The Insurance Marketing Playbook
The Insurance Marketing Playbook is your go-to podcast for insurance agents who want to attract more clients, close more policies, and scale their business with modern marketing strategies. Each week, we break down proven tips on digital marketing for insurance agents, including SEO, social media, email campaigns, Google Business Profile optimization, paid ads, and referral systems.
Hosted by Shelby McFarland, The Marketing Broker, who specializes in helping insurance agents grow, this show gives you actionable marketing strategies designed specifically for the insurance industry—no fluff, just play-by-play tactics you can implement right away.
Whether you’re a new agent building your book of business or an experienced producer looking to modernize your marketing, this podcast is your competitive edge. Subscribe to The Insurance Marketing Playbook and learn how to generate quality leads, build your brand, and grow your insurance agency with confidence.
The Insurance Marketing Playbook
Define Your Ideal Insurance Client
We lay out a simple, repeatable method to define your ideal client and turn that clarity into content that converts. Two sample personas show how message, channel, and follow-up change based on age, habits, and needs.
• why clarity on your ideal client matters
• how to build personas from your book and community
• two core personas: new homeowner and retiree
• content that fits each persona’s habits
• office tactics: scripts, flyers, and reviews
• targeting tools: ads, life events, and geofencing
• educating younger buyers on life insurance value
• aligning marketing, sales, and service around personas
Hey y'all, what's up? It's Shelby here. I'm so excited for another episode of the Insurance Marketing Playbook. This is where we make your life a lot easier as an insurance agent, and we talk specifically about marketing strategies for you and your agency and your community. So I hope today helps you out a lot. I want to dive into how we can define our ideal client. Who are you trying to reach? If you're marketing to everybody, you're marketing to no one. I want you to know who your ideal client is. When I first started my business, I would take anybody as a client. I was like, oh yes, they said they want to work with me. Of course, yes. Oh, they want to do that. Okay, I don't know anything about that industry, but sure, I'll learn it and I'll learn how to do marketing for it. But now, 10 years in, I'm like, uh, I think I want to actually choose who I'm working with and have that ideal client. So let's say you're an agency that's just starting out and you're like, I want to um work with everybody. That's totally fine. Let's start with creating your personas. Who are the people that you want to actually work with? We are creating content for these specific personas. So if I was doing a persona for this podcast, it would be an insurance agent within like business between one to three, maybe five years, and they are located in a small town community because you are the person I want to work with. And if I just described you, then hell yeah, what's up? Welcome to the podcast. So glad you're listening to it. But this is what I've created the podcast for. That is my direct persona for the insurance marketing playbook. Is a new to fairly new um business owner that's an insurance agent. You can be with a national chain, you can also be independent agent, just someone that understands marketing is important, but you may be having to do it on your own. So who is your persona? Is it a 30-year-old new homeowner that may be looking to start a family? Um, or is it a 60-year-old retiree that needs to um kind of scale back on their costs a little bit? They're about to um retire, or they have retired. Um, maybe they need insurance, like life insurance. We need to make sure all of that's up to date for them. Um, those are two different personas that you can choose from, or you can create your own. And look around at your community. What does your community look like? Who are the people that live around where you are working? Um, who are the people that do business with you already? Maybe you can dive deep into your book of business right now and see, okay, well, this is who I've gotten, and these are the ones that I want to get, or I want to continue with this type of person and then market to them specifically. So once you get your persona created and you know who your ideal client is, that is when you can start creating content specifically around them. Your 30-year-old is not gonna react to the same content that your 60-year-old is gonna react to. Also, the 30-year-old's probably not gonna ever come into the office, but the 60-year-old is gonna be in there every month paying their bill. Can I get an Amen? Because I know that that is still true in most small towns today. So the 60-year-old, they may be needing some marketing with flyers or reminders from the uh your employees that are helping them, maybe like, hey, you've got this policy, but we'd love to help you with that policy. And then the 30-year-old is like, oh, they see your story about life insurance, and they're like, dang, I just had a baby like three months ago. I probably need to think about life insurance. So those are the types of um ways you can market to the different personas that you choose. Now you may be like, How many personas can I have? It's literally unlimited. So I have a persona for this podcast, I have a persona for my marketing happy hour podcast, I also have a persona for the marketing broker, my digital marketing agency. I have different types of clients uh clients that I want to reach uh when I'm doing my marketing for my actual agency, and so I create the content around those personas and I schedule it out and I see um if I can actually reach them or how I'm reaching them. You can do targeted ads to them, you can do geofencing. Um, I've helped a construction management company and we actually geofenced every Home Depot so that way when the guy, the male walked into a Home Depot across America, he got an ad on his phone for the construction management software. And you could do the same thing for insurance if you are looking for new homeowners in the area, if you're looking for newly married couples, if you're looking for people that just had babies, or maybe even retirees, you can do that on targeted ads as well. But really specifically, I need you to get down to the nitty-gritty of what kind of content that you are going to be creating for them. But the only way you can do that is actually defining your client. Where are they at? What does their lifestyle look like? What does their income look like, and what do their needs look like? I know that different generations also come into play on this. You need to educate the younger generations on why life insurance is actually important. I'm not gonna lie, I'm almost 32 years old. I have a four-year-old right now, and I didn't actually think life insurance was needed until I had my baby. And then I was like, oh dang, I should probably like set her up for life, right? And that's just how my generation normally thinks. Like, well, I don't need it right now, but I'll wait till I do. But really, we need to educate everybody because my idea is completely different now that I'm on the other side of things. We need to educate the younger generation on why life insurance is important, who they're setting it up for in the future, and how to actually help their family after they've gone because you really just never know what happens. Now, your 60-year-old retiree, he he or she better have life insurance, right? But if they don't, um they need to understand that why it is more expensive at their age versus when they were younger. And again, that's another thing you can educate the younger, is it's always it's always cheaper the younger they are. And I even have life insurance on my child. I didn't think that that was um something I needed, I thought it was kind of morbid, but honestly, um now that I do, I'm like, okay, I feel better, I'm paying. I literally, if I burn the hair on my head, I have insurance for it, you guys. Like, seriously, not even kidding. So I want you to take a few minutes. I always keep these podcasts real short. So take a few minutes right now. If you're driving in the car, um, or maybe you're sitting at your desk eating lunch or a snack or whatever. Um, let's think about what kind of personas you want to reach out. If you are an employee of an agent and maybe you're in sales and you are specifically for life insurance or auto insurance um or homeowners insurance. I know some offices do the specific sales, then I want you to create different personas for those people and how you can create those content. How can you curate those conversations with them as they come into the office? And what kind of marketing materials do you need on your desk so that way you can educate people when they come in for a payment and maybe you can upsell them on something else? All right, guys, let's create those personas, and I'll catch you next week on the Marketing Insurance Playbook.