How to Create an Insurance Agency Marketing Plan

A marketing plan is the set of objectives, strategies and tactics that make up your marketing activities designed to achieve your financial goals. But don't let that definition intimidate you. It might sound like a complicated task, but putting together a marketing plan is basically just answering three simple questions.
1. Where is your agency right now?
2. Where do you want to be a year from now?
3. How do you plan to get there?

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Mobile Internet Access is on the Rise

The next time you walk into a restaurant, store, mall or airport, take a look around. How many people are on their phones or tablets? How people access the Internet is changing, and it’s changing fast. Some surveys show mobile Internet usage surpassing desktop Internet usage as early as this year. Our insurance website customers have seen a drastic increase of traffic from mobile devices in the past three years.

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5 Myths of Digital Insurance Marketing

For some insurance agents, online marketing is a mythical concept. It's hard to understand and some see it as a waste of time. However, it is not just a passing fad. The Internet has changed not only how consumers purchase goods and services, it has changed how businesses reach those consumers.
Here are five of the biggest online marketing myths we hear from time to time.

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How Your Insurance Website is Losing Money on Google

Or more accurately, how to lose money by not being on Google. It's simple to lose money by not ranking in Google's search results... don't invest in SEO.
When you have a few minutes, conduct an experiment. Go to Google (make sure you're not logged in if you have a Google account), and search for one of your top keywords. If you don't have a keyword, use the line of business you are promoting right now with your city or geographic region if your agency is in a small town. Some examples: "Carrollton home insurance" or "Fort Worth auto insurance." Is your agency on the first page of results? If it's not, you could be losing money.
SEO services can take up a lot of your marketing budget. To determine if investing in SEO makes sense for your agency, you first need to calculate your potential return on investment.

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5 More Annoying Social Media Behaviors

In posts earlier this year, I talked about mistakes you can make on social media that were specific to Facebook and Twitter.
Here are five more annoying behaviors that would be a mistake to make when you're trying to develop relationships and build trust on social media. These are not specific to any one social network but can be applied to them all.

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Microdata, an Important Update to Your Website, That No One Will Ever See

In previous posts I have mentioned that search engines are becoming smarter. They are no longer looking for backlinks to determine your website’s content relevancy. They are looking at the content itself. They are looking for data.
Your website is littered with data: phone numbers, product offerings, address information, company facts and figures, employee details and much more. More often than not, the data is placed in the web page HTML, formatted to look good for a visitor and forgotten. 

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Busting 3 Facebook Myths

Social media is surrounded by many myths. Facebook, the largest social network with more than 1 billion users, is no exception. Here are a few of the biggest Facebook myths.

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Why Buying Followers is a Waste of Money

When agents begin marketing their agency via social media, they tend to focus on the quantity of likes and followers as opposed to the quality of those likes and follows. You’ll see advertisements all over the web trying to sell you “real” followers and likes for anywhere from $5 to $200 depending on how many you purchase. But 2,000 spambots and fake accounts (by the way, they're never real followers) do not make a successful social media presence. Basically, all buying follows and likes will do is make your page seem more popular than it is. It’s like paying to sit at the popular kids’ table at lunch.

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The Evolution of Marketing

Here at ITC we are constantly researching ways to improve the services that we offer. In order to market effectively you have to continuously measure and tweak your plan due to the change in consumer needs and changing technology. A few weeks ago we went over the difference between inbound marketing vs outbound marketing. Today we’ll look at how marketing has evolved and how marketing automation is the next big step in the marketing evolution.

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How Retention Rate is Misleading Your Agency

One of the things I see all the time when it comes to agency marketing and agency health is a reliance on the blanket retention rate. A high retention rate is good, while a low retention rate is bad. Some agencies understand that they will have a low retention rate due to their clientele and have modified their business plans and pricing accordingly. However, the vast majority of agencies will live or die based on their retention rates.
While speaking to a particular agency, I asked, “What is your retention rate?” They proudly stated, “Roughly 85%.” Never mind that the principal did not know the exact number (a carrier offered his retention of their customers), a retention rate of 85% is a decent number. However, this retention rate is misleading the agent into thinking all is well with his agency. When I asked a few more questions looking at a three-year sample of the agency, the following picture unfolded.

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