No matter the type of insurance you sell or what carriers you offer, it is crucial to know your target customers. Without being aware of these customers and their requirements, it is impossible to address their needs. You won’t know what types of insurance to carry or how to market your services.
The best way to get a clear idea of your target customers is to create buyer personas. This will also help you keep those target customers in mind throughout all of your business processes, from creating your list of insurance offerings to advertising your agency.
A Refresher on Buyer Personas
As a refresher, a buyer persona or target persona is a semi-fictional way of representing your customers. It is based on research and data, not just guesses. Personas will outline the most relevant traits of your target customers, such as demographics, jobs, pain points, and preferences.
Explicitly layout out all of these things in your buyer persona makes it significantly easier to ensure that you cater to your clients’ needs and wants. This should help with leads, retention, and more.
Create Multiple Personas
You want to create as many buyer personas as is necessary. That being said, it is best to start with just one or two so you can get experience creating and using the personas. So, start with your main demographic, then expand to create personas for other demographics.
You Can Make Negative Personas
In addition to target personas, you can also make negative personas. Think of your buyer or target persona as your ideal customer and a negative persona as a client you do not want.
For example, maybe your agency specializes in auto insurance, so you don’t want clients without a car. Or maybe that is the case for home insurance. Or maybe you focus on offering policies within a certain coverage and premium range, so you don’t want clients who have lower-value homes or cars to insure.
Why You Want to Use Personas
We already touched on the fact that creating target personas helps you meet the needs of your clients. It is also crucial for marketing. Specifically, creating personas is a great way to segment your audience and deliver each segment more targeted advertising.
How to Make a Target Persona
Before you start making your target personas, remember that you will likely end up defining more than one, but you will likely find it easiest to start with just one or two, as mentioned.
Gather Information on Your Clients
The most important part of defining your target persona is gathering the data and information that you will use to create them. Remember that these personas are based on fact. That means that you need to collect data on your client base to create them.
The simplest way to get that information is to look at what you know about your current customers. If you have data on their jobs, income level, address, education level, or anything else, great. If you use Jenesis, some of this data will already be in your agency management system.
If you don’t already have data on the information you need to create personas, get in the habit of collecting it from new clients. This will help you in the future. You can try to gather some of the data via the contact form on your insurance agency website. You can also include optional fields for relevant data when new clients sign up with your agency for the first time.
You can also use your knowledge about your customers. Many insurance agents build relationships with their clients, as this helps them cross-sell. Use the trends you’ve noticed about clients via that process. If you have other agents in your agency, ask them as well.
Of course, you can also directly ask your clients for feedback. Send out a survey to your current clients. If you want to boost the response rate, offer a small incentive. That could be a small discount on one month’s premium or even something small like a bag or water bottle branded with your agency’s name and logo.
Find Patterns
Once you have all of the data you need, it is time to analyze it and look for patterns. This is frequently easier said than done, but it is worth the effort that you put into it.
Creating the Persona
When you are ready to actually create the persona, you will want to include the following sections:
- Demographics (including income, age, gender identity, location, career)
- Identifiers (including social media platforms and communication preferences)
- Challenges
- Goals
- Motivations
With all of that information in mind, you can start to think about how you can appeal to that persona. This lets you coordinate your selling points with other agents or members of your team. It also gives you one less thing to think about before interacting with potential clients, as you will already know how you will encourage them to use your agency.
The Bottom Line
Creating target personas will greatly benefit your insurance agency’s marketing efforts. Create the personas based on real data and make as many as necessary. Then, use the personas to target potential clients and cross-sell existing ones.