Five Reasons Your “Too Expensive” Excuse Is Costing Your Insurance Agency Growth

Fear of “spending too much” on marketing is one of the fastest ways to stall growth. We dig into five practical mindset shifts that transform scattered tactics into a focused system: reframe marketing as an investment, stop paying for cheap shortcuts, build visible proof across Google and social, outpace competitors with smart timing, and design processes that save time and money over the long haul. If you’ve ever wondered why some agencies keep winning even without the biggest ad budgets, this conversation lays out the playbook.

We start by defining ROI before a dollar moves, then show how to track outcomes across paid social, community sponsorships, and brand campaigns. From there, we unpack why “cheaper” often means no strategy, weak creative, and zero accountability—and how that quietly inflates your cost per acquisition. Visibility takes center stage with simple wins: complete your Google Business Profile, post with intent, and collect recent reviews that validate your promise. We also talk about signaling expertise—like publishing a book or guide—to raise perceived value without changing your core knowledge.

Competition isn’t waiting, so we map local calendars and seasons to move first with relevant outreach, community events, and client touches. Finally, we share the systems that compound results: a clear message, defined audiences, a manageable content cadence, CRM tagging for attribution, and a monthly scorecard that keeps budgets honest. The goal is momentum you can measure and improve. Want ideas to get started fast? Grab our free resource with practical, low-cost tactics that build trust and drive quotes.

If this helped sharpen your strategy, follow the show, share it with a teammate, and leave a quick review so more agency owners can find it. Got a question or a win to share? Message us and tell us what you’ll implement first.

