One of the biggest decision you’ll make in your life insurance business is selecting your niche. The niche you choose is often more important than how good you are at selling life insurance.
I know some great agents who are articulate, knowledgeable, great sales experience and have ample leads – but can’t break through the income level they desire because the niche they’re playing in is limiting them.
This leads me to believe that mid-level agents (not newbies, but not veterans) spend too much time on lower level thinking and tasks…and not enough time on higher level ones like picking the right niche and executing a marketing plan around it. By lower level thinking, I mean doing what everyone else is doing. In other words, the lower level thinkers are following the crowd of agents failing at buying internet leads, paying for websites without any clue on how to generate traffic and having the limiting belief that they can’t break through because they’ve tried everything.
Higher level thinkers are doing what most agents aren’t doing. They’re crafting their marketing plans around opportunity, under-served markets, their knowledge and learning to harness technology to implement it. These are the agents that are excelling rapidly in selling life insurance online and over the phone.
Do I Have To Pick a Niche?
My opinion is YES. And you need to become the go-to guy in that niche. Your niche can be your local area (great niche if you do it right!), it can be a health condition, it can be a certain product or a targeted group of people.
Many agents are starting life insurance blogs, so how does niche selection apply to you? Pick your target long-tail keywords and own them. My main blog has over 300 pages of content, there’s 10 articles that bring in over half the traffic. 3% of my content generates most of my traffic because I focus on those niches. Same with all my other websites. So I focus on marketing within those niches online and don’t pay much attention to my other pages.
If the niche you picked ends up being too small, then use the skills and knowledge you acquired to dominate another niche. The success timeline will be shorter since you have the experience now.
We’re in an industry where we’re competing with insurance companies, call centers and lead vendors who are all throwing money at the biggest platforms – TV, radio, search engines, online media etc. They haven’t niched down and that’s where the big opportunity lies for all of us indies.
What If Someone Is Already In A Niche I’d Like To Pursue?
Simple – study what they’re doing and do it better. Think on a higher level than them and go where they’re not. If they’re active in that niche and they’ve been there a while, it’s validation that it’s lucrative.
There is so much new technology that enables us to get in front of people that no one in our industry is doing – or at least they’re just barely scratching the surface. It’s an exciting time to be marketing life insurance if you can think on a higher level.
Don’t be scared of technology – hire an expert to do it. That’s how I built my business.
Bottom Line
Pick a niche and get in the game. Even if you fail, you’ll pick up some marketing skills and insights along the way and most likely discover another niche.
There’s so much potential for agents selling online right now it keeps me up some nights. I only have a certain amount of bandwidth to execute my own marketing and I see so much opportunity in other areas of life insurance and even the niches that I’m playing in.
Which is one of the reasons I’ve started an online community for life insurance agents who sell over the phone and market online. This will soft launch in December. I’m in the process of uploading all my resources so everyone has access them. I’ll send out an email when it opens.
