How to Market Your Insurance Agency in 2022 - Physical Bandit Signs vs Digital Bandit Signs

Hey, what's going on guys? It's Angel here, and in this video I am going to break down the difference between a physical banded sign and a digital banded sign. And the reason I'm making this video is because a lot of my clients before enrolling with me have told me that, you know, this is one of the strategies that they use alongside like, you know, dinners and, you know, Walmart and CVS and things like this. And, you know, I just wanted to make this video to kind of explain the differences to those who haven't necessarily compared the two in this way. This is gonna be a short video, so let's dive right into it. So what I'm gonna be breaking down is the difference between the two strategies, the pros, the cons of each one, so that you can justify what route makes most sense to you. And of course, our motto, educate, never manipulate, every single day of the week. The reason that we have that as our motto is because in the insurance space, there's a lot of companies out there that manipulate in order to get the business or manipulate in order to transfer an individual looking for insurance, right, by, you know, scamming them or by saying certain things to, you know, make them feel scared and make them transfer. And then at the end of the day, they don't even know how they got on the call with the agent, etc. So, you know, education is the way to go. That is the way that you're gonna earn business. That's the way that you're gonna build a brand. That's how people are gonna remember you and refer you their friends and other people that may be a benefit that may also want insurance and why not enroll them with you. So let's get into it. So this is an example of a bandit sign. For those who don't know it, this is somewhat similar to a flyer but not so much. Bandit sign, you would stick into the ground and you would place it in a place whether it's a corner in a neighborhood or wherever it is. Some people even put bandit signs at the top of a post. So rather than using this little silver thing, they usually like staple it up at the top of a post so that people can't actually access them. So if you can get that method done that way, it's going to be better than probably sticking it in the ground. So this is another example of an insurance banded sign. What I'm going to do is going to go ahead and start with the pros on the insurance banded sign. So let's get started. So one of the pros that you have is that you can feel them with your own hands. Now I'll be honest with you, it was difficult coming up with the pros on banded signs considering we are in 2022 at the time of making this video. And as you know, banded signs are something that were invented back when the dinosaurs were on this planet. So like, you know, when your grandpa and grandma were driving dinosaurs to work with license plates on it, that's when these banded signs were hot. So another pro is that you can place them wherever you want, and that's if you don't care of getting in trouble, of course, right? Because there's going to be certain places that by placing them there You know, you can get fined and if they find you, obviously you can get fined. And if your phone number is on there, I mean, it's not going to be that difficult to trace you and figure out who the owner of that bandit sign is. So you have to be very careful. Some cities are more strict than others and some places completely absolutely don't allow it. So there's going to be places that you won't be able to place a sign simply because they just don't allow that and you don't want to be soliciting, right? That's what they consider it. A pro is you can get hundreds of them made per day. You can go to a print shop, get these printed. A lot of them have templates and you can get them printed depending on where you go that same day and get a whole bunch of them done. A pro is your grandpa will tell you this is a good idea, right? Because back when he was growing up, you know, the digital space didn't exist. So, you know, back then this, flyers, pinwheels, you know, guys flipping signs, you know, those those things that like wiggle and stuff and make a bunch of things in front of your retail store, right, to capture attention, right? Those wiggly like balloon-looking things, right? You know, all those things your grandpa will tell you, "High five there, great job!" You know, "That's a great idea!" You know, so it's because, you know, they don't know what they don't know, and if that's all they know, that's what they're going to consider to be the best route of action. Now the other pro is that you'll piss off the city officials. So if you're someone who you know, doesn't necessarily agree with certain rules, right? You can easily piss these guys off by putting bandit signs in their corners and things like that. So, you know, that is a pro if you find that to be a pro in your world, right? Now, cons: you can plant them, but they may get removed, blown with the wind, detached by a competitor, or even stolen, right? And that's money you can't ever get back, right? That's a complete con. If someone steals it, you know, that's it for that bandit sign. You have to go buy another one. You can't track which bandit sign is working and which ones are not. So unless you have a completely different phone number on every single one of your bandit signs, it's going to be physically impossible to track which bandit sign was the one that generated the call so that you will know where to place more bandit signs and where not to place bandit signs, right? So that way the next time you, you plant these, you don't burn money and bandit signs in places that they're one, going to get removed, and two, no eyeballs are there. And 3, your target market might not even be in that neighborhood, right? So you're assuming also that, you know, where you place these bandit signs, you know, your customers hang out, right? So, you know, those are things that unfortunately you can't track with bandit signs. Now, you need to print and place hundreds to basically guarantee