
It can be frustrating when your insurance agency’s marketing efforts haven’t yielded great results. But sometimes, it helps to go back to the beginning, ensuring you fully grasp your ideal customer. A well-researched, comprehensive insurance customer profile may be the piece you’re missing!
What Is an Insurance Customer Profile/Avatar?
An insurance customer profile is a type of customer avatar—one that’s specific to the insurance industry. If you’re unfamiliar with this concept, here’s a brief overview…
A “customer avatar“ is a representation of your ideal customer. But more than that, it’s an outline of the buyer’s characteristics, including the following:
- Demographics
- Interests
- Behaviors
- Motivations
- Goals
- Challenges
Basically, creating a customer profile (or avatar) for your insurance agency involves developing a detailed overview of the potential policyholder you want to attract. This can help you and your team understand the needs and preferences of your target market better. Moreover, it can help you tailor your marketing and sales strategies accordingly.
Why Your Agency Needs One for Marketing Purposes
Having a fleshed-out insurance customer profile is a must. It ensures you and your team understand exactly to whom you’re trying to sell coverage. That way, you can take a more strategic marketing approach for better results. After all, if you don’t know critical details about your ideal customer, how can you market your products and services effectively?
With a well-developed profile of your ideal insurance customer, you can create messaging that resonates, choose the right tactics, build a presence on the right platforms, and more. Ultimately, it informs your entire marketing strategy, setting you up for greater success. That’s why creating profiles/avatars is one of the top insurance marketing tips out there.
5 Steps for Creating an Insurance Customer Profile
Creating an insurance customer profile isn’t as simple as jotting down information you think you know about your ideal customer. If you really want to get it right (and you should), you need to put in more effort.
Here are 5 steps to take…
1) Define Your Target Market.
The first step in creating an insurance customer profile is to identify the type of customers your agency wants to target. Of course, you probably have more than one ideal customer. But to avoid getting overwhelmed and to focus your efforts, it’s best to start small.
Consider what coverage you want to push most and who will most likely buy it. Alternatively, you can consider which policy option delivers the highest customer lifetime value (CLV). To define your target market, you must determine who needs, can afford, and sees value in that offering.
You can narrow it down even more by doing the following:
- Analyze your current customer base: Look at your existing customers to see which ones best represent your ideal customer. This can also help you identify patterns that may indicate the type of customers your agency is most successful in serving.
- Research your competitors: Review the types of customers that your competitors are targeting. This can help you identify gaps in the market that your agency could potentially fill.
- Consider external factors: Analyze trends and events that may impact the insurance market, such as changes in regulations, economic conditions, or consumer preferences.
2) Gather Demographic & Geographic Information.
Once you’ve defined your target market, gather demographic and geographic information. You need to know your ideal customer’s age, gender, income, education level, occupation, marital status, location, and language. These details will come into play when you build your insurance customer avatar.
Here’s how to compile this information:
- Check your CRM: Log in to your CRM platform and pull relevant information you’ve saved for current customers who fit your ideal customer.
- Do secondary research: Conduct research to find out more about your target audience. This may involve looking at government census data, market research reports, or other relevant sources.
- Conduct surveys: Create a survey or questionnaire to gather specific demographic information from your target audience. This can be done through online surveys or phone or in-person interviews.
- Use social media: Social media platforms can be useful tools for gathering demographic information. You can gain valuable insights by analyzing your followers’ and prospects’ profiles.
- Use lead generation tools: Use lead generation tools to gather demographic information from website visitors or people who fill out contact forms.
3) Understand Their Challenges and Pain Points.

The next step is figuring out your target market's challenges and pain points.
What pain points are they experiencing?
What problem(s) do they have that insurance can solve?
What are their concerns and fears related to insurance?
Understanding these things is a crucial aspect of selling insurance policies effectively. It lets you speak directly to your ideal customer’s problem and position your offering as a solution. That’s why you need to dig deep into the issues facing your target market by…
- Garnering insights from surveys, polls, interviews, etc.
- Practicing social media listening
- Reviewing existing customer data
- Looking at customer service call transcripts
- Referring to your own and your competitors’ testimonials
4) Identify Sources of Information & Psychographics.
Next, compile psychographic data about your ideal customer. Learn as much as you can about their hobbies, goals, values, beliefs, motivations, habits, and sources of information. This can help you create marketing messages that resonate with them.
You can get this information by taking the following actions:
- Interviewing or polling current customers who fit your ideal customer
- Reviewing outside research on individuals in your ideal customer’s age group
- Looking at social media groups, Quora questions, and subreddits
Ultimately, you want to get details about your ideal customer from a psychological standpoint. That way, you can understand why they might buy a policy from you and how to frame your messaging.
5) Put It All Together.
Once you’ve completed the steps above, it’s time to combine everything into an insurance customer profile. You’ll want to document everything you’ve learned about your ideal customer and make it accessible to everyone in your agency.
Remember, this is meant to represent one ideal customer, so keep it narrow and specific.
A good approach is to make a chart or worksheet. Create a fictional character to represent your ideal customer using the key traits you identified. Give them a name, age, occupation, and location. The goal is to make them feel like a real person. Add all the information you compiled, splitting everything into sections for easy readability.
To take it a step further, consider adding an image of your ideal customer. You can use a tool like Canva to help visualize the person you’re trying to sell to.
Advice on Applying Your Insurance Customer Profile
After you’ve created your insurance customer profile, put it to good use! Make sure that your marketing strategy aligns with the type of policyholder you want to do more business with. More specifically, use your avatar to guide your marketing efforts.
For example…
- Select the channels that your ideal customer frequents most often.
- Use targeted advertising to reach people of the same age, in the same location, etc.
- Create content that addresses the pain points your ideal customer has.
- Apply language that resonates with your ideal customer.
- Tailor your messaging based on where they are in their customer journey.
Finally, measure the success of your marketing strategy by tracking key metrics like website traffic, conversion rates, and customer feedback. Use this information to refine your strategy and continue to improve your results over time. The more you learn about your ideal customer, the better.
Takeaway
If you don’t understand your ideal customer, how can you hope to reach them? Without this knowledge, you’ll likely waste time and money trying to target everyone you think may benefit from the policies you offer. Don’t make this mistake. Instead, create an insurance customer profile that uncovers valuable insights. That way, you can be sure your marketing efforts are geared toward them, improving your results and closing more insurance sales.
Need help with your marketing efforts? Learn how we can help you grow your insurance agency!