Revolutionizing the Insurance Industry: The Impact of AI in Marketing for Summer 2023
Heraclitus is credited with the idea that “the only constant in life is change” and there has never been more of an example of that than right now with Artificial Intelligence. It is an understatement to say that “AI has changed nearly everything that utilizes technology”. However, it has been one of the core responsibilities of my job to stay on top of AI, and it is nearly impossible, because it is constantly changing. So, while this article will be good as of Summer 2023, our aim is to come back and update it as technology changes.
So without further ado:
Step 1: Enhancing Customer Experience with AI in Insurance Marketing: Know Your Audience 2.0.
The most foundational thing you can do in AI insurance marketing is get the right message to the right potential client at the right time. What that means is that you really have to know your audience. You have to know them at a macro level, and you also have to install tools to understand how to reach them at a micro level.
Let’s talk about the macro level first. One of the first things I want to know about my target audience is who they are.
Understanding your target audience and developing buyer personas are pivotal to any successful marketing strategy. Insurance companies must identify their target audience to understand who they are communicating with, their needs, and how their products or services can meet them.
We recommend you take the time to review extensive buyer persona exercises. Buyer personas are fictional representations of ideal customers, further helping businesses delve into the specifics – demographics, buying habits, interests, challenges, and motivations. This deep understanding enables businesses to leverage AI for personalized insurance marketing campaigns. NOTE: Sometimes, this can be challenging to do internally, and we recommend using an outside agency or company to walk you through this process.
AI technology Aids:
We have used tools like ChatGPT4, Bard, and Claud.ai to help us develop a foundational buyer persona. These are often incorrect by about 40 to 50%; however, it does give you a strong organizational head start and it can help you keep things organized as you take it back to your team to work through the questions and answers of the persona to make sure the details are 100% correct.
Another AI insurance marketing tool that we like to use is Sparktoro. SparkToro is an audience research tool that helps you understand your target audience, what they talk about, and where to reach them. It provides you with data on their demographics, interests, online behavior, and social media activity. Some capabilities of Sparktoro include:
- Audience Explorer: This tool allows you to search for any topic or keyword and see a detailed breakdown of the interested audience. This includes their demographics, interests, online behavior, and social media activity.
- Influencer Discovery: SparkToro can help you identify relevant influencers for your target audience. You can see their reach, engagement, and audience demographics.
- Ad Tester: This tool allows you to test different ad copy and targeting options to see what performs best.
- Email Finder: SparkToro can help you find the email addresses of your target audience.
- Export: You can export the data you collect from SparkToro to a spreadsheet or CSV file.
Step 2: Develop an Editorial Calendar & Content Creation Schedule
After collecting detailed information on your target audience, the next step is to develop an editorial calendar. This will help you go from being reactive to proactive with your marketing. Your editorial calendar will allow you to plot out what content you anticipate writing and when it will be published. The calendar will help you be accountable to know what content is going out in the next 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, 6 months, or even a year. It will take into account factors such as your business’s seasonality, critical trade shows you need to attend, important events that could impact your business, and product launches.
Once you have developed your editorial calendar, we recommend connecting each of your content pieces to keywords that can be optimized for SEO. After you have developed your editorial calendar, you can run it through ChatGPT and ask it questions such as:
- Are there any gaps in my calendar?
- Are there any critical keywords or elements in my strategic plan that would impact my potential audience more?
- What am I trying to accomplish by consistently putting out content?
- What is the best mix of content formats for my audience?
- How often should I publish new content?
- What are the best times to publish content?
- How can I improve my content marketing strategy over time?
Step 3: AI-Powered Marketing Strategies for the Insurance Sector: Prime Your Content
One of the biggest mistakes that we see insurance companies make when using AI-powered tools like ChatGPT4, BARD, or Bing AI is that they open up the platform and immediately start talking to it. However, even though the AI is brilliant, it still needs to understand the complete context of what you’re talking about, your goals, and your potential audience.
Therefore, We recommend that you use an approach we call “Chat Priming”. This approach involves feeding the chat tool with as much contextual information as possible, which helps to eliminate AI hallucinations and produce more accurate and high-quality output.
Things that we recommend that you prime the tool with are:
- Buyer personas: These are detailed profiles of your ideal customers, including their demographics, pain points, and goals.
- Statistics: Data about your industry, your competitors, and your target audience.
- Case notes: Examples of how your products or services have helped customers in the past.
- Quotes and testimonials: From thought leaders in your industry or from your own customers.
- Best performing pages on your website: This will give the tool a better understanding of your brand and content.
- Best performing social media posts: This will give the tool a better understanding of your audience and how they interact with your brand.
- Your marketing materials: This will give Bard a better understanding of your messaging and tone of voice.
Note to reader:
ChatGPT, Bard, and Bing have a small context window (token limit), so if you plan to use these tools, you must import your primed content in 500-word segments.
However, a tool called Claude.ai by Anthropic allows you to upload or import up to 100k tokens worth of content. This is equivalent to 75,000 words, which is the size of most books. The more you prime Claude.ai with content, the better and more accurate results you will get.
Once you import all of this into the chat tool, you can prompt it to generate content for you, but use all of the contexts you previously provided. This will allow you to develop content that utilizes the power of AI, but still sounds like you and your brand.
Step 4: AI Underwriting and Risk Assessment in Insurance Marketing: Connect it to Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is a powerful tool that can help businesses consistently communicate with potential customers who have previously engaged with their marketing.
Before the advent of AI, drip marketing was a manual process requiring businesses to create and send individual emails to each potential customer. This was time-consuming and inefficient, and it wasn’t easy to track the effectiveness of these emails.
With marketing automation, businesses can now automate sending emails to potential customers, allowing businesses to save time and resources in their drip marketing process and track the effectiveness of their emails more accurately.
According to Hubspot, 63% of businesses that use marketing automation report increased leads. 63% is a massive number, and we have a very effective way to generate new business for insurance companies using drip marketing and marketing automation.
If someone comes to your website and fills out a form, you could send them a series of emails that provide them with information about:
- Overview of your insurance company
- Products or services.
- Cost of Procrastination messaging
- Client Testimonials & case studies
- And offer to take the first step to know about your business
AI can be used to power marketing automation in many ways. For example, AI can be used to write content for emails, track the effectiveness of emails, and personalize emails for each individual recipient.
Open AI’s Code Interpreter is a tool that can be used to analyze exported analytics from marketing automation platforms. This allows businesses to track the effectiveness of their marketing automation campaigns and make necessary adjustments. The more businesses analyze their content, A/B Test it, and rework it, the better their results will be. Companies can save time, resources, and money by using marketing automation. They can also track the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns more accurately and generate more leads.
Step 5: Develop AI-Generated Social Media
AI can generate social media posts that are relevant to your target audience and contain the right messages that will generate, nurture, and ideally convert leads into business. But before you get started, it is important to know that social media is designed to be just that: “Social”. Utilizing AI can save you time and energy, but it is important to note that AI cannot replace human creativity, so never just prompt and publish. Always revise and improve your content with a human touch.
To develop an AI-generated social media post, you can use AIPRM, a free Chrome plugin that connects to ChatGPT4. Prompts generated by AIPRM allow you to generate 30 or more social media posts simply by adding some contextual details, such as who your target audience is and what keywords you want to use for your prompt.
Once you have generated some social media posts, you can import them into Canva.ai. Canva.ai will allow you to take these posts and create social media graphics in various formats to fit critical platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Engage:
While it is great that AI can develop graphics quickly and effectively, it is important to note that AI cannot replace human interaction. As people begin to engage with your social media, it is important to have someone in charge of creating a conversation and dialogue on social media channels. This will help you to get the most out of the experience.
Here are some additional tips for developing AI-generated social media posts:
- Use clear and concise language. AI-generated posts should be easy to understand and scannable.
- Use relevant keywords. Ensure that the keywords you use in your posts are relevant to your target audience and that they will likely be searched for.
- Use eye-catching images. Images can make your posts more engaging and visually appealing.
- Track your results. Use analytics tools to track the performance of your social media posts and see what is resonating with your audience.
Step 6: Use Code Interpreter to Talk to Your Data
One of the most profound leaps offered to paid users of ChatGPT is Code Interpreter. Code Interpreter allows you to import data sets and spreadsheets into the AI, which then analyzes your data and creates visualizations that help you to understand it better. You can also ask Code Interpreter questions about your data, such as “What trends do you see?” or “Can you visualize the data meaningfully?”
This information, combined with data from Google Analytics, can help you make data-driven marketing decisions. For example, you could use Code Interpreter to identify which marketing channels are most effective for reaching your target audience or to track the performance of your marketing campaigns over time.
Here are some sample questions:
- What are my most popular pages? This would help me to understand what content is resonating with my audience and what I should focus on creating more of.
- Where are my visitors coming from? This would help me to understand where my marketing efforts are most effective and where I should focus my attention.
- What are my most popular keywords? This would help me to optimize my website for search engines and attract more visitors.
- What are my bounce rates? This would help me to understand how engaged my visitors are with my content and where I can improve my website’s user experience.
- What are my conversion rates? This would help me to understand streamlining lead generation and conversion with AI in insurance marketing.
- What are my most popular social media channels? This would help me to understand where my audience is spending their time and where I should focus my social media marketing efforts.
- What are my most popular times of the day? This would help me understand when my audience is most active and when to schedule my marketing campaigns.
- What are my most popular devices? This would help me to understand how my audience is accessing my website and how I should optimize my website for different devices.
- What are my most popular demographics? This would help me understand my audience and how I can tailor my marketing messages to them.
- What are my audience’s most popular interests? This would help me to understand what my audience is interested in and how I can create content that is relevant to them.
Taking the First Step and Measuring Success: Analytics and Metrics for AI-Driven Insurance Marketing
AI has dramatically changed the landscape of how we do business and how we market our products and services. One of the questions we often get is, “Will AI replace marketers?” We like to quote something by Paul Rozer: “AI won’t replace marketers, but marketers who use AI will replace those who don’t.”
If you are an insurance company looking for ways to improve your marketing, we encourage you to try this six-step approach (transparently, there are over six steps, but this is a great start).
This article may make it sound like using AI insurance marketing is simple. However, it takes work. It is highly recommended that you use an agency to help you take what you have learned in this article and scale it throughout your organization’s marketing. Companies that scale effectively with AI are more likely to outperform their competition.
If you’d like to know how we’ve helped organizations like Philadelphia Insurance, ProWriters, and others implement this approach, please contact us.
