or grammatical errors.

Hey, hey, welcome back to the Accelerate Your Insurance Sales podcast. My name is Andy Neary and this is episode four. In this episode, I will teach you how to create effective marketing in the insurance industry in 2025. Why? Because so many agencies today are still leveraging outdated and ineffective forms of marketing. And if you want your business to grow, you want your producers to win.

You have got to shift the perspective about what marketing looks like and give them the tools and the technology to win today, because today it is a game of attention and you’re not getting your prospects attention. Your prospects are. But it’s not just about throwing out any message. You got to be very clear about who you’re targeting, what you’re saying and where you are saying it.

And then this episode, I am going to teach you how to do all three. So if you’re amped up this year to make this a record breaking year, or you just know you got to get back on track, it starts with marketing, but it’s got to be marketing driven to help you win today. And that’s what this episode is all about.

So let’s buckle up. Tune in. Here we go. How you can create effective insurance marketing in 2025. Andy Neary here. Episode four. In this episode, I am going to show you how to create effective marketing to win. Today, I’m going to show you how to create an effective marketing strategy in the insurance industry. So for the last three weeks, I have been on a road show working with an extremely valued client.

And I commend their sales leaders because they are giving their producers an opportunity to look to other tools today to help them get their prospects attention today. And this isn’t the case with every team. You know, I made a post, last week about, you know, how some sales managers and sales directors and agency owners bring their personal bias to their prospecting, and then they force their personal biases on their prospects?

And this can be a challenge for producers, especially when you know, the things that we do today to grab our prospect’s attention are very different than they were five, ten, 15 years ago. And so if you’re not giving your producers the opportunity to grab prospect’s attention using the tools and technology that are available today, you’re putting your producers at a in a very bad position.

You know, we have to understand that today a LinkedIn post is as effective as picking up the phone and making a cold call. Those are both prospecting. Today, we have to understand that. And I still see sales leaders who just pound their fist on their table, tell their producers to make more phone calls. They still host cold call power hours that probably lead to, you know, create a fraction of the results they did 5 or 10 years ago, but they still force this down their throat.

And you’re putting your producers in a position where they’re just not going to win like they used to. And so we’ve got to change it up. And these half day workshops have been performing for, a client of ours have been so dang effective. There’s just nothing that replaces the energy when everybody’s in the same room strategizing and collaborating.

And basically what these half day workshops covered were three things. Number one, how do you develop a personal brand that gets the attention of your market? Number two, how do you identify your ideal prospect and create a marketing message that gets their attention? And number three, how do you put a megaphone on that message so you can share it far and wide?

I mean, that’s the precipice of this workshop that I’ve been hosting pretty much for the entire month of January. If you want to know more about it, hit me up. I’m happy to share how we’re doing it or what it looks like. But anyways, so when I think about these workshops that I’m leading, it really got me thinking about where our industry is just so far behind the times when it comes to insurance marketing.

I mean, believe it or not, there are still agencies today that leverage billboards, and I’m just going to start there and pick on people who have billboards. And I apologize if this offends you, but I want you to think about this from a very practical standpoint today when it comes to a marketing, is this effective or not? One of the most traditional forms of marketing in our industry is the billboard.

Now I want you to think about how a billboard works. The first thing about a billboard is it can be very expensive, especially if you want to put it somewhere where there is going to be a lot of, traffic. So, you know, a billboard out on the interstate is more expensive than a billboard on highway 12, right?

A billboard on the corner of the Four Corners and Main Street downtown is going to be pretty expensive, right? Because there’s a lot of traffic, so it’s expensive. Now, the second thing about a billboard that’s interesting is the audience. You have zero control over who sees that billboard. You don’t get to dictate the traffic, the audience. And then the third thing about a billboard is the message itself.

It’s static. Right? You put up a message on a billboard. It is the message every day, unless you decide to change the message, which probably comes with an additional expense. So a billboard, one of the most traditional forms of marketing in our industry, is expensive. You have zero control over the audience, and the message is static. I think you can quickly see why that’s an ineffective marketing strategy.

And in these workshops I talk about that. I talk about how agencies are still leveraging so many ineffective and expensive strategies to create marketing. And so when I think about our industry at large, here are three areas, three mistakes most agencies and industry partners are making when it comes to their marketing. Number one, trying to be all things to all people.

When you put out a message that tries to speak to everyone, you end up speaking to no one. It gets drowned out in the noise. So if you have a marketing message today that essentially says we can help everybody. Nobody’s going to hear it. And there’s too many agencies out there today that still believe they can help everybody.

