As a small insurance agency, you may feel as if advertising on television is too expensive and unaffordable. While this may be true in certain time slots, TV advertising is attainable when you have the right information and resources to guide you. There are many avenues that are specifically designed to enhance marketing for insurance agencies, and using television ads to gain insurance leads is just one of a number of options.

When marketing for insurance agencies, understanding the market and how digital advertising can assist in elevating your brand is key. Knowing what trends could significantly affect the way you do business, and what your customers may be interested in will help you tailor your marketing campaigns to reach the right demographics to attract valid insurance leads. Here are 5 digital advertising trends to watch in 2016:

You know how important insurance leads are to your business. Luckily, marketing for insurance agencies isn’t any harder than marketing for other industries. Knowing what not to do is a major step in the right direction, so here are 10 mistakes to avoid.

The Internet is a big place. There are a variety of websites and online communities where people choose to spend their time. While you may spend a lot of your online time browsing social media sites or reading industry blogs, these may not be the places that your customers frequent. When it comes to marketing for insurance agents, you want to make sure that you are making the most of your online advertising budget. Creating customer personas is the best way to narrow the focus of your marketing to bring in more insurance leads.

Marketing for insurance agents isn’t always an obvious prospect. If you take the wrong approach, moreover, you may lose customers that could have been yours.

Grow strong connections with your new customers and you'll help spread positive feedback about your business.

For new insurance agents, getting those first few customers can seem daunting. Will they come? Do you have the knowledge to receive them? With a solid marketing strategy, you can not only bring in customers, you'll feel more prepared to keep them with your agency in the long term.

Good reviews have always been crucial for any business, but in the digital age, they are more important than ever. Now, when customers search for an independent insurance agency, they’re likely to scan the results of that search. If they see anything negative (usually limited to the first or second page), then boom: They’re probably going to move on. This makes it crucial to have good reviews to push down any possible negative press.

Good reviews serve another purpose too: good SEO (Search Engine Optimization). When your business name is linked with industry keywords as well as praise on multiple sites, a search for your goods or services is more likely to pop up. This means a campaign to garner lots of great reviews is well worth it for independent insurance agents, so get going with the five easy, cost-effective tips below. 

Southern Oak Insurance inspires confidence in your new and existing clients.

At first blush, advice about when independent insurance agents should send emails might look more like advice about when not to send emails. Why? Because there are quite a number of days and times you should avoid wasting your words, as well as a few that will get you the most attention. Once you know when these times are, you can optimize emails to gather insurance leads and reap the benefits of a solid email marketing campaign.