Internet Marketing for Insurance Agents - Choosing Options
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The internet is woven into every aspect of insurance agency marketing: websites, email, social media marketing, SEO, local search...and more. But how to choose the programs for your insurance agency? That depends on just a few factors, all of which are easily quantified, such as your sales objectives and their time horizons, your budget, and your internal capacity. Once you know these, it is a simple matter of reviewing the unique characteristics of different internet marketing options. It is worth keeping mind that requirements for unique, informative, and engaging content are required across most internet marketing channels and campaigns.
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Internet Marketing for Insurance Agents - Choosing Options
- 1. More Visibility, More Leads, More Sales for local insurance agencies August 30, 2011
- 2. Kevin McDonald President, Confluency Solutions 877.351.2600 ext. 5 kmcdonald@cfluent.com About Confluency Solutions Websites, internet marketing, including social media, SEO, eMail marketing...exclusively for independent insurance agents since 2004. www.confluencysolutions.com
- 3. Relax, Choosing is Easy Agenda • Visibility means internet • Internet options • Program characteristics • Making a case • The Matrix
- 5. Internet Marketing: def. any internet-based communication intended to establish or build a brand, generate leads, or capture new customers or additional sales from current customers.
- 6. We Know What to Do But what to do now, and what to do later? No tactic is ‘wrong’, inherently but...
- 7. Time and Money ...are finite resources... ...or you probably can’t do everything all at once...
- 8. What You Said 14% of you are blogging 11% of you are emailing clients at least monthly 46% have claimed the Google Place page for your agency 53% have set up a Facebook Page for your agency 94% of those that have Facebook Pages have under 100 ‘likes’
- 9. Level of Marketing Activity (Leads are Proportionate to Activity) 8 Marketing Options Local Search - Website SEO - Website Email Social Traditional Advertising PPC (Text - SMS) (Purchase Leads) Mix 1 Mix 2 Mix 3 1. Do it yourself Time Money 2. Pay for services 3. Do nothing
- 10. “Strategic organizations tend to divide their budgets across staff salaries, outsourced agency services, and for-fee SEO marketing and analytics tools.” --Marketing Sherpa 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report The best agencies budget between 3% and 5% of revenues for marketing (1% to 3% for very large firms), with more funds allocated in years with big projects, such as a major rebrand. --ACT White Paper: Your Digital Brand (http://na.iiaa.org/ACT/downloads/DigitalBrand_1110.pdf)
- 11. Situational Factors what to implement when... Cost Lead Time to Results Phases Sales at Maturation (the gift that keeps on giving) Management Burden (ongoing) ROI
- 12. 5 Internet Tactics - Relative Cost Cost Email Local Search Social Organic PPC Marketing SEO Media SEO
- 13. 5 Internet Tactics - Sales Lag Lead Time to Results Email Local Search Social Organic PPC Marketing SEO Media SEO
- 14. 5 Internet Tactics - Program Phases Time Set Up Content Engagement Leads Sales Email Local Social Organic SEO PPC
- 15. 5 Internet Tactics - Sales at Maturity $$ Launch Refinement Maturation Email Local Social Organic SEO PPC
- 16. 5 Internet Tactics - Management Burden Ongoing Management Email Local Search Social Organic PPC Marketing SEO Media SEO
- 17. 5 Internet Tactics - Relative ROI Range Range Typical ROI Email Local Search Social Organic PPC Marketing SEO Media SEO
- 18. 9 Options...One by One Purchase Leads (lagniappe) Text - SMS (lagniappe) Email Local Search - Website Social Traditional Advertising (lagniappe) SEO - Website PPC Mobile (lagniappe)
- 19. ? Purchase Leads Beneficiary of 3rd Party SEO-SEM Fast Ramp Up Quality Varies by Provider Need a Lead Management Process
