Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be extremely intimidating. It is seen as the evil side of technology by most of the population; after all, we’ve all seen the movies! AI will one day surpass humans in intelligence and take over the world. Furthermore, only the top tier of people is smart enough to utilize AI. All of these things that we have been taught about AI are untrue. In reality, AI is a handy tool that can be used by anyone who does their research. The value of using AI for marketing your insurance agency can be immeasurable!
One of the most critical aspects of the success of an insurance agency is marketing. You want to reach the right audience, increase awareness of your product, and, most of all, generate sales. Generating sales can be a daunting process, especially when the funds are low. There are quite a few aspects of AI that insurance agencies can take advantage of regarding marketing, and these aspects are both simple to use, as well as affordable.
Here are a few characteristics and uses of Artificial Intelligence that highlights its value concerning marketing:
Machine Learning
Machine learning uses data history, and analyses trends to predict future trends. Knowing future trends can help an insurance agency immensely by giving them an idea of how their audience will respond to the services and advertisements that they announce. It is then up to your agency leadership to look at the analysis and make informed decisions based on the predictions.
Task Handling
Some agency tasks do nothing but take up time and money. It is often unnecessary to hire someone to do something that can be taken care of by AI. An example of this is customer interaction. You are inevitably going to get questions from customers that others have asked every day for the last two months. Having AI respond to these customers and resolve their problems opens time for your current employees and avoids the prospect of hiring more employees for repetitive tasks.
Targeted Marketing
Manually testing and refining of ads to a point where it becomes competent enough to provide results is a time-consuming process. AI can analyze large amounts of data based on customers’ personalities, opinions, and desires. This data allows for a much more refined, accurate audience to which you can pitch your agency. Understanding your audience, in turn, results in more efficient advertisements that are only shown to people who would be interested in your services, decreasing the time and money spent on ads, and improving the outcome drastically.
Personalized Customer Experience
The customer experience (CX) refers to the interaction between your business or the people, products, or websites that represent your business and your customers. Ideally, you want phenomenal CX to ensure happy customers who want to utilize your agency.
Personalized CX can provide that. AI uses machine learning to be able to predict your customers’ needs. Consider the ads you get shown on Facebook. They tend to be for products in which you have either shown interest or for products like those in which you have shown interest. Predicting your interests makes it more likely that you will click on the ad and buy the product.
Consumers have become so accustomed to such personalized CX that it is something they have come to expect. It is, therefore, necessary to implement analytical and predictive AI to your marketing to produce personalized CX not to disappoint your customers.
Personalized CX can take place in different ways:
- Recommendations of products based on past behaviors
- Recommendations based on location
- Recommendations based on ethnicity or culture
Customer Insights
You, as a person, will never be able accurately to guess everything about your customers or your target audience. Those very consumers have spent years pouring information into technology, looking up things on Google, clicking on ads on Instagram, joining groups on Facebook. They have also entered their personal information—including age, gender, location, and the like—into various forms of social media. AI can access all this information and work out trends concerning the type of people who would typically prefer to work with an agency like yours.
Having these trends to consult will not only result in more clicks and more buys, but it will also decrease other factors such as buyer’s remorse and unhappy customers.
Improved Customer Service
This point has already been touched on briefly as an earlier example, but this will provide you with a clearer understanding of this concept specifically.
Your employees are undoubtedly busy most of the day. This includes responding to emails, taking phone calls, and just interacting with customers in general. While such activities provide a much more personal touch, it is ineffective in the long run. Using AI for customer service not only increases the speed of the response but also allows your employees to invest more time into cultivating leads and generating new business.
There are a few ways in which you can utilize AI for customer service:
- Automated chatbots that lead customer inquiries in the right direction on social media
- It can direct inquiries to the right person automatically, reducing waiting time for your customers and improving their CX
- Answer basic, redundant questions automatically, without having to take time away from busy employees
- Analyze concerns and use these trends to set up available information in the form of an FAQ on your page, where customers can easily find it
All of these options free up resources that generally would build up and result in serious marketing expenses for your company.
Improved Online Advertisements
By incorporating some of the methods mentioned above, it is easy to utilize AI to improve your online ads. Would you be more likely to click on a general advertisement or one that caters to your specific needs or interests? You can take advantage of the fact that AI allows you to know your customers’ needs and use that to improve ads by targeting them directly. Note that while you can show general ads to more people, significantly fewer people will be interested in them.
Creating the Right Content
The analytical properties of AI can easily be used to give you an idea of the type of content you need to be creating. However, that still leaves you with the responsibility of creating said content.
Several tools can be used to generate the content for you. These AI tools create content that is relevant, engaging, and falls within the interests of your customers. Technology is so advanced that these tools write articles that have perfect grammar and are each unique (no plagiarism to count against you).
AI tools that create content that is relevant not only guarantees useful quality articles that will attract your customers but also takes care of the countless hours that someone would have to spend researching to write the same articles.
Tweet
Better Email Marketing
AI is completely reshaping email marketing. It can not only tell you exactly which words to use to attract customers and what your subscribers are interested in, but it can also tell you other useful tips. These tips include what day and time people are most likely to read emails, and so much more.
Email marketing is such a meaningful way to connect with your customers, as it is very personal. Furthermore, most people check their emails at least once a day, which means they will undoubtedly see your email.
AI can be extremely intimidating for new users. Furthermore, new business owners have enough on their plate already without having to worry about this alien technology. Therefore, don’t be scared to take it slow, merely start somewhere. Implement one tool at a time based on necessity, and then slowly start building on it. However, don’t let the vastness of the AI world scare you off, as it can indeed be such a useful tool to improve and simplify your marketing. Furthermore, your competition is without a doubt using AI, and you don’t want to fall behind because of your fear and ignorance. Do your research and consult a professional if necessary, it will undoubtedly be worth it in the end, and you will see your marketing improve drastically.
Keep in mind that artificial intelligence cannot replace real human contact and that as straightforward as it is to use AI to improve your marketing and CX, it is not foolproof and will never be able to replace human employees completely.
Tweet
Dshanya Reese, CIC 