Now, I guess you could argue there’s something to be said that that’s true. But when it comes to marketing, it’s not going to help you be effective. Number one, that’s what everybody else is saying. But number two, it just creates a very vanilla, bland message. You know, the best agencies out there, the ones that are growing rapidly, are the ones who have made a decision about what they’re going to be known for, and then lean into that, which we’re going to talk about in a minute.

So the first mistake is trying to speak to everybody through your marketing and it’s not working. Number two, if you look at the message, most agencies spend the majority of their time in their marketing message, telling their story about how long they’ve been around, how many years of experience they have on their team, all the preferred partnerships they have on and on and on and on.

And nobody’s listening because nobody cares. We’re going to talk about what your prospects want to hear in the marketing, and it’s not your story over and over and over again. And number three at large, we still are asking our producers to go share that message, one prospect at a time, by picking up the phone and calling people who have no clue who we are, by sending cold emails to people who have no clue who we are.

Heck, you may still be asking your producers to go park their car in an industrial park and go door to door like I did 20 years ago. So think about that. If your marketing strategy relies on the following, trying to speak to everybody. Focusing on your story and then sharing that message one prospect at a time, can you start to see why this is ineffective?

But this is what the vast majority of the agencies in the insurance industry are still doing today.

And as I hosted these workshops and we went through the exercises that we do, I think it became very clear for producers about where they need to shift their strategy if they’re going to get the attention of their ideal prospect. And the most effective way to create enough marketing strategy in the insurance industry is to take the three mistakes I just shared and flip them on their head.

What do I mean? Well, the first one was speaking to everybody, right? Well, if you want to have an effective marketing message, you’ve got to be very clear about who you’re speaking to. And. The best way to think about this is to to ponder the following questions. Number one, what is your agency? What is your team? What does your company do best?

What’s your zone of genius? I know that you can help a lot of prospects, and I know that you solve a lot of problems. But what do you guys want to be known for? What do you what do you do best? What do you do as well as anybody in your market? I bet you there’s one thing you do as well as anybody else.

It might even be your customer service. The second question I want you to ponder is what do you want to be known for? You see, if you’re going to if your agency is going to build brand recognition, you can’t try to be known for all things. You have to be known for one thing. For a real life example of this is think of somebody like Arnold Schwarzenegger, right?

Today he’s been a movie star. He’s been a governor. Now he’s probably an entrepreneur with dozens of businesses. But at one time he built brand recognition by becoming known as what, from one thing, a bodybuilder. If you know who Gary Vaynerchuk is. Gary V same thing today. He’s a social media icon. He runs one of the largest marketing agencies in the world, but at one time he was just known as the wine Guy.

He helped his dad grow as wine business from 3 to $60 million. I want you to apply the same strategy with your team and your agency. What is that one thing you want to be known for? Because the quicker you get there, the more expansive your market becomes. You know, when I think about the traditional insurance agency in our industry today, the more you try to become known for, the more restrict it your market is.

Let me let me give you an example. That agency today that hangs a shingle and says we do commercial insurance, we do health insurance, we do life insurance, we do disability vision, dental, short term, long term, voluntary, you name it, we can do it. The agency that says we do it all is very restricted to a local geographic market, probably the town that that office is in.

And if that’s your thing, more power to you. However, if you want to expand your market today, which, by the way, has never been easier because 2020 basically broke down market lines, market territory lines. If you want to expand your market, you got to become known for one thing. The more specialized you become, the more expansive your market becomes.

Let me give you another example. I caught up with a pyramid about a year ago. New. I’m back in in Colorado and we are both selling health insurance there. Well, since he has taken a role, with a company out of Dallas, an agency out of Dallas that has a very unique industry niche, the agency was designed to support the dealership industry, auto dealers, boat dealers, motorcycle dealers, you name it.

And I caught up with them about a year ago. And I say, hey, man, how are things going? He said, dude, never been better. In the last two years I have sold more than 70 benefit accounts. I’m like, what? How in the world have you sold that much? He said it’s actually pretty easy when you walk into a room and you can look at the prospect and say, hey, our agency just works with people like you and we’ve built our strategies just for you, that specialization.

Hey, it’s Andy Neary. Thank you for listening to the Accelerate Your Insurance podcast. Did you know the ideas we share on the show are things we actually specialize in helping you implement? You want to increase your sales, make more money, and be the thought leader your prospects reach out to. Please go to my LinkedIn profile DM me and sign up for a free discovery call again, go to my LinkedIn profile, DM me and we’ll get you set up for a free discovery call.