- 20. For Instance...Quote Requests on Your Agency Website “Agencies...are achieving a close ratio of 35% to more than 60% by...following up with consumers within 15 minutes or less...” Stats not specifically referencing purchased leads but the dynamic is the same...internet leads have no shelf life Source: Big I White Paper, http://na.iiaa.org/ACT/downloads/TakingBackPersonalLines_Yates_0611.pdf
- 21. Text - SMS Intimacy Immediacy The right message for the right person at the right time. - John Pelphry, CEO, One-txt
- 22. Acceptance of Mobile Ads Proportionate To Perceived... Usefulness Relevance Monetary incentives Entertainment value Information value Source: “An Empirical Study of the Drivers of Consumer Acceptance of Mobile Advertising.” Journal of Interactive Marketing 2:2007
- 23. Email to Customers Easy to Implement Fast Ramp Up Need Email Update Process Content is King
- 24. The Case for Email Marketing 10 points - improvement in number of customers not likely to switch when agents communicate monthly1 37.5% - most prevalent starting point for insurance research - friends2 78% - preferred method for sharing info3 Noteworthy - Facebook, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, etc. use email notifications 1. IIABA-ACT White Paper, http://na.iiaa.org/ACT/downloads/SalesandServicingStrategies_Yates_0711(2).pdf 2. AIS Media Survey 2010 3. Marketing Sherpa Survey, 2009
- 25. Local Search Increased Integration with Organic Inherently ‘Mobile’ GEICO, etc. Often on Sidelines
- 26. Local Search Fix Your NAP - Errors Over 60% Fixes at: UBL.org, localeze.com Claim Google Places, etc. Local Signals on Agency Website Infographic: www.blumenthals.com
- 27. The Case for Local Search Optimization Fundamental to search engine visibility (SEO) Very little cost Mobile search is growing and mobile assumes local
- 28. Social Media Marketing Social Referrals Customer Contact SEO Benefits Content is King
- 29. Social Media is... Blog Local Search Listings StumbleUpon Photo Sharing Digg
- 30. Phases of Social Media Marketing Set Up - claim key accounts, modify and add apps or plug-ins Content - add relevant, useful information to your pages/accounts Engagement - build your network, receive feedback, get referrals Leads - quote opportunities from your networks Sales - the dollar value of your social marketing 85% of insurance agencies are stuck in phase 1 or 2
- 31. The Case for Social Media Marketing SEO benefits Social content - blog, video - can be used for email Significant communication channel - 50% of U.S. on Facebook Referrals - 37% trust recommendations of friends on social media* Social is one of the top three SEO tactics to focus on for 2011 - Google’s Matt Cutts *This tracks with the 37.5% of consumers who say they start insurance purchase quest by asking friends
- 32. Traditional Advertising 59% of Direct Mail go to Web 67% of Print go to Web Where do Referrals Go? Sources: AIS Media 2010 Study, Google Survey with the Print Advertising Association, 2008
- 33. Traditional Advertising - Don’t Make Them Think Landing pages QR Codes
- 34. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Good Page Structure and Links Internal Linking Back Links Fresh Content Content is King - Blog
- 35. The Case for SEO Long term visibility Conversions are part of SEO - time on site, pages/visit, leads transactional precursors Enterprise class budget isn’t necessary
- 36. Insurance Pay-Per-Click Most Competitive Keywords Customer Acquisition Can Be $2,000 Find Competition - Low & Commission - High: Sweet Spot Infographic: WordStream
- 37. The Case for PPC Instant feedback Budget control - turn on or off instantly
- 38. Mobile Local Search Social ‘Apps’ or ‘App Like’ Insurance can’t compete with angry birds...but: 45.5 million people owned smart phones in 20101 and mobile browsing will overtake desktop by 2015.2 1. ComScore Study, 2. Morgan Stanley Study, 3. Graph: Flurry Analytics
- 39. Mobile Claim Glove Box Kit Quick Research ‘On the Road’ Service Tablet *and* Smart Phone App or mobile web optimization - most useful insurance apps require internet connectivity.
