If your agency wants to improve client retention and acquisition, marketing is a must. However, amid turbulence in the insurance industry, prioritizing marketing and communication is difficult.

Educational and informative content can be a powerful tool that establishes your agency as a knowledgeable, trusted adviser. However, all powerful tools have drawbacks. Marketing is a time-consuming process that pulls staff away from servicing accounts. Not only does it require extra talent, agencies also need to find the right talent to create and run successful marketing campaigns. And to top it off, not all your clients need the same information at the same time, which means effectively tailoring content to each segment can be a challenge.

Automating the process helps alleviate these challenges so your agency can retain more clients and easily win new business. Here are some of the most impactful ways automation can be integrated into the marketing process to make it more efficient for your staff:

1) Creating content. Creating content is the most time-consuming part of developing marketing campaigns. However, devoting staff to writing content instead of remarketing accounts and serving clients may not always be the best use of resources.

Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) can help you craft engaging content quickly. Simply decide the length, formality and subject matter, and let the power of generative AI provide descriptive text. The beauty of using generative AI for this task is that your staff is still in the driver's seat. AI drafts the content, but you can still review and make necessary edits.

You can take this a step further and create a library that houses this new content so your staff will not have to start from scratch for each campaign. A content library allows you to quickly pull evergreen content to share with your clients when the time is right.

2) Syncing data. Now that you have your content, you need to send it out, which is easier said than done. Managing contact information is tedious and risky. Rekeying data costs your staff time and opens you up to compliance risk if you send an email to someone who has opted out.

Automating this process by integrating your marketing platform into your agency management system (AMS) takes the manual labor out of managing updates, contact information and subscription preferences. This gives you peace of mind by knowing that you are reaching your clients without overcommunicating.

3) Targeting customer segments. Sending out mass email blasts to all your customers at once is not a reliable way to strengthen relationships. Effective marketing involves a more targeted approach to reach the right audience at the right time with the right message. However, audience segmentation is tricky and time consuming.

Automation tools allow you to set up campaigns ranging from one-off emails to complex, recurring campaigns all with the click of a button. You can develop targeted emails with timely information on topics that are relevant to specific segments of your agency's client base. Automating the campaign and list management processes makes it quick and easy for your staff.

Finding new ways to integrate automation into your marketing processes will help you win over new clients while keeping your existing ones—without depleting your resources.

Anupam Gupta is chief product officer at Applied Systems.