someone calling to account for the ones getting removed, right? So, you know, don't expect to get calls coming in if you're only placing 5 or 10 of these things. You need to place like 100, 200, even 500 bandit signs right now at any given time to actually see some yield from it, right? Because you need attention, you need as many of these things out in as many corners as possible because you have to account for the wind blowing, you have to account for the tree blocking the view from the side of the road, you have to account for, you know, a ton of different things that you have absolutely no control over. I mean, you do, but No one's going to pinpoint all these things for hundreds of bandit signs at a time. I mean, even if you hired your neighbor to do this for you, they're not going to adjust and use the ruler and look at the line of sight to make sure where it's going to be the best place to put the bandit sign. A lot of them won't have access to place them high up, and so these are things you have to account for. They're naturally going to be removed. I mean, I remember I did a bandit sign. I was working at the time with real estate. And I placed the bandit sign at the beginning of the day. I went back at the end of the day after finishing to place all the bandit signs just to look at the bandit sign one time to pretend as if I were the one driving through. Next thing you know, I'm like, where is it? It hasn't even been 7 hours. And next thing you know, I mean, it was completely— it was pushed down to the point where the wind actually got it to a point where you couldn't even read what it said. 7 hours later of wind, I mean, that whole sign was completely bent to the point where even the metal bearing was bent. So those are things unfortunately that you can't control. In some circumstances, people use bandit signs to advertise things that aren't necessarily allowed to advertise on different platforms or social platforms and things like that. So besides that, it's something that you can't really control. You have to spend a good amount of money to place a good amount to actually get the yield that you're looking for. That, but you know, consistency, right? Because you don't want to place 100 bandit signs and then get like 3 calls in the entire month, right? You want consistency. You want hopefully calls to come in every single day, right? So that's why you need to place hundreds of these to actually get that yield that you're looking for. Now you can scale bandit sign campaigns in the areas where it's working and pull the others to avoid wasting time and money. Once again, because you can't track where you place the bandit signs, so you can't know unless you assume that this neighborhood isn't as good as that neighborhood and so on and so forth and things like this. Or let's say you know that this zip code is the zip code that makes most sense even though you can't necessarily figure that out, but if you did, you'd naturally put more bandit signs in that section of the neighborhood or in that zip code because the data dictates that you should do that. You can justify that action by the data. Now you can't scale beyond your local radius or neighborhood unless you have an army willing to place bandit signs, right? So, you know, in my case, I think I placed, you know, maybe 50 bandit signs and that took like 6 hours because, right, you're not going to be placing a bandit sign right next to the other. You're going to place them and you're going to spread them out, right, so you can kind of, you know, cover a bigger radius, right? Because, you know, the idea is that you're going to place a sign that's really bright in a corner and hopefully that sign generates calls and then you're going to go place it 2 blocks down a different corner. Corner, or even one block separate from each other, right? So that takes time, takes drive time. You gotta pull over to the side of the road. You gotta make sure that there isn't a police officer. You have to make sure that no one's gonna run you over. You gotta make sure that you're actually allowed to even place a sign there. So there's a lot of things that you need to do per sign that people don't really think about, and that is either gonna cost you time or money, right? And the time that it takes doesn't necessarily exchange with the amount of money that you get out of it. So these are the things you have to weigh out. It's like time is our most valuable asset. Money, there's abundance everywhere. We only have so much time in a day, right? So spending 8 hours placing some signs to yield maybe 3 calls a month, I mean, that to me isn't necessarily a good exchange of time, right? The other hand is like if half of them blow away, you just drained that much money down the toilet when There's better ways to do this. Now, tracking your abandoned signs at any given time is literally and physically impossible without visiting the site that you physically placed it to confirm it's still there. So like I mentioned at the beginning, it's like I went back to where I first placed the first few signs and then it wasn't there. It wasn't there completely. So it was either pushed down or completely gone. So these are the things that I'm talking about that just is an unfortunate thing about bandit signs, but people still do it till this day because that's all they know, right? And you can't escape a prison that you don't know you're in, etc., etc., etc., right? I mean, I can keep going on with the cons because, I mean, we're not in the dinosaur age anymore, right? We're in 2022, you know, where you have little kids driving Lamborghinis because, you know, they have cracked the code on the digital space, right? So This is where the insurance game needs to step up and get ahead, right? Because there's very few insurance agents that have the step up because they're still doing things like this and putting all their marketing dollars into campaigns like this. And then at the end of the day, the yield is not very good and they keep doing that and expect different results. And that's just an example of insanity, right? I