Over the past 12 years, I’ve had the pleasure of talking to a couple thousand agencies across the country, whether it be agencies looking for a better insurance agency website, or existing customers who are trying to get a better handle on their internal digital marketing processes.
There are many common themes and patterns embedded in those conversations —
Agencies who want to get better at SEO, PPC, and lead generation.
Agencies who want to get better at blogging and content marketing.
Agencies who want to get better at automation.
Agencies who want to build more fruitful referral relationships.
Agencies who want to outsource customer service to free up much needed time in their agency to market and sell more insurance.
This valuable experience has allowed me to “profile” to a large degree, who the agency is, and what they want to talk about in advance. It’s gotten to the point where I can predict with almost 100% accuracy how the call is going to go before I ever speak to the agency owner.
Startup Agencies vs. Veteran Agencies
One of the big things I’ve noticed through the years is, agency owners who are between the ages of 25-40, are typically very eager and willing to try things to grow their agency, whereas the more “veteran” agency owners between say, 45-65, aren’t able or willing to be as agile when it comes to their marketing initiatives, specifically digital marketing.
Some of them are straight up stubborn.
And it’s totally understandable. They’re a demographic who’ve already built their businesses through referrals & relationships and in their mind, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
If your agency is doing 1M-3M in annual revenue, there may not be a great reason to make wholesale changes, or dabble in new marketing strategies. I get it.
However, in my humble opinion, veteran agencies who are already established & profitable are in a prime position to double-down on customer acquisition, and at the same time, build a legacy that will far outlast their own career in the agency.
When you’re already established as a veteran agency owner, you are in some respects playing with “house money” when it comes to trying new marketing strategies. You have the disposable income that most other agencies simply don’t have, and thus, can afford to try new things.
Yet many established agency owners are still apprehensive for various reasons, and mostly because they simply don’t know what they don’t know about digital marketing. After all, their entire life and business has existed in an offline, belly-to-belly world.
So how can these vets get in the digital game?
Buying Into Digital Marketing For Veteran Agency Owners
I’ll cut right to the chase — the smartest thing a veteran agency can do when it comes to digital marketing is to outsource it to a trusted vendor who can do everything for them from soup to nuts.
I’ve seen countless agencies try to hire internal marketing personnel, or worse, do everything themselves, and time and time again it fails miserably (and fast) because the agency doesn’t know enough about digital marketing to do it correctly, and doesn’t know enough to properly vet, interview and hire in-house marketers.
Most agency owners don’t know what questions to ask, and don’t know what they need, and thus, they normally bring someone on who has a minimal skill set who can’t really move the dial for that agency.
Hint: This is such a problem, that at Advisor Evolved, we’re actually creating a training program specifically for in-house agency marketers. More on that later. It’s going to be huge!
If you’re reading this and your idea of marketing is sending out newsletters and the occasional blog or social media post, those things simply don’t move the needle anymore.
Outsourcing is by far the most cost-effective way to buy into digital marketing if you’re a veteran agency owner.
How to outsource digital marketing for your insurance agency
One thing to understand about digital marketing agencies is, they’re a lot like insurance agencies. There are a TON of them out there, and they’re all selling virtually the same services with the same elevator pitch and same old promises.
It can be very difficult for an uneducated agency owner to tell the difference between the experienced marketers who have seen and done it all, and the ones who read a blog article on Search Engine Journal last week and all of a sudden are selling SEO packages to insurance agencies.
That may sound a bit harsh but sadly it’s the reality of the digital marketing ecosystem. There are a lot of inexperienced marketers and one-trick ponies who talk a great game, but don’t have the skill set to actually drive results.
One of the biggest problems is, agency owners simply don’t know which questions to ask when hiring marketers, and thus, they end up in a contract with someone who is doing stuff that doesn’t actually work.
So here are some questions to ask if/when you decide to outsource your digital marketing.
Questions to ask marketing agencies
This isn’t a complete list, but at a minimum you should ask the following questions when outsourcing your digital marketing:
- How long have you been doing digital marketing?
- How many clients do you have?
- How long does a client typically stay with you?
- How big or small is your team?
- Will I be in a contract, and if so, how long?
- If running PPC, will you be using my own ad account, or yours? (Hint: always use your own)
- If you’re doing SEO, are you doing any link-building, or just on-site optimizations?
- Are you doing Local and Organic SEO? Or just one of the two?
- Do you have experience with re-marketing and display advertising?