- 40. The Matrix Lead Time to Ongoing Program/Tactic Cost/Investment Typical ROI Results Management Local Search SEO Low Immediate - 90 days Low High (website) Organic SEO Medium - High 60 - 90 days Medium - High Medium - High (website) Email Marketing Low Immediate Low High Social Media Low - Medium 90 days + Medium - High Medium - High Marketing PPC High Immediate High Low - Medium
- 41. Summary Short or Long Term Goal Budget Risk Appetite In-House or Outsource Synergies (Content)
- 42. Questions
- 43. Thanks for Attending! Kevin McDonald for more information: Ken Kremers kmcdonald@cfluent.com www.confluencysolutions.com ken@cfluent.com 877.351.2600 ext. 5 877.351.2600 ext. 1
Editor's Notes
- Planning for growth starts with visibility which generates leads...sales come later...this presentation to independent insurance agents analyzes how to get more of all three.\n
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- Visibility today means the internet, but the internet comes in many varieties - your insurance agency website is one aspect, but so is social media marketing, email marketing and even smart phone apps. Deciding where where to start can seem confusing but it isn’t - once your break down the options and line those up with individual agency needs and goals.\n
- The internet visibility ‘ecosystem’ is all interrelated. So increased activity in one channel can easily influence results in another channel. Internet ecosystem components are like molecules of gas or liquid - when energy is introduced - like heat - all molecules start moving around more quickly.\n
- So for our purposes here internet marketing could include a lot of different communication tools.\n
- There have been - and will be - a lot of seminars, articles and the like about what to do to get more business for your agency. No internet marketing tactic is wrong inherently, but any given campaign may be wrong for your agency - and right or wrong depends on situational factors.\n
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- Before we start the analysis of various internet marketing choices, let’s review what all the attendees said about some key marketing activities their insurance agencies have undertaken.\n
- When it comes to the internet, more activity means more leads. And that activity generally comes in the flavor of the tactics listed on this slide (although there are a couple more we will discuss). You can manage these initiatives and campaigns in-house or you can outsource them...but doing neither will relegate your agency sales growth to dumb luck or no growth.\n
- Deciding what marketing to perform in-house, which to outsource, and how to budget for marketing are all conscious decisions that marketing organizations make when planning.\n
- Your agency may have near-term needs to produce sales. That will make some tactics more appropriate than others. Or you may be at a stage in your business life cycle where making an investment in long term growth is an opportunity you can take. Your unique situation in time will mean that you should assign different weights to cost, lead time, and so forth.\n
- On a relative basis, email marketing is the least expensive program you could implement; PPC is on the other end of the spectrum, for reasons we shall explore a few slides later on. If your insurance agency is budget challenged, email marketing may be a good place to start. And the attendee responses indicate this is an opportunity for most.\n
- Email marketing takes a very short time to generate results, once implemented. The same is true for PPC. If your time horizon is short - satisfying insurance company production requirements before the end of the year, for example - then one of these tactics may make sense for you.\n
- Most internet marketing options have five distinct phases: Set Up, Content Generation, Engagement, Lead Generation and Sales. Each program has a different curve. Email and Local Search require relatively little time to set up, and not much content has to be generated - at least at the outset. Social Media and Organic Search (SEO) require longer set up and content is a big time-consumer. Some phases of different programs may be kept in-house and other phases may be outsources. Content generation is a phase that many insurance agents have difficulty with.\n
- Some programs produce leads quickly but sales growth flattens out as the program matures - e.g., local search and email. Other programs deliver rewards with patience as the rate of sales growth increases with maturity, as with SEO and social media marketing\n
- Two of the programs on the right of the graph- social media marketing and organic SEO require new content on a more less continuous basis. PPC is highly competitive so managing keyword groups and bids require ongoing attention. Email marketing - at least programs that leverage content already produced for other purposes - requires little tending each month. Likewise for local search optimization.\n
- Finally, whatever you invest in internet marketing, it is fair to have some idea of what kind of return you can expect on that investment. Email has a high ROI because the required investment is so low. PPC generally produces poor ROI because insurance related keywords are so expensive, although this not true absolutely.\n
- So now let’s take a look at the five options we have been talking about plus four others, just to make our discussion complete. Think of the four additional programs as lagniappe - for those outside the New Orleans area, lagniappe is like the baker’s dozen - a little something extra. In our case the lagniappe are buying insurance leads, text message marketing, traditional advertising and the mobile web.\n
- Since many companies that sell leads to insurance agents use PPC or banner advertising on websites to generate those leads, it seems fair to include this tactic in a discussion about internet marketing. You can’t get a ramp up time much shorter than this - give up some money, get a lead. But the quality of the leads you get will vary by provider, so if you go this route, you should try more than one. And as with any internet related lead, you definitely need a lead management program.\n
- Consumers today expect immediate response - especially when they are in the web. Internet leads don’t season well. So you need to make sure someone in your office is prepared to respond when you have a new lead - right away. This doesn’t mean you need to provide a quote, but rather you should follow up by email, or preferably, by phone.\n
- Text message marketing is delicate and can be challenging for an insurance marketing practitioner. If you knew someone was about to buy a car, then messaged them with an offer for repair/replacement cost coverage, that message would be intimate. If you delivered the message right as the car shopper became a car buyer, the message would also be immediate. In an insurance context, intimacy and immediacy are hard to coordinate.\n
