As business owners and marketers, you hope that your message resonates with your audience (your customers and prospects), but how do you know for sure? Most insurance agencies take a “see what sticks” approach – publish some content, create some messaging, and hope that someone sees, understands, and acts on it.
Well, as they say – hope is not a strategy.
What’s a Persona?
A persona is a fictional character that represents the qualities and characteristics of your ideal customer. A good persona will help you get inside of the head of your audience to gain a better understanding of their motivations, their goals, their pain points, and their personality traits. Most businesses need more than one persona and your insurance agency is no different. In our experience, most insurance agencies can benefit from creating (at least) the following personas:
- Personal Lines: Young family, just starting out.
- Personal Lines: Established family, middle aged with kids
- Personal Lines: Retirement aged family.
- Commercial Lines: Startup
- Commercial Lines: Established small – medium sized business
- Commercial Lines: Large business
Depending on the niches that your agency specializes in, or where your located, you may want to include some others, too. If you’ve got great markets for farm insurance – you may want to create a persona that specifically represents that demographic. If you live in a college town, you may want to create a persona that’s focused on a single individual, just starting out. Creating personas may sound intimidating, but it’s actually pretty easy and it’s a great way to get your entire team involved. Here’s a quick example:
You’ll see that Mark, our Small Business Owner persona is motivated by providing financial stability for his family, creating jobs for his community, and leaving behind a legacy that he can be proud of. You’ll also notice that he’s pretty disorganized because he’s always strapped for time and is a bit anxious at times.
Armed with this information, you’re able to create messaging that will speak directly to Mark. If you’re trying to earn Mark’s business, you would want to make sure that your messaging very clearly and concisely (remember, he doesn’t have much time to waste!) explained how your insurance agency could help him better protect the business he’s worked so hard to build today and while setting him for growth tomorrow. You’d also want to make sure that you reassure him that your team will be by his side every step of the way to help him, whether he has a simple question or needs help with a claim, to help ease his anxieties.
Creating marketing personas can really help get your entire team on the same page while gaining a better understanding of your target customers – something that can be very helpful for insurance agencies that are on-boarding new team members or those breaking into new niches.
With any marketing initiative, you always want your audience to feel like you’re talking specifically to them. Creating marketing personas is the first step to making that happen. You don’t want them wondering…
Eddy DeMelo is the Co-Founder of Agency Appeal and President of Beyond The Bots.