- Will you be setting up Google Tag Manager and G4 analytics for my website?
- Do you offer ongoing reporting?
- What type of experience do you have with insurance marketing if any?
- What ad platforms are you experienced with? Just Google? Just Facebook/Instagram? Both? Any other platform?
- What should my monthly budget be for SEO and/or PPC?
- Will we have check-in calls?
- Can you help me setup automations to nurture incoming leads?
Again, these are just some of the questions.
And finally, probably the most important question you can ask a marketer is:
“Can you provide me with a detailed and very granular bullet-point list of exactly what you plan to do? Both one-time tasks, and ongoing maintenance.”
I absolutely blows my mind how many agencies I’ve consulted who have a marketer, either on-staff or outsourced, and they have absolutely no clue, I mean ZERO CLUE what is being done.
What’s more, there are a TON of marketers out there who are doing very low-level tasks, and stuff that worked 10 years ago, but the business owner doesn’t know any better.
Again this goes back to not knowing the right questions to ask, and hopefully this article has already helped you tremendously in terms of knowing how to interview a marketing agency.
What’s the ROI of Digital Marketing?
This is another big question agencies will likely ask, however, there are a few important things to understand about ROI.
First, ROI depends much more on the agency in most cases than the marketer.
How? Well, there is a major distinction between marketing and sales. Marketing by itself is not going to get you new customers. The agency still needs to be great at sales so it can close incoming opportunities at scale.
I’ve seen agencies waste A LOT of leads because they completely fail at follow up and sales. This is usually because there are many other problems in that agency that need to be fixed first, before any sort of marketing takes place.
Also, ROI is not linear. Meaning, you could talk to a lead in December from one of your campaigns, and they may not become a customer until July.
A lot of agency owners don’t understand this, and become frustrated when results don’t pour in immediately. Marketing is a long game folks!
So what’s the ROI? Well, that depends a lot on the agency, and thus, there is never a straightforward answer to that question, but what I can tell you is this:
The ROI of doing no marketing or advertising is always going to be ZERO.
Let’s assume though that you spend $30,000 in one year on marketing and your average profit-per customer over your typical retention period is say, $2000.
You’d only need 15 new customers to break even on your marketing spend. In other words, you’ll get 15 new customers at zero total cost, and whatever you make off referrals generated from those customers is house money.
Getting basically 1 new customer per month should be very attainable for agencies who are good at sales, retention, and who have referral and cross-sell processes in place.
Obviously, the goal is to get more than 15 new customers, and most agencies who are good a sales will blow that number number out of the water. Lets assume you get 30 new customers at the same marketing spend, that’s obviously a 100% annualized ROI, which is incredible for any business.
Conclusion
You knew this was coming right? The good old shameless plug…
If you’re going to outsource your digital marketing, we offer a complete done-for-you digital marketing service that checks off all the boxes you need. We’ve have 10+ years of insurance industry experience and have seen and done it all. There are no contracts, and no bullshit.
We do everything from Local and Organic SEO, PPC (this works the fastest), automation support, and advanced analytics implementation (and much more). We’re experts in Google, Facebook, Instagram, AdRoll, and many other marketing channels, both online and off.
Hell, I used to design postcard mailers for direct mail campaigns we were doing in the mid 2000’s for financial seminars. We’ve literally done it all.
Instead of focusing on only one strategy which is what most marketing agencies do, we take a holistic approach to marketing and look at the agency and it’s team as whole before we make any recommendations.
Sometimes SEO isn’t the answer because it can take forever. Sometimes PPC isn’t the answer if the client doesn’t have an adequate budget. Sometimes LinkedIn isn’t the best place to run B2C ads.
But yet a lot of marketers will recommend these things without doing their research on the business first. You need to know the challenges and operations of the business first before implementing any marketing programs.
If you read this entire article and want to learn more, feel free to book a call with me and my team and we will give you a brutally honest assessment of your agency and tell you how we may be able to work together based on what you might want to do online.
One final note — we don’t work with everyone. That’s not some fake scarcity statement, its the truth.
We turn down more agencies than we take on because a lot of agencies don’t have a defined sales and/or follow-up process in place to actually support adding new business at scale.
Or, they don’t have the necessary budget to do all the things they want to do.
At any rate, if you’ve thought about outsourcing your marketing, we’d be happy to jump on a call to talk through your objectives and goals.
No hard sell. No fluff.
Just an honest conversation about what you may want to do and how we may fit in.
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