How to Convert More Niche Leads by Developing Buyer Personas
Life insurance agents like you have an incredible advantage over other professions when it comes to understanding your customers.
When selling a policy, you gain intimate knowledge of a person’s medical and family history, lifestyle choices, and more. For agents selling online, this type of information becomes invaluable when it’s coupled with analytical data.
The insights that can be gleaned from digital tools and your own experience as an agent can elevate your sales and marketing game and help you deliver incredible value to your target audience.
start by Researching Your Target Audience
Unfortunately, many agents don’t take the time to research their customers — despite having plenty of information readily available. This leads to a one-size-fits-all marketing approach and sub-optimal conversion numbers.
Maybe you’re not quite sure what information to look at and how to package it up into an actionable format.
This is where buyer personas come in.
What Is a Buyer Persona?
Buyer personas are fictional representations of your target audience that help you attract and relate to your customers as real humans. They help you identify who your “perfect prospect” is, where they spend time online, what pain points they have, and how you can best help them.
That way, when they land on your website, they are greeted with open arms in the form of perfectly targeted content.
Personas go beyond simple demographics of age, income, and education level.
They dive deep into the needs, behaviors, desires, and concerns of different groups. By developing buyer personas for your niche audience, you can tailor your products, services, and content to your target market in a way that resonates with them.
Why Does a Life Insurance Agent Need a Buyer Persona?
If you’re selling life insurance online as an independent agent, chances are you are targeting a particular niche.
After all, having a targeted audience is the number one way to remain competitive against large independent agencies.
It is also the best way to serve your customers.
No matter which niche you’ve chosen, whether it’s diabetics, veterans, or people with osteoporosis, you will need to gain a thorough understanding of your audience in order to convert them into sales.
Simply put, developing buyer personas for your internet life insurance business ensures that your marketing efforts are targeted toward the right audience, which in turn, will convert more visitors and lead to more sales.
Here are three reasons why you need buyer personas for every lead-generating life insurance site you create:
1. They guide your content creation
When it comes to blogging and content creation, buyer personas enhance your writing and give you crystal clear direction.
From the copy of your website homepage to the blog posts and articles you write answering your prospect’s toughest questions, personas help you write better and faster.
Personas also help you write in a conversational tone, which your audience will relate to and find welcoming.
As marketer Neil Patel says, “A persona gives clarity, power, and passion to your writing. You will find that when you’re thinking of your persona and writing to them, your style of writing will really come alive.”
2. They help you make informed decisions about your content marketing
Personas can help you make decisions beyond content writing.
By developing several personas for your niche, you can segment and deliver personalized messages to each type of buyer. You can also create unique funnels for each person.
Send them to a specific landing page, and then capture identifying information using a program like Ninja Quoter.
Knowing which landing pages convert your visitors into leads can then help you on the phone.
3. They enhance your social media presence and interaction
Social media is a critical component of a well-rounded digital presence.
Although it’s not the main source for generating leads, it’s still an avenue to interact with prospects.
With personas, engaging with people on social media will feel more human and less corporate.
Creating Buyer Personas for Niche Leads
Buyer personas are created through a combination of analysis and research.
It’s part science, part art, and can include surveys, interviews, and good old-fashioned data mining from the forms on your site and analytics.
The best way to get a well-rounded view of your audience is to include customers you’ve already sold a policy to, as well as prospects and those outside your contacts database who might fit with your audience.
For most businesses, developing several buyer personas is recommended so you can get an accurate view of your audience.
Even with a niche focus, developing multiple personas helps address subsets within your niche.
As an example, you may be selling to diabetics, but those diabetics may range in age, lifestyle, and background.
You may have diabetics who live a healthy lifestyle and others who do not. Each of those would be an individual persona.
3 ways to gather information on your target audience:
#1: Check your website analytics to see how traffic came to your site, what keywords were used, and what actions they took with your content.
#2: Look at past interactions with members of your target audience, and keep a journal with new insights moving forward. Write down questions they ask, concerns they have, and hopes and priorities they mention. Remember, life insurance is emotional, and many people will be generous with their thoughts.
#3: Interview customers and prospects when you’re on the phone with them or over email. Ask questions about the niche group they fall into so you can better segment your prospects moving forward.
As you collect information about your buyers, remember to think beyond typical demographics.
Think in terms of hopes, priorities, and desires. It is this information that will help you market to them in a meaningful way.
For a detailed list of survey and interview techniques, check out this article by HubSpot, the go-to leader for user personas and inbound marketing.
What Does a Life Insurance Buyer’s Persona Look Like?
Remember, buyer personas are not fixed. Buyer personas continue to change. They are an ever-evolving aspect of doing business with humans.
As technology changes, so do buying habits and trends. This couldn’t be more evident than the rise of the internet life insurance agent.
Also, as time goes on, medical advancements, changes, and trends affect the way people shop for life insurance.
The key takeaway here is to never stop evolving your buyer personas.
Set up bi-monthly meetings to review them, and be sure to always take notes when you’re talking to your actual buyers on the phone.
At the end of the day, the more you know about your buyers, the more people will buy from you.