All right, now back to the show. If you want to build more brand awareness, I want you to become more specialized. Is it is it is it a niche industry? Is it a product? Is it a strategy? I don’t care what it is. Is it a skill set? What do you want to be known for? And then when you get clear about what you want to be known for.

Stay in that lane. This is how you become the go to expert for the thing you do best. And when it comes to marketing, you got to stay there. Now the second part. Whose story do you tell? Well, if you want to have an effective marketing message I’ve already shared. Stop telling your story. You got to tell your prospect story.

You got to talk about what they’re going through today. The problems they’re dealing with today, the failures they’re dealing with today. And then how your solution? That thing you want to be known for can help them overcome those failures and achieve success. But the best marketing tells their story, not yours. As some of you know, we are a story.

I’m a story brand certified guide, so we use the seven part story brand framework in storytelling. It’s a very simple framework that goes like this. There’s a hero who has a goal but has a problem keeping them from achieving the goal. Therefore, they need a guide with a plan, a solution to help them overcome failure and achieve success.

The key in that story is uncovering who the hero is, and too many agencies try to use their marketing to make them the hero. You’re not your prospects. The hero tell their story. You’re just the guide with the solution. When you pivot that in your marketing, your message, you’re going to become ten times more effective. That’s number two.

Now let’s talk about number three. How do you distribute that message? By and large, the industry has been distributing it one cold prospect at a time. Well the tools and technology are out there today to do it very, very fast and very inexpensively. It’s that word inexpensively. If you want to put a megaphone on your message, you got to start looking at social media, webinars, public speaking podcast.

Right. Those are all channels, marketing channels where you can distribute a message very fast and get it in front of a lot of people at one time. That is the key. Stop putting a message in front of one cold prospect at a time, and get it in front of a lot of prospects at one time. This is what changed my career.

I built brand awareness simply because of my six year journey that I talked about in episode two, where I started, you know, I started speaking, I went on social media, started hosting webinars, I started my podcast. That brand awareness and that ability to get that message out in front of a lot of people fast is what changed my sales success.

And you have to start doing the same thing. It has never been easier to do it, but again, you got to be open minded that these are effective strategies because they are, but they’re also inexpensive. You can leverage almost all of those for free. You don’t have to go pay for the billboards. Sponsor the golf hole. You can leverage this strategy to put a megaphone on your message, and it doesn’t have to cost a penny.

It just requires you to change the way you think about prospecting. I want you to win this year. I want your team to win. I want you to scale your business. But you got to stop doing what you’ve always done instead of trying to speak to everybody, instead of telling your story, instead of beating your producers over the head to participate in your cold call, our our.

Give them the tools to win like this client did for the past three weeks. Figure out what you do better than anybody in your market. Figure out what you want to be known for and make that the foundation of your marketing, and then craft the message that tells your prospects story, not yours. What are they going through? What are their goals?

What are their problems? And then when you distribute the message, give your producers the ability to distribute it far, fast and wide using social media, using webinars, using public speaking, using podcasts, or any of the other number of channels they can use to get it out fast. This is how you get your prospects attention today. You know, when I got in the industry in 2001, social media didn’t exist.

Email was still brand new. We didn’t do webinars. Podcasts weren’t even a thing. So I had to go to the cold market. I was taught how to go buy a membership at a golf club. I could not afford, and how to go eat lunch at the most expensive restaurant in town I could not afford, because that’s where the business owners hung out.

But guess what? Things have changed. You know where they all hang out. Now you know where their eyes are set on that thing you’re holding in your palm. Your phone. So my question for you is, where in your marketing strategy for 2025 is a blueprint to grab your prospects attention in their form? Because that’s where everybody’s looking today.

So that’s my advice for you. If you want to be effective at marketing this year, if you want to scale your business, you want prospects coming to you. You got to leverage the three things I just shared with you. Number one, get very clear about what you do best and what you want to be known for, and build the credibility and the thought leadership there.

Number two. Stop telling your story. Start telling your prospect story in your marketing. Number three, have a very clear strategy to share that message far, fast and wide. Using channels like social media, podcasting, public speaking, webinars, you name it, you do that every week. You will build the brand awareness you need to create business growth, create more qualified leads, and consist revenue growth for your company.

And if you need help doing it, you know where to find me. This is our bread and butter. But man, take what you learned today. Execute it. Run with it and you will change your business forever. Be good. That’s all we got for this episode of the Accelerate Your Insurance Sales podcast. One of the most valuable things you can do to help us and other new potential listeners find our show is for you to rate the show and leave a review.

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