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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Marketing Tips for LinkedIn

The third social network of what many consider to be the big three, LinkedIn may not be as popular as Facebook or Twitter, but it has its own niche as the social network for business.
Because it is for business, how you use LinkedIn will differ slightly from how you might use Facebook or Twitter. If you're looking for ways to use LinkedIn to market your agency, there are several things you should be doing that will impact your marketing results from LinkedIn.

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4 Areas to Audit on Your Insurance Website

Your website is your agency online. For some visitors it will be their first impression of your agency. For others it will be their only impression. If your website doesn't function the way it should, that first impression could be one you wish you could do over. A regular audit of your website will help you identify what areas need to be updated as well as what areas may no longer be functioning the way it should.
Here are the four areas you should review on an annual (or as often as quarterly if you can) basis to make sure your website is updated and working for you the way it should.

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Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing

 Marketing is changing. Now, I know that’s easy to say, but every day there are more and more studies done on the two different types of marketing. Some people refer to these two types as “new age marketing” and “old marketing.” The proper terms are inbound marketing and outbound marketing.

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What is Keyword Research?

Articles on search engine optimization often talk about keyword research (or keyword analysis). But what exactly is it?
Keyword research is the process of identifying which keywords or keyword phrases people are likely to use on Google and other search engines when searching insurance.

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What is Facebook EdgeRank?

The first thing that someone sees when they log into Facebook is the newsfeed. The newsfeed is compiled of status updates, photos, RSVPs, and many other things. You might think that the newsfeed just updates the most recent posts from all of your friends, pages you like, and promoted ads and pages. Instead, Facebook calls every action that happens an “Edge.” Whenever someone posts a status update, tags a photo, etc., they generate an Edge. Facebook decided to create an algorithm to predict how interesting each story will be to each user. EdgeRank ranks each Edge that is connected to each user and decides how high on his or her newsfeed it should be displayed.

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Website Smackdown : Insurance Website Builder vs. WordPress

You have many options for your insurance agency website. A common question agents ask me is whether they should use WordPress (or a similar content management system) for their website or go with a product that is focused on the insurance industry like ITC’s Insurance Website Builder.
Before we break down the differences between Insurance Website Builder and WordPress, I want to cover a brief history about the Insurance Website Builder system. In 2003 (the first year of WordPress’s initial release), I was developing websites for multiple insurance agencies. I noticed that each website included the exact same features and decided to develop a content management system dedicated to building insurance agency websites. In 2005 after two years of development, we launched Insurance Website Builder.
From that point, the rest is history. Even though they were developed independently, at the core of both Insurance Website Builder and WordPress is a basic content management system. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. Let’s break it down.

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Why You Should Inventory Your Digital Agency Marketing

Once a year you should take an inventory of your digital marketing resources, assets, and anything else you use to connect with your customers online. This inventory will help you determine what works for your agency, what doesn't and what areas may need more attention and effort to get it working the way it should. The more complete your inventory, the better you will be able to understand your resources and make strategic decisions about your digital agency marketing.

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A Hit Parade of Twitter Mistakes

If you're new to using social media for business and still trying to figure out how Twitter works, you can easily end up spending too much time on the social network. It's also easy to make mistakes that could cost you followers.
To help you avoid the awkward learning phase and start building a Twitter following, I've put together this hit parade of Twitter mistakes to avoid.

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Questions to Ask Yourself Before You Hit Publish on Your Next Blog Post

 Have you started blogging?
Whether you've been blogging for years or are thinking about finally giving it the old college try this year, there are a few questions you should ask yourself before you publish each post you write.

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Using distribution lists for email marketing? You’re doing it wrong

 Recently, I talked with a prospective (now) customer about how many distribution lists AgencyBuzz supports. I asked about his current email marketing strategy and why a large amount of mailing lists was important to him. What he said shocked me. He had a distribution list for almost everything: auto prospects, home prospects, auto customers, home customers, auto lost, home lost (these were repeated for each line of business his agency offered), age groups, cities, primary agents, referral sources, and many more. I admire his organization as many agencies that do email marketing do not even categorize their lists and simply send untargeted, mass email blasts.
However, this setup can cause long-term problems. Each time a contact changes status, someone has to manually move the contact from one list to another. This manual list maintenance is time consuming and can be an error-prone strategy. I want to suggest a better way.

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Marketing Smackdown: Email vs. Text Messaging

Some people