Best CPA Network

Are you a Cadillac man? How about a Range Rover mom or a BMW urban professional? When you last shopped for a new car, which ads grabbed your attention? If you’re like most people, it was probably the ad and car that most fit your character - and budget.

Marketing to specific targets works! People respond to ads, jingles, commercials and web pages written for them. When a target prospect visits your website and hears the right message, they’re more likely to stay, re-visit and turn into insurance clients.

But how do you create the right message and use it effectively on your site? Here’s a 3-step process to help you create website content that zeroes in on your target prospects.

Identify Your Main Targets

Everything begins with your customer - specifically, your target customer. Corporations spend millions for market researchers to tell them who their customers are.

Fortunately, you don’t need to spend everything you have to figure out your target audience. Others have already figured it out for you.

1. Ask carriers.
   Pick up the phone and call your carriers’ reps and marketing departments. Ask them who their target prospects are for their individual programs, so you’ll have a better idea of the type of online shoppers you need to target.
2. Look at your closed deals.
   Take a look at all your closed deals. Analyze the type of clients who sign apps and close - besides your friends and relatives. Pay special attention to people who came through your website or independent of personal referrals.
3. Who’s on the internet?
   Although people of all ages shop for insurance on the internet, the overwhelming majority are between 21 and 45, most with high school diplomas and many with college degrees. Translation: they’re young and educated - though not necessarily about insurance. You’ll need to remember that your website isn’t necessarily marketing to your neighbors.
4. Do you have an online niche?
   There may be a small but potentially lucrative niche waiting for you online. Perhaps there’s a significant Hispanic-American or Polish-American community looking for a bilingual agent. Or maybe you have a program geared for people with a specific disability or profession? But you need to be sure that your niche is large enough to justify your investment.

You’re not limited to just one target audience. But you should start with just two or three of the more profitable targets. I recommend you focus on visitors most likely to visit your site AND convert into clients.

Find Programs That Appeal To Your Target Prospects

After deciding on your target prospects, find the programs that would best serve their needs. In some cases, your programs will drive your targeting.

For example, say you elect to take advantage of the large pool of uninsurable consumers who have a difficult time getting insurance coverage. You’ll want to sign up with the carriers who offer the best discount medical plans.

On the other hand, if you want to target families with small children, you’ll need to look at programs offering the best coverage for them. And don’t forget to mention pre-natal and maternity coverage for couples planning on having children in the near future.

Whichever route you choose, make sure you give your prospects more than one option. Otherwise, you risk giving them the feeling that you’re forcing them into only one program.

Create Pages That Appeal To Your Targets

Now that you have your available programs matched with your target prospects, your final step is to create customized content for them. Here’s how you can do it…

• Think of someone specific.
  Give your writing (and your target prospects) a concrete connection by thinking of someone specific.

  For example, if you’re targeting single fresh-out-of-college workers with no-insurance jobs, can you think of someone exactly like that? Maybe that was you decades earlier. Think of that person as you write - because you’re writing to them!

• Set up separate pages.
  Create a page for each of your target prospects; then create a customer profile for each page. Consider using stock photos of people who resemble your target prospect’s demographic. You can even give a name to that profile, to better engage your readers.

  For example, if you’re targeting single entrepreneurs, you can say “Susan Jones, 39, started her small business last year. She’s still struggling to get it established, but she knows she can’t put off getting health insurance. She also needs something that she can afford - and won’t make her waste precious time whenever she needs to file a claim.”

• Sell your program.
  The rest of each page will describe the programs you think work best for that target prospect. Tell them why you think these programs are the best options to meet their insurance needs.

  Remember the old sales adage of highlighting the benefits more than the features. For example, a carrier that routinely gets the highest customer appreciation scores and quickest response times offers the benefit of fewer hassles for clients filing claims.

• Call to action.
  Don’t forget your call to action! Make sure you’ve got at least one big button or link to nudge interested visitors to take the next steps and ask for a quote - or fill out an app.
• Landing page.
  These targeted pages can be effective landing pages for advertising campaigns. For example, you may want to consider pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaigns to appeal to your specific targets and send them to these pages.

  But these should also be landing pages for links from other parts of your website. Your home page should definitely have a blurb quickly describing these target prospects and directing visitors to see why your programs and services are exactly what they need.

If a particular prospect landing page really takes off and attracts a lot of visitors, you may need to consider creating a separate group of pages or a sub-domain just for those target prospects.

Tailoring your message to your audience is key for any successful marketing campaign. You can see how big corporations run different ads on urban, Spanish-language and country music cable channels.

The internet now lets small businesses and insurance agents tap do the same for a lot less. It costs very little to customize your content. But the cost of not doing it is high - when you consider how many potential leads you’re losing because your site doesn’t talk to them.

According to a report by E-consultancy retailers in the UK are seeing positive results from affiliate marketing. The research group surveyed 239 merchants this year and most of them have both online an offline presence.

A full 95% of brands said that affiliate marketing is ‘very cost-effective’ or ‘quite cost effective.’ The next most effective ways to acquire a new customer is paid search and then email marketing. On average the retailers spend 18% of their online marketing budget on affiliate marketing.
Retailers like affiliate marketing (also called CPA or cost-per-acquisition) because they only pay an affiliate when a sale is made.

Kevin Cornils, CEO of buy.at explains, ‘Affiliate marketing has proven itself as the most cost effective online channel to drive incremental volume. It works for marketers because they only pay for activity that generates genuine sales?” He even went so far as to say that affiliate marketing “is a guaranteed positive ROI if managed correctly.” You can’t get much more glowing than that.

The research was sponsored by buy.at, the UK’s largest independent affiliate network. They are like CJ in the US, with brands like T-Mobile and Capital One. Business is good - with 250% growth in turnover year-on-year since 2004.

The industries most benefiting are telecom, financial services, and travel retailers.

Another interesting fact is that most retailers work through an affiliate network. It’s almost all - 90% and they’re seeing the best returns. They are choosing networks based on how they interact with networks.

Affiliate marketing is growing fast, here are some facts from the report:

• 78% of brands set to increase their investment in affiliate marketing over the next 2 years.
• 78% have already increased their spend over the past two years—many times drastic increases.
• 23% of UK marketers have more than doubled their investment since 2005.

Research report by E-consultancy.com to be released on 26th September

The numbers are incredible. Affiliate marketing is still emerging in the UK but growing at a very fast pace. What does that mean for affiliates? Opportunity.

About Janet Meiners

Janet Meiners always wanted to be a reporter but prefers the immediacy of blogging. Known as Newspapergrl, she has freelanced for newspapers, City Search, and business magazines. She reports on internet marketing and online trends.

Get this: A new Opus Research survey, “Small Business Attitudes toward Online Marketing and Web 2.0,” found that 59% of small businesses don’t market online and many don’t even view their websites as an aspect of online marketing. ClickZ goes into more detail about this survey conducted in August by Local Mobile Search and AllBusiness.com.
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