Use Technology to Stay in Touch With Clients Throughout the Year: Idea File

Michael Jans believes many professionals involved with the insurance sales and marketing need to work on balance.

“They’re pretty good at sales,” Jans said in a recent interview. “They’re not at all good at marketing.”

Jans now works as a consultant who helps insurance agencies and insurance technology companies use marketing to get bigger.

From 2001 through 2016, he was the CEO of The Insurance Communicator and later of Agency Revolution. Both companies helped insurance agencies with marketing automation. FMG Suite, another financial advisor marketing software company, acquired the company in 2017.

Here are trends Jans and FMG Suite see in insurance marketing, based on a recent interview with Jans, and a summary of FMG Suite survey results.

1. Technology can make marketing better.

“Marketing is the strategically designed relationship between the agency and the marketplace,” Jans said.

Technology can make it much easier for agents to segment the marketplace, to get the right message to the right people at the right time, he added.

One simple way, he said, is to reach out to customers around their coverage renewal dates. But, to get the most of marketing, he said, agents need to find reasons to communicate throughout the year, without always asking for money.

2. Marketing skills appear to trail marketing goals.

“There’s a strong recognition that [marketing is] important,” Jans said. “But it’s a relatively new skill set.”

FMG Suite found when it surveyed agents that only 37% reported feeling “very comfortable” with modern, social media-based marketing techniques, he said.

3. Younger agents may be taking a different approach.

FMG Suite did a survey about marketing and broke some of the results out by age.

About 61% of the participants ages 24 through 40 said they were using social media to prospect for new clients, compared with just 42% of the agents ages 41 and older.

Similarly, 68% of the younger participants said they share information with new clients through social media. Only 49% of the older participants reported doing that.

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