Your Insurance Agency and its Need for a Good Brand
Good branding can make or break a business. Not only is it important for making a business internally consistent, but it’s also a cornerstone of effective marketing. Being able to sell the merits of your insurance agency brand can mean the difference between landing a new client or having them slip through your fingers. Every insurance agency needs a solid, approachable brand to stand behind, for very practical reasons.
Below, we’ll walk you through all the ins/outs of branding and why it’s so important – explaining some key points along the way.
Who needs a brand 
Branding isn’t just for major corporations with hundreds of employees. Every business including insurance agencies can benefit from a good, well-designed brand that fits their style and quickly tells customers, and potential customers, who they are and what they stand for.
An insurance agency brand isn’t something most people think about often, but nailing your branding should be top of the list for any insurance agency looking to go the distance.
Custom branding is really worth the initial outlay for any serious agency. While it can cost you upfront to have a brand and website designed to fit your agency’s style and voice, the marketing potential that this opens up is immense.
Every agency needs a good, solid, well-designed brand identity to use as a sort of north star for all their client-facing business. Using your brand guidelines to inform your public-facing work helps ensure that everything your agency does feels consistent and cohesive.
Clients and potential clients will ideally have a good idea of what to expect from your brand before you ever speak to them directly; the overall tone and direction should be clear in your brand assets.
But all of this sounds pretty complicated, doesn’t it? This is where it’s best to call in the professionals to design an effective, approachable brand you and your entire agency can stand behind.
What is a brand made of
What sort of things make a good brand?
There are many things that go into a good, creative brand design, from color choices to font selections. Just searching for an ‘insurance agency brand’ isn’t likely to let you in on all the under-the-hood work that goes into these sorts of strong and memorable designs.
A good brand has a clear focus. Before anything else, you should be able to nail down and clearly state your agency’s mission, the benefits of working with you over other agencies, and what your key values are.
All of this will help to form the foundation of the brand, around which everything else can be built. Without that solid internal framework, it doesn’t matter how sleek your brand looks from the outside – people aren’t going to be able to connect with it, identify it at a glance, and know what they’re getting when they work with you.
That said, there are also a lot of tried and true ‘rules’ and guidelines for everything from logo design to full-on web design. While having a basic knowledge of these guidelines is nice, just knowing them isn’t going to make you an expert in design. Like any skill, there’s a learning curve involved. It’s better to partner with someone who knows this space well than have to backtrack and update your original design work later on when your business has already gained some traction. In short, pulling the professionals in from the start will save you both time and stress down the line.
Designing a Brand
Complementary colors and a clear, easy-to-read logo are essential to any brand out there, regardless of theme or intended audience. Associating your brand with the right colors and symbols is half the battle sometimes.
Decide on these early on and stick with them for the best results. Rebranding, even in small ways like a color change, can be hard on any business, especially one that isn’t all that well-established yet.
When a brand is truly built well, it understands both its audience and its competition. It reflects and reinforces its key values and benefits in everything it does, and it manages to do this consistently across all channels the brand is active on. A solid brand identity does speak for itself.
When should you be showing your brand?
The shortest answer is: everywhere.
A good insurance agency brand will be more like a good fashion sense or a good fragrance. It’s noticeable and it informs your opinion about who someone is likely to be, but it’s not overpowering.
Showing your brand can mean pointing clients in the direction of other businesses or organizations that fit with your brand’s goals, organizing events that showcase your agency’s benefits or key values, or even something as simple as giving everyone’s email signatures the same theme.
Websites for insurance agents need to be clear, readable, and functional. More than that, they should also aesthetically fit in with your agency’s overall branding. That may mean using bright colors and a friendly tone in your copy, or keeping things more fact-focused and choosing darker shades for your images. Whatever your agency’s brand identity is, it should be clear and noticeable in everything your agency does.
Showing your brand will mean showing what matters to you as an agency, consistently and woven into everything you do. If you can manage this, you’ll walk away with a solid brand identity that people can recognize, relate to, and trust.
Where you should be showing off your brand
If you can realistically showcase your brand somewhere, make use of the space.
This goes for digital space, such as social channels, as well as physical space, such as conventions and conferences. Your brand should be infused into everything public-facing that your agency does.
This way, clients and potential clients know what to expect from working with you. Are they getting a fun but down-to-earth brand they can talk to like a friend, or are they getting a crisp, professional experience that’s more about making their lives flow a little easier?
It’s Who you Are
Whatever your brand identity, digital spaces like your agency’s official social channels are a great place to show it off. Headers and banners can be designed to perfectly capture what your brand identity is all about, while your key values and general style guide will inform what sort of content you produce. Keeping a consistent overall tone to your messages and updates helps people form a general image and feeling for your brand in their minds.
You can even leverage this sort of shorthand in more professional settings, such as conferences and conventions. The simple touch of a well-branded pen, notepad, bag, or other gift items can say a lot about how ‘put-together’ your agency is.
Simple branded gifts also serve another purpose – that of getting your agency’s name out there in ways influential people in your business are likely to notice.
How to build your brand
How do you start building a brand that people can trust and relate to – one that’s perfectly fitted to your agency?
Insurance web design is an important piece of the puzzle, but it’s not the whole of a brand’s story. Everything from social channels to email signatures can be created with an overarching insurance agency brand identity in mind.
It’s time to give your agency the best shot at longevity and success you can by creating a brand identity that will stand the test of time.
We’ll help you through every step of the process, from choosing key values and viewpoints to finalizing the color choices and logo designs. Your final brand identity will be as unique as your agency is, and will let potential clients know they’re in the right place for their needs.
Why does your insurance agency brand matter
Why bother building a brand? Building a brand means much more than just nailing down what colors you want to be associated with your agency’s name. It’s about building a relationship with your clients!
A strong, well-designed brand will help drive business and take a lot of marketing stress off your shoulders. Well-built brands can easily generate referrals, which often turn into conversions.
All of this adds value to your agency. Good brand recognition is a key part of marketing no matter your service or product, so starting with a strong, identifiable brand that people can connect with puts you in a great position to drive sales and generate long-lasting clients. Building your brand helps you build trust with your clients and that trust will often translate into retained clients and word-of-mouth referrals.
The Better your Brand the Better your Business
Finally, having a strong brand identity helps set you apart from the competition. Instead of blending into a sea of faceless agencies, you can stand out and make people remember your agency’s name, even when not directly interacting with them.
There’s also the chance that your agency will be picked up as a suggested page based on a potential client’s searches or overall taste in content. That sort of ‘word-of-web’ referral really can’t be bought.
Contact us
If you are looking to grow your insurance agency, contact us, and let’s build something great together!