mean, doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. Let's move on to digital banded signs. So drum roll, right? You guys were probably expecting it. Digital banded signs are, you know, whether it's a newsfeed post on Google, uh, or, you know, you make a post on your, on your Google listing and, you know, bam, that's a digital banded sign, right? Or you're making a newsfeed post on your Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or TikTok or whatever it is, you're making a video, right? These are digital banded signs, right? Because they're essentially a message, right? Whether it's, you know, wrapped up in a post or in a video, and you're, you know, sending that off to a place where you can attract eyeballs, which is the exact same thing that a bandit sign does. Now, these platforms are massively advantageous because, you know, they have so many users. And with the insurance space, you know, your customers are on these platforms. They're on every single one of these platforms. So You know, each of these platforms is what is called a tactic, which is, you know, just simply a vehicle of delivering your message, right? Because every single one of these tactics work, right? You're watching this video on YouTube, right? You found this video simply by typing in something related to this video, and so YouTube showed you this video. So here you are, right? And so that's organic, meaning, you know, search with intent. Someone was looking for the thing and they found the thing, and here you are. Now, other platforms work differently. The idea is, is that you understand the tactic that you're using and you're running the appropriate strategy on that avenue, right, or in that tactic, right, to actually yield the result that you're looking for, right? Because, you know, I get it every single day, you know, Facebook sucks, you know, Twitter sucks, TikTok sucks, YouTube sucks, all this stuff sucks. Right, but the reality is, isn't that the platform sucks because, you know, the second you make a post on Facebook, right, and it's out there and you're starting to get impressions or eyeballs, that platform did its job, right? Second you post a video on YouTube and it goes out there, right, YouTube did its job. The second you make a post on Google, same thing, right? The avenues did their job. Now the difference between getting a result or not is the strategy that you're running behind these tactics, right, to actually yield the result, right? And in our case, when it comes to insurance, we educate to do that, right? So we're educating people to yield, to get their attention, to then yield the result that we're wanting, which is an exchange of information typically, so that we can actually reach out and professionally guide them to the solution that they're looking for. So, pros and cons of digital bandit signs. So let's start with the cons on this side. So the cons is it actually takes 5 whole minutes of your time to make a free post either in a group or on your newsfeed wall where your potential clients can see them. So it's a whole 5 minutes you need to sacrifice, you know, in order to think about it, type it, click the button, post, and boom, now you got yourself a digital bandit sign. Made. Now the other con is, is you have to actually type out the ads or post to put on your wall and then find an image to capture attention, whether it's an image or video. You have to be creative. You can't just, you know, make something super bland because, you know, you have to make it pop. You need to stop, you know, someone scrolling, capture their attention for them to actually focus on what you're posting, right? You have to have a social media account, unfortunately, right? I've spoken to people who don't even have a social media account. And unfortunately, you can't leverage technology if, you know, in 2022, if you don't have an account. Even if it's just to make an account to run an ad, you know, you have to have one to access the people who do have accounts, right? And the people who do have accounts actually have money in their pocket that could be in yours, right? So you have to get comfortable with it in one shape or form in order to access, you know, the scalability that this platform— so these platforms allow you to do. Now to be super successful, you need to actually pay to play, fueling the ad spend on these ad platforms to reach more people. Now you can go organic like this, which is, you know, you're not necessarily paying to post. Like you see this video, I didn't charge you, I didn't pay for you to see this video. You found it organically. I got a pair of eyeballs from you, but I didn't pay for it. Essentially over time, YouTube actually pays you for getting eyeballs, which is why I'm gonna be making more consistent videos. And I appreciate you for watching it, so subscribe so you get notified of all the future videos, okay? But back to what I was saying is that if you really truly want to scale, you need to pay to play, which means get into the ad manager and put your money behind your offer and your brand and actually reach more people, access more people beyond your, your circle of influence or beyond your radius or beyond your neighborhood, right? Access other states, other countries, right? Get eyeballs from all different types of places because, I mean, these platforms have billions of people on them, right? Including seniors and, you know, your grandma and grandpa who need insurance, right? Now, con is that running ads does take skill and it can't be learned overnight. And you have to understand that that is the reason why you won't be able to understand why things aren't working. For you, right? So a lot of people get this mistake where they take a little ad course or they do this or whatever and they run one ad, you know, and it doesn't work. Or they run an ad and their ad account gets shut down, right? Now all of a sudden, you know, they get defeated, right? But not only do they get defeated one time, they get defeated again a second time when an expert comes to them and says, hey, I can do this for you and do it professionally and get a result. And then they defeat themselves again because they tell themselves that the platforms don't work because they didn't get a result. So they got double defeated, right? And so this is a problem that people have, and it's because they don't realize that just like anything, you know, to be done right, you need to take, you know, put practice, you have to experience, you have to trial and error, you have to fail forward so you learn what not to do most importantly than what to do, right? So, you know, someone like me is taking years of experience, years of managing clients, putting all of that, consolidating all of that, and essentially applying all the skill sets and all the things that I've learned into the clients that I take on and do the work for them. So, you know, that is the advantage of working with an expert over an amateur. You know, you're taking their years of experience and you're basically paying upfront for the lessons that I've already learned that you don't have to. And so you don't have to pay that expense, right? So, you know, you're basically paying to learn lessons that I've already learned and be ahead of the game and get the result much faster. Now let's talk about the pros. So you can pay or play for free on these platforms and generate new business either way. So that's a pro, right? You can go organic if you have a lot of time on your hands and you can make posts all the time, or if you don't have a lot of time and you have money, you can buy back your time by running an ad. And you know, it does all the promoting for you. Now you can take data-driven decisions on where it makes sense to scale and where it doesn't, right? Because when you're running an ad or you're on social, I mean, there's analytics and there's data points that you can study to make sure that you're, you know, scaling the right campaign or you're making the changes in the right places or you're turning off things that aren't working and things like that, which allows you to eliminate, you know, costs and eliminate money down the drain and get more production and get more profitability from your investment. Now you know what avenues are working for you or not based on statistics and not emotions. If you're running a Bandit Sign campaign, a physical Bandit Sign campaign, and let's say you place it in this corner and then you come and visit it and you don't see it there, you're going to get emotional about it and you're going to tell yourself, you know, that will never work, right? That's— that bandit sign will never work in that corner ever, and you'll never put that bandit sign ever again. Where, you know, the data doesn't necessarily dictate that. Maybe the next time you put it there, it doesn't get removed, and it might generate a call, but you won't know that because it's a bandit sign versus a digital bandit sign. You would know that if, you know, you're targeting this state versus that state, or that zip code versus that zip code, you know which zip code or what state is yielding a result versus which isn't. You know, even down to the demographics of male and female, the age groups. I mean, you can get so granular when you study the statistics to really pinpoint, you know, who is the person that's gonna, you know, be interested in your product or service. Now, your results are predictable. You look at the data, you know, you'll eventually realize, like, you put in a dollar, you get $3 out. You put in a dollar, you get $6 out. At that point, you know, you know how many single dollar bills you want to get or how many, you know, $5 bills you want to get, you know, right? So if you know for every dollar you get 5, you know how many dollar bills you want to put in. So results are predictable and you know whether you're going to get a result or not by studying the data, okay? Now this is literally infinitely scalable if you know what you're doing, right? Because each of these platforms once again is a different tactic that takes a different strategy, but each of them have billions and millions of users. So, you know, if you're maximizing on one, you can move to another and vice versa and do a hybrid of all of them and really break into the market that you're in. Now, no one can remove your ads or posts from these platforms, and the wind can't blow the ad away. Okay, so this is great because your competitor can't remove your ad if you have a fantastic ad, right? Your competitor can't remove it. If anything, they're going to try to steal it from you and try to recreate it. But if they don't understand the strategy on the backend or what you're doing on the backend to do the conversion, then it doesn't matter if they're trying to steal it. The strategy isn't going to work and they're not going to yield the result, which is why they're going to fail. These are the pros of digital bandit signs, which as you can tell just from this video It by far outweighs a physical bandit sign or even a flyer or even a regular bandit sign, you know, or billboards, like, you know, things like that, just because, you know, the main thing is you can't track or scale or turn off what isn't working. Thank you so much for watching. Once again, my name is Angel Pichardo and I specialize in helping insurance agents primarily in the Medicare, Medicare T65, final expense, ACA opportunities, and we have a program where we do all the work for you. Not only that, but we also provide you training and scripts so that you can get the most production out of your leads. If you want more information on those programs, you'll find the link in the comments below. You'll be able to book a call with me. If you found this video helpful, go ahead and subscribe, like the video, and then comment below any other topics that you want me to, you know, cover when it comes to insurance marketing or branding or positioning or things like that, so that I can go ahead and make a video for you guys to help you guys out. So once again, educate over manipulate. Become the next leader in your market. If that's you, go ahead and book a call down below. Let's take your insurance agency to the next level. Talk soon.