Transcript

Welcome And Purpose

The “Too Much Money” Mindset

Investment vs Expense

The Trap Of Cheap Marketing

Be Visible Or Be Forgotten

Stay Ahead Of Competitors

Good Marketing Builds Long-Term Savings

Free Resource And Closing

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Hey y'all, what is up? It is Shelby, the marketing broker. Thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of the Insurance Marketing Playbook Podcast. I hope you have been enjoying these for your insurance agency. These are great tips and super short episodes so that way you can grow your business in marketing and understand that this is going to help you in the future and know that you are capable of handling marketing for your business, or even maybe someone in your office can take some of these away as well. Today we're talking about five reasons of air quotes, if you're listening to this, I don't want to spend too much money on marketing, is the wrong mindset. I run into this all the time with potential customers of, okay, well, I want to do this, but I don't want to spend too much money. Okay, well, what does too much money look like? I don't really know. Like, what's your budget? What do you, you know, I need to know things like what is your strategy? What's your budget? What's your expectation? Because if you come at me with I don't want to spend too much money on marketing, I don't really understand where you're coming from. We need to make sure that there is a formula here of how much we spend on marketing and how much we want to get away from it, or like the ROI from that, right? And so I want us to change that mindset. And I'm gonna go through five ways of how we can change our mindset around marketing and spending a little bit of money and making sure that we do see a good ROI from those. The first one is marketing is an investment and not an expense. I hear this a lot of like, oh, well, you can write it off. Absolutely, you can still write off marketing on your taxes. Anything you do, if you're giving something to the community, if you're spending money on Facebook ads, if you're hiring agencies like mine, like, yes, all of that is an expense, but it's also an investment. And that's more important to change our mindset from the word expense to investment. The things that we are investing in is going to come back as some sort of ROI. Like, what is a return of investment on that thing? If we put a Facebook ad out, how many people clicked on it and went to our profile? If we give back to the community by sponsoring a baseball team, okay, how many quotes or how many people have called us from that baseball team since we've given that$250, you know? And some things we do in marketing, yes, it's an investment, but we want to make sure that it's just a branding investment, like a billboard. That would be more of a brand broad investment for marketing, just to get our name and face and things out there in front of people. So marketing is an investment and not just an expense. And I want us to change our mindset because the energy we're putting into that from the back end is what we're gonna get out of it. So if we have a bad attitude because we've spent$500 on a Facebook ad, then we're not putting good energy into that. We're actually putting bad energy and we're not gonna see that return that we want. So it's important to make sure our mindset is changed. The next one is very important. Cheap marketing is often the most expensive. I've had people hire other agencies and they were cheaper. Like that's literally the only reason why they went with them because they were quote unquote cheaper than me. But it did not compare apples to apples. So they didn't see a return of investment appropriately for the money that they spent with them. So sometimes if you do go with a cheaper person on marketing or if you do the cheap way of like, oh, well, I'm just gonna let my admin person do this, it'll be fine. Social media is not that hard. You know, they're 18 years old, they can post on social media. Well, maybe the branding is not right, maybe there's no hashtags, maybe there's no call to actions. Um, maybe they've misspelled a few words on there. Like, we wanna make sure that when we are investing into marketing, we're not just having that, oh, they're cheaper, and so let's go with them. It's okay, if I'm gonna spend this much money, what's my end goal with that person or that thing that I'm spending on marketing? And then understand that we can take our ROI from that. So let's just change our mindset. Let's not always go with cheaper, because sometimes cheaper means cutting corners, and if we're cutting corners in our marketing, then what are we doing for our clients or our customers on the other side? The third thing is if you're not visible, you are forgettable. So if you choose that marketing is just not your thing, or you're like, hey, listen, I pay for ads or leads all the time. I don't need to do marketing. Yes, you do. What if you call that person, you leave a voicemail, and they're like, okay, well, they want my insurance business. So then I'm gonna go Google them and see what their reviews look like? What do um, what are people saying about them? I'm gonna call around and ask about them. So if you're not on social media, if you are not on Google, if you are not showing up, then people do not know who you are, therefore you're forgettable, or they may not even call you back. So if you are buying leads, make sure that you have a marketing plan to back you up to make sure you are valuable and make sure that people know who you are. I wrote my book, Market Like a Boss. It increased my value as a person tremendously. I knew the same amount of information before I wrote the book, right? Hence me being able to write the book. But now that I have a book out, people are like, oh, well, let me ask you this question, or oh, okay, well, now that you do that, yeah, let's let's work together. I want to hire you. So just understand that when you are out there and you are visible, people know you. And if you're not, then your um client, I mean your competition down the road is gonna get that person before you and because they are marketing. So I want you to get ahead of the game and understand that even if we're doing a minimal marketing of social media, Google business profile, you're not running any ads, know that that is efficient and it is gonna help you in the future. Number four, your competitors are not holding back. So that just like I said, if you're not on social media and they are, then they're gonna win those customers over before you are. So just know that whatever marketing tactics you have in your strategy, that you have to be one step ahead of your competitors. I'm not saying be exactly like your competitor because I can't be like my competitor because I am who I am. You are who you are in the insurance world. So I want to make sure that you understand that. Be true to who you are when it comes to marketing, be authentic, but also understand that you need to try to be one step ahead. If you're in a small town, like what can you do during the summer before they do it? Or customer appreciation, how can you get ahead of that person before they um start doing things and then it looks like you're copying. We don't want to look like we're copying them. We want to look like we are different from them and doing something before they do it. So just be hyper aware of like when school season starts and sports season starts, like what can you do before your competitors do it? So that way you can be one step ahead. And the last thing is is good marketing saves time and money in the long term. So understand that building strong systems and strong marketing strategies at the beginning is gonna help you save time and money at the end. You may be like, oh, well, this is a big investment at the beginning of all this. Absolutely it is. But understand that when you start on a good foundation, just like a house, right? If we have a great foundation in our marketing or on our house, like we know that the bones we build on top of that are gonna stay there and they're gonna be stable. Yes, we may have to switch some things around budget-wise or we may have to shift our strategy mid-year or something like that. But no, when we start um on a good foundation with good marketing systems, then we will be successful in the end. So those are the five things I wanted to talk about today. Marketing is an investment, not just an expense. Cheap marketing is often the most expensive type of marketing. Um, if you're not visible, you are forgivable or forgettable, and your competitors are not holding back, and good marketing will save time and money on the end. And if you are someone that needs help with ideas on marketing, you are always welcome to download my resource, 55free marketingideas.com. That is 55free marketingideas.com that you can use to um establish a good marketing presence for your insurance agency. Um, they're all free ideas. So I want you to know that you can take it and do with it what you want. Maybe you can do 10, maybe you can do 12, maybe you can do 48. Um, whatever it is, I know that you will be able to see success in your marketing if you start strong and you have those strategies. All right, guys, I'm Shelby, the marketing broker. I'll catch you next week.