Improve your Marketing Swing

Who says you can’t learn great marketing tips from your kids? With spring in the air, our marketing manager, Lisa Merriman, was recently asked to coach her son’s little league baseball team. And therein lies a lesson for all us. Here’s how she tells it:

“It was all too obvious when these very young kids (ages 6-7) came to practice that first day that they had a lot to learn. With much trepidation, I started to teach them some baseball fundamentals. Who would have guessed that those kids would also teach me something about the way you and I do business.

“Their swing was stiff-armed, only swinging half way with no follow-through. They couldn’t connect with the ball, and when they did, it certainly didn’t go ‘out of the park’! With a lot of work, and a little patience, they learned that there are many elements that go into ‘the perfect swing’. You can’t just stand there and move the bat in the general direction of the ball and expect anything meaningful to happen. For one thing, your swing will be far too late to connect most of the time. You’ve got to anticipate the ball’s arrival and place your bat strategically at the sweet spot with a full swinging motion, among a host of other considerations. It takes time, but gradually my kids are acquiring the skill that will help them one day hit a few out of the park.

“And so I thought, using newsletters as a marketing tool is a lot like learning how to swing a bat. If you just send out your newsletters month after month, with no follow-through, swinging with no particular strategy in mind, you’re not going to have an effective ‘marketing swing’. At best you might hit a single now and then, but certainly not the home run you are looking for.” So what’s your newsletter marketing swing like? Are you swinging aimlessly, with no particular strategy in place? If you’re sending out newsletters to existing clients for customer communication and retention purposes, that’s one thing. But if you expect to acquire new business that way, you need a plan. Most successful agents use a plan that involves sending out newsletters with a telephone follow-up. There are two simple steps to this plan:

1. Send your prospect your newsletter on a regular basis (preferably monthly) for several months. This accomplishes several objectives: you familiarize them with your branding, including the name of your firm and its corporate identity; you establish your concern for communicating with clients about topics of interest in insurance and risk management; and you indicate your interest in doing business with them.
   
   
2. Once they’ve become familiar with your branding and your reliability after several months, give them a call. Ask how they’re enjoying the newsletter. Most importantly, ask for an appointment to meet with them to review their insurance program. Or maybe you’ve got something important to show them that will make life easier for them, like on-line service and management tools or an approach to customer service that’s unique to your agency (your “branding”). Or maybe even play it low key on the first call and just ask if the newsletter is getting to the right person. As you build trust, your likelihood improves of getting a chance to quote or even get a broker of record letter.

So don’t just take a few wild swings at new business with your newsletters. Develop a plan and follow through with it.