Agency Marketing Campaign Tips
Budgeting, Tracking Results and Using Competitive Intelligence
Get helpful tips on budgeting, tracking results and using competitive intelligence to evaluate your insurance agency's marketing campaign.
This is the last article in the series of articles on insurance agency marketing and PR planning- for now. The articles in this series include Insurance Agency Marketing and PR, Insurance Agency PR Ideas, Insurance Agents Marketing Plan and Insurance Agents Marketing Tips.
Your budget is the most inflexible part of your insurance agency’s marketing campaign. Stay on top of budgetary concerns with these tips:
- Get price estimates before you plan your marketing campaign to help ease budgetary concerns later.
- Remember to include “people costs,” including the time it takes to execute marketing campaign tactics, in your insurance agency’s budget planning meetings.
- If items get cut, as they often do, have a back-up plan. If you don’t have money to do a direct mail marketing campaign, focus on e-mail, Web and inbound phone marketing.
Establish progress review checkpoints to evaluate your insurance agency’s marketing campaign.
Before you begin your direct mail, electronic marketing or PR campaign, determine how you will track specific campaign results, and how frequently you will report on results.
- Use historic activity to help benchmark your direct mail marketing campaign. For example, “In the years 2004-2006, ABC Insurance Agency’s new customers flatlined. In 2nd quarter 2007, we completed a direct mail marketing campaign and 200 new customers signed up for insurance policies.”
- Tracking campaign response codes is a clear-cut way to measure the effectiveness of your insurance agency’s direct mail marketing campaign. “300 new customers referenced Access Code 20072Q when they joined ABC Insurance Agency in 2nd Quarter 2007. Access Code 20072Q appeared on ABC Insurance Agency’s ‘Nice To Meet You’ direct mail postcards sent in March 2007.”
- Web site analytics, customer surveys, unique 800 numbers and unique Web sign-up pages help measure marketing campaign results, too.
- Collect press releases and articles placed in magazines or newspapers, and save your clippings. Public relations and image branding efforts can be difficult to measure, but no one can argue with the written word.
- Compare sales objectives after the campaign to pre-campaign results.
Not sure how much agency growth you can attribute to your marketing campaign? You’re not alone. When surveyed, most marketing executives say they don’t know how to measure marketing ROI. Whatever method you use to track results, stick with it long enough to show historical data- if you switch methodologies too often, you'll never get on top of marketing campaign results.
Competitive Intelligence Gives You Insights into Your Insurance Agency’s Marketing Campaign Results
Test your marketing campaign results once the program is complete to see if you had an increase in awareness. Use focus groups to determine your insurance agency’s presence in the community. And a marketing research survey can provide insights into how your agency is perceived.
Determine what worked and what didn’t work in your insurance agency’s marketing campaign. And then stick with what works. That doesn’t mean that you have to continue to re-use the same marketing materials, but if a direct mail marketing campaign netted you the highest return, run another one.
Measuring campaign results is an imperfect (sometimes painful!) process. But providing results from a successful campaign at your budgetary planning meetings will likely net you a boost in your marketing budget next year.
Talk back with a writer: email your ideas for successful competitive intelligence methods used at your insurance agency to Lisa Nichols.
