5 Resolutions Insurance Marketers Should Make in 2013

The New Year finds people across the world making resolutions to better their lifestyles, by crowding gyms and dieting, breaking bad habits, and saving more money. Resolutions are not simply for personal lives; marketers can and should make resolutions for their businesses as well. These resolutions can make your business practices more efficient and effective. The following resolutions correspond specifically with the AIDA sales funnel.

If you are unfamiliar: E. St. Elmo Lewis developed the AIDA funnel in 1898 as a sales tool. It is based on a hierarchical process that uses four layers to track the behavior of consumers, from brand awareness to purchase of a product or service. These layers are: awareness, interest, desire and action (AIDA). In an ecommerce world, I like to add a fifth layer: referral.

Awareness – Reviewing Your Marketing Mix

A plan is the key to awareness, and you must have a marketing plan for your business. This may mean newspaper ads, radio spots and television commercials. However, what has worked in the past may not be working now. The beginning of the year is the prime opportunity to review your entire marketing mix.

Look at your print materials, billboards, television, radio and any other channels through which you project messages and evaluate them. Determine your ROI on each channel, and determine which channels are performing best for you. Analyze trend data as well, which will give you a good idea of where you can find your customer base. Make sure that you are spending the appropriate amount of time with each channel.

If you find that a channel is no longer yielding results, do not be afraid to retire it. Losing time and money on marketing channels that no longer provide a good return on investment are just that: a loss.

Interest – Materials

Just like cleaning the garage, looking through all of your marketing materials can be a daunting task, but it is very important. A year has a way of outdating many of your printed materials.

Making sure that your materials reflect the interests of your customer base is imperative. Look for industry changes that have occurred in the past year, and see if your materials reflect those changes. If there are new buzzwords or terminology used frequently in your field or that your customers may use, update your materials to reflect these changes.

This may also mean changing your materials to a more intriguing form, like infographics, for example.

Desire – Competitive Analysis

Making your customers desire your product over a competitor’s product is important. You have to continually come up with ways to answer, “Why should I buy your product over another company’s?” It all comes down to knowing your competitor. It may be easy to believe that ignorance is bliss, but not knowing what your competition is doing can result in being left behind.

Use the beginning of your year to do an analysis of all competitors in your market. Some of your competitors will do things better than you, and others will do things you have never done and may not have any intention of doing. Study these things, and learn how you can compete in those areas.

Make your efforts your own, and make certain they have your mark on them. Simply: do better than your competitors.

Action – Reallocation

Over the past year, you have likely run multiple promotions and enacted incentives and other programs to help drive traffic. Here, too, you should review all of the coupons and other promotions you ran, and determine which ones resulted in the most action from your customers.

For example, if your rewards program is being used by 30 percent of your customer base, but a two-for-one promotion you ran was used by a paltry 3 percent, you can clearly see which programs work best for you.

Get rid of the programs and coupons that do not work, and reallocate the funding and time to the programs that create a reaction. Use your effort and money to make those programs even better.

Like I mentioned, the original AIDA sales funnel ends here, but referrals are what really drive business. Referrals may be the strongest sales tool you can find in a business’s arsenal. With one happy customer referring many others in your direction, it is possible to harness that power in your marketing plans, which can create an environment that allows you to work with your customers to bring in more business.

Referral – Build a Brand Advocate

Take a good look at your customer base through your marketing outlets, including social media. Review those who are already your brand advocates, and determine what you can do to turn others that are already good customers into advocates as well. Many metric tools can help here, and in some cases, you can use surveys and focus groups to learn exactly what your customers think about your brand.

Social media is perhaps the prime way to reach your customers on their own ground. Using real communication, build a relationship with your most influential customers. On any given day, a brand advocate can generate a number of leads and turn a slow sales day around.

There is always room for improvement in some facet of our personal lives, and the same goes for businesses. Making resolutions to improve every year will make you better at your job, and make your business grow faster.

In following the AIDA (plus R) funnel and doing a total review of your marketing mix, you can nix the outlets that simply do not work for you. Keep your materials up to date, and keep a close watch on what your competitors do well. Reallocate any time and funds from unsuccessful programs into the programs that do work, and continue to improve them. Let a brand advocate make your job easier.

You can start an amazing year of business just by making conscious decisions to improve.