- But if you should decide to try your hand at SMS marketing your agency should be prepared to deliver messages with value. The list on this slide itemizes the various forms ‘value’ can take.\n
- Email marketing has lost some of its luster over the last few years - social media marketing has taken its place. But email marketing has much to commend itself to your insurance agency. It’s easy to implement and you will see results quickly. But people change their primary email address about every three years, so you will definitely need an email update process. And you have to have something to email so content is a big factor. That’s a theme we will see recur more than once - content is king.\n
- Email marketing engenders loyalty among customers; people share information by emailing links in far greater numbers than through other internet channels (social media is second at 21%). And since consumers are bound to ask their friends where to turn for insurance, it makes sense to put email in your customers’ hands. Regularly.\n
- Over the last year or so we have seen local search results - particularly in Google’s Places - receive more and more emphasis. Local search determination - the algorithm - was once separate from Google’s organic search algorithm. No more. In many cases there seems to be an integration of the algorithms and certainly of the results, as in the image on this slide. Mobile is nearly synonymous with local...and since the huge direct marketers often don’t have a local office, local search is a competition that many insurance agencies can win.\n
- Nearly 50% of you have claimed your agency’s Google Place page, though I suspect the number is much lower for Bing Local and Yahoo Local. Still, last year at this time the number of agents who had claimed their Google Place Page was down around 25%. The diagram on this slide illustrates how important it is to maintain consistency in your basic business information: name, address, phone number and website domain. Confluency’s observation is that about 60% of insurance agents have some fundamental inconsistencies across the search and social internet ecosystem. This is easily fixed by using data provider services like UBL and Localeze. Agents need to capitalize on all the information that can be added to Google Places, Bing Local and etc. And agency websites need to include consistent, crawl-able local NAP data.\n
- So this one is really important and probably shouldn’t be put off - local search optimization doesn’t require much of your agency budget and will show results quickly.\n
- There are a lot of benefits to social media marketing - additional referrals and enhanced SEO among them. And here is that recurring theme - content is king.\n
- There are lot’s of social media services; blogging, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are the big ones. But Google Places has a social aspect (reviews), You Tube allows for comments - a social network characteristic and there are many others, including the up-and-coming G+.\n
- It is worth noting that the large majority of insurance agents haven’t realized any sales benefits from their social media forays to-date. Most are stuck in an early phase of social media marketing implementation, as this slide illustrates. Even agents who have built up a corpus of content on Facebook often don’t build a network of followers. ‘Build it and they will come’ does not work here. Network building requires specific promotions. Until a social network is established, leads will not materialize.\n
- Social media marketing has an incubation period that is somewhat longer than other internet marketing options. But the benefits are long lasting and far reaching.\n
- Increase activity with traditional advertising creates the kinetic energy that excites the internet ecosystem molecules, as it were. There is strong survey evidence that good print advertising and direct mail campaigns create internet use.\n
- If traditional ad viewers are going to go to the web anyway, you may as well send them to a web page specifically designed for your traditional advertising campaign - a landing page. QR codes can be used as well so that smart phone users with bar code readers can be taken directly from your print collateral to a video or other web page.\n
- SEO - including optimization for keyword search - is still a very big deal. A well engineered website should include solid internal page linking. Some SEO requires time and work - like securing back links from third party websites. But the SEO component that is most important - content - is within every agent’s control. Regular contributions to a blog will go a long way toward addressing this. Content is king.\n
- So again, SEO isn’t going to get you short term gains but the long term visibility pay off is substantial. Analytics will provide clues as to whether you are moving in the right direction, even before leads begin to materialize. And you don’t have to spend $500 to $1,000 a month to make it happen.\n
- As this infographic from WordStream shows, insurance keywords are *the* most competitive - by a good bit. You can get decent ROI from pay-per-click, but you have to be really selective about the products or target markets you choose. Policy commission has to be high for this to work. Car insurance and home insurance keywords are highly sought after, requiring higher bids. And commissions are usually not high enough to warrant PPC for car or homeowner insurance.\n
- Having said all that, you do get instant feedback on PPC and using a PPC campaign can be useful to vet keywords for SEO. You also have budget control - a pay-per-click campaign can be stopped at any time.\n
- Mobile web browsing is exploding at a much faster rate than desktop browsing adoption. The overwhelming uses for social browsing are social networking and games. It’s hard for insurance to compete with that but because so much internet access is now mobile, a mobile web presence has become table stakes for insurance agents.\n
- A mobile version website or app can easily be promoted as a competitive advantage, as some of the uses on this slide illustrate.\n
- Here are all the graphs we looked at earlier in a table format...you can use this to facilitate your internet marketing plans.\n
- So to summarize, the choice of internet marketing programs for your agency - right now - is situational. Budget, time horizon, and staff capacity are key considerations as are the characteristics of alternative internet marketing options.\n
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