As we enter into 2023 there's really some big shifts that I've noticed as I try to reflect on what marketing is going to look like in 2023 and how things have changed so far so I want to shoot a quick video sort of giving you three major shifts that I've seen in the insurance marketing space before I get into that I want to give you a quick background of my story so I got my degree in marketing from Missouri
State University this was before Facebook was even a paid platform nobody was using Facebook to advertise their local small business at all because it wasn't a paid platform Google was barely air even in the picture they had a couple uh products that were sort of tailored to the small business but most people weren't using it in fact very few people were um at all so that was back in 2009 when I graduated so I was doing a lot of
Direct mail et cetera so I've been in the I started my first company about you know let's see nine months after um which was a direct mail company and then I got a digital marketing agency so then I got into a general Ad Agency game where I was doing you know storage unit marketing uh dentist marketing everything in between chiropractors everything right so then four and a half years ago I realized that shifting into one specific Niche which is Insurance
Marketing and financial services was where I wanted to get into I've really spent my entire full effort and focus doing marketing lead development calls leads and appointments for the Insurance and financial services Market with me and my staff of now 35 whatever people we go up and down I think we have 35 about right now so what I want to do is as I've sort of was was sort of contemplating on what does marketing look like in the insurance Financial
Services in 2023 I want to give you three specific shifts that I think matter to you as you start to allocate your budget as you start to figure things out Etc all right the first thing I want to get into is actually just talk to one of my friends that has a really large search engine optimization website um for final expense his name is Anthony Martin you guys probably know him because he's kind of the guy was that was the first guy to do search engine
Optimization he just texted me um and basically reiterated what I was telling you now search engine optimization is not something that is going to be a entry-level new agent product at all for anybody that wants to get consistent lead flow I used to back three and a half years ago it was working um it was able to be successful and it definitely works outside of the insurance industry but the insurance
Industry is so crowded and large and so big on the in the Google Sphere that it's just so so so difficult to stand on a search engine optimization basis and get organic leads from your website with a search engine strategy that doesn't mean that the principles of what search engine optimization is built on are invalid meaning like a good content strategy a good educational build sort of website that has structure to it that has blog posts that has videos all that
Stuff is search engine optimization but paying x amount of dollars for search engine optimization for the exclu the only purpose to generate inbound inquiries from search engine optimization is something that is just not really going to work that well anymore in the insurance space specifically now I want to reiterate that doesn't mean that content marketing is not what you're supposed to be doing that doesn't mean
You shouldn't be investing in your website that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be structuring your website the correct way as if search engine optimization you know robots are crawling it and ranking you Etc what I'm trying to say though is if you have any sort of strategy that's Performance Based that's tied to search engine optimization you really right now are better suited putting that same budget into paid tools lead development on
Whatever platform we want to talk about whether it's YouTube or um you know Facebook Instagram Google whatever it is um your return on investment from a short-term perspective is going to be great now if you have the time to build and invest into your search engine automation strategy and your budget that you have to sort of build all that stuff out and build a long-term engine um that's great but if you're an
Individual agent out there trying to just sort of get ahead by getting a search and optimization website live you're in for a long road ahead of a lot of budget and I just at this point I would just put it towards paid tools that's a big thing the next thing I want to get into is Facebook's new place in the insurance Market I believe that Facebook has a very valuable place in the insurance market and that's going to be using low intent
Um consistent flow of real-time and exclusive leads that are of low quality in general if you're going to build a Facebook campaign and let it stand alone and just do a lead form campaign um and just let that like sort of be your lead Source you're going to have a hard time being successful alone what most agents are using Facebook right now if they haven't already like paused it all together they're using it as a supplemental lead flow typically there's
A high intent lead that they're using whether it be a digital marketing lead that is a different platform or whether it's a direct mail lead or a transfer or whatever it is very very very few people right now are living solely on Facebook leads it's kind of a thing in the past in my opinion on living on Facebook leads a lot of my big call center relationships that I have that are outbound dialing are barely using Facebook anymore as an example now where
It is a good fit is whenever you have an automation platform that's built out and that you have time to sort of invest into a budget that's a daily active budget that puts leads into the system and then potentially has some automations uh ours is called Samson but even then typically what I would recommend Facebook being is like a supplemental source so like we've evolved way past Facebook so like all these guys that you're seeing sell
Facebook courses good grief save yourself some money and don't buy these stupid courses on Facebook they're going to give you outdated tools they're going to give you outdated strategies all the stuff you can find on YouTube go to the Facebook ads library and find all this stuff in like five minutes anyways don't like the days of like getting a leg up by generating your own Facebook leads are just done like that's not a thing anymore and if people are still selling
That course they're not doing the right thing they're honestly they're not it's not beneficial for most people that doesn't mean that there isn't an agent somewhere that's using Facebook to generate their own leads but like I talked to an agent the other day that's doing life insurance just like yesterday um we're going to be doing some high intent video leads for them but they're doing their own Facebook campaigns
They're managing their Facebook leads at like three to six dollars and they're like yeah they're crap but it's what I use my new agents to cut their teeth on and you know we have get enough business to kind of get a basic Roi we basically use it to something we can turn on and turn off again to be able to fill the gaps but nobody is eating only on Facebook leads anymore or has some sort of funnel out there that's like got the life and the health funnel all mixed and
The automations I mean I'm not saying it might not be working for one or two people out there or you might have found it work but anytime you try to scale that outside of yourself um it's a difficult thing uh to scale so you know there's just other ways to generate leads Now search engine optimization at a big scale with asset development like what we do other video platforms you know all these other ways to generate leads is kind of what
Everybody's doing right now at the top of the industry all right another thing that I want to give you as a heads up is it really is coming full circle that the insurance industry is moving mostly like virtual sales right now it is more virtual than I've ever seen in the past so every time I speak in front of individuals or like ask people to raise their hand because virtual sales versus just face to face the amount of agents that are
Doing face-to-face sales right now um are way less than they've ever been now that doesn't mean that that's because face to face is dead or it's dying or seminars are dead or dying I'm not going to be that guy that's going to tell you that that is like the the you know face-to-face sales is dead that's not at all the truth there's still people that are successful that way that's great like that's great but in General on average when you when you
Pull most agents especially when it comes to life insurance final expense mortgage protection simplified issue infinite banking Advanced markets all this different stuff those are typically being done on a virtual capacity now and not so much a face-to-face like type deal it's just not working like it used to also I think also there's like a like final expense as an example the market is just a little more dangerous than it used to be it's just a little
More crime heavy and like it's just not ideal especially if you're a woman to be going and door knocking in these random neighborhoods and then going into a living room and talking about final expense Insurance it makes people feel uncomfortable not that only women are in that situation but I hear that more and more that like you know in a long enough timeline you're not gonna have doors and a lot of times you're going to get made to feel uncomfortable at some point
Especially if you're a woman right so I think the coveted era taught the market that they can make these decisions online and virtually and so people are not only are they not opposed to making these decisions they are more Adept with tools that are technologically driven to be able to be virtual anyways like before covid you know very few people were like very um attuned even business people and zoom well now the tools have sort of evolved
So quickly because they had to and the market has evolved quickly but doing virtual consultations with a zoom screen share or whatever that is is something that just isn't as difficult so it's removing the barrier to entry of the insurance agent to the prospect in a virtual capacity now what I want to make sure I'm clear when I talk about this is I don't think that the insurance agent is going to be automated out of the sales process this is a very human
Business this is a very confusing business this is a very custom business now that's not to say that there aren't automation systems out there that insurance agents aren't involved in but the persistency is low a lot of times the amount of capital it takes to get to that point is unbelievable so the insurance agent as a whole is protected in my opinion the this the handshake and the way that you get in touch with people is now just moving to more of a
Virtual video non-face-to-face capacity which is great because then you don't get you know stood up you don't have to drive across town and yada yada now I still know people that are crushing and door knocking and I still have people that are doing great with their face-to-face strategies so I'm not saying that you should get into virtual if you um if you are doing face to face I'm just saying that that's kind of where the Market's
Headed one of the marketing advantages of being virtual is getting licensed in multiple States so this is a huge Advantage so like if you're in a particular Market you're doing face-to-face sales you're going to be limited by a specific Geo because it's just not feasible to drive to particular areas if you're virtual you're going to expand your your pool of actual prospects so you're going to have anywhere from one to four to 16 States
The amount of states that I recommend individuals have is obviously full state but then do like four or five states that are core States and then start there and then get up to like 15 or 16. I'm not sure how much more than 16 States you really need anytime I talk to like big mortgage protection or final expense or life insurance agents typically they're stateless is really anywhere from like nine to like 17 States depending on what their products
Is depending on what their sort of team is pushing all of that when it comes to picking your States I would say stay away from New York maybe stay away from Hawaii and Alaska maybe stay away from California even though California is still fine it kind of has its own little like continent almost sometimes it seems um and then obviously stay away from low population States if you're only going to pick up a couple States so like if you want to do North Dakota South Dakota
Idaho Montana Wyoming like those are fine States but you need all of them or none of them you know what I mean they can't just have one or two of those so adding those days to your list are beneficial but it's not necessarily something that um you know you need to really worry about so I would say start with full State and then go to four states and get to up to 16 States but typically 9 to 16 is a sweet spot so as you get into 2023
And you start to you know formulate your marketing budget just understand the security agent marketing is here to help if you were interested in doing any sort of marketing or lead development or refining the intent of your digital leads or getting into Infinite banking or whatever it is we can do all types of lead flow all types of pre-book deployments Etc so hit the link below if you're interested in talking to one of us about some potential marketing Strategies we would love to partner with you and lock arms and be successful together foreign