If you’ve spent any amount of time here on our site, you can see we’re all about digital marketing for insurance agencies, and while digital marketing is an incredible way to build your brand and generate revenue, there are a ton of other “offline” tactics that can reap massive rewards for your insurance agency, especially at the local level.
These “grass roots” or “guerilla marketing” tactics can draw incredible attention to your agency, and help you stick out from the crowd in creative, and unconventional ways.
I’ve always told agents, that there are enough people within a 10 mile radius of their agency to make them rich for life. It’s just a matter of those people knowing/liking/trusting you, and that requires creative advertising.
Of course, there are all sorts of guerilla marketing tactics from very simple to very bold. Heck, there are companies who have staged full blow flash mobs. But today we’ll cover a few pretty simple, and “localized” examples of things you can implement in your agency quickly.
Let’s talk about our first tactic, QR code marketing.
QR Code Marketing For Insurance Agencies
QR code marketing is one of, if not the fastest growing marketing tactic that exists today. We personally use it for a wide range of things like flyers, exhibitor materials, scheduling demos, and more.
If you’re not familiar, a QR code is a barcode of sorts that can be scanned by certain digital devices (like smartphones) that opens a corresponding webpage.
QR codes are great for a variety reasons, and offer a way to send people to landing and sales pages for marketing and sales campaigns. What’s more, QR codes make it really simple to track the traffic coming from the code.
How should you use QR codes in your agency?
The first step is creating a QR code.
There are a number of tools that allow you to create QR codes, both free and paid. Two of the best options are QRCode Monkey, and Adobe’s QR code generator. Either of them will work just fine.
You will need to have the URL of the webpage handy that you want to send people to once they scan your QR code. This should be a sales page, quote request page, or some other page that collects contact information from a visitor. My recommendation is, send people straight to your quote request page.
Note: It’s important that remember that once you assign a URL to a QR code, it can’t be changed later, unless you have the paid version of QRCode Monkey, in which case, you can actually change the assigned URL after the fact if need be.
Once your QR code is created, you’ll have the ability to download several files, like a PDF version, and image versions (.jpg & .png). From there, the possibilities are endless. They can be put on flyers, stickers, business cards and more.
Where should I put my QR Code?
QR Codes can be put anywhere, but here are a few places I would start:
- make QR code stickers, and put one on the back of your car
- create QR code cards, and canvas parking lots putting them under windshield wipers
- create mailers with the QR code on it and mail them to local residents
- put them on your business cards
- make flyers with them, and pass the flyers out at auto dealerships
- pass the flyers out to your realtor and mortgage broker friends
- order some agency promotional goodies with the QR code on them
These are just some of the ways you can use QR codes to get clicks to your website and sales pages, and I highly recommend giving these a try!
As an example, I just created this one on two seconds if you want to scan it with your phone:
The next guerilla marketing tactic I want to discuss is car wraps.
Car Wrap Marketing For Insurance Agencies
Car wraps are an incredible, and really bold way to get your brand in front of a TON of local residents!
While this can cost a bit more than QR codes, it’s one of the most effective ways to get eyeballs on your business. Think about the sheer number of cars on the road who will see your brand while you’re driving around every day.
To double down on your car wrap, you could include a QR code decal on the wrap as well, and drive passers-by to a custom landing page on your website!
Car wraps cover a lot of ground, as obviously they go where you go.
By the way, I’m not suggesting you get your entire car wrapped. While you certainly can, you could do a partial wrap, or even just a removable magnetic decal if you don’t want the design to be permanent.
I’ve actually seen businesses by and old used van or cargo truck, and wrap it up and park it in front of their business as a moveable billboard. The possibilities are really endless!
Yard Sign Marketing
The last tactic I want to mention is yard sign marketing.
While this may seem somewhat trivial, and maybe not as exiting enough to be true guerilla marketing, with the right messaging, yard signs can be very effective at catching peoples’ attention and driving leads and sales!
The bonus is, yard signs are pretty cheap, so even if they break, or people throw them out, they’re only a few bucks a piece.
And guess what? You guessed it, you can put a QR code on a yard sign!
Yard sign marketing is already very popular among real estate agents, political parties, home improvement companies, and more, yet I’ve never seen an insurance agency use them.
You could even incentivize new customers to place one in their yard after binding their new policies for local referral generation!
After all, everyone wants to know who their neighbors are using for certain services, and people typically want to copy what their neighbors are doing, especially if they’ve had a good experience.
Besides your neighbors yard, they can be put in a million different places around town.
Conclusion
Building brand awareness for your insurance agency is a critical ongoing activity you need to be working on all the time. If people don’t know, like and trust you, you’re not going to get very many customers.
At the end of the day, relying on referrals is only going to get you so far. Of course there is always digital marketing, but great businesses are doing a little bit of everything to build their book, brand, and authority in their local market.
Grass roots guerilla marketing is a fun and effective way to build that local awareness and generate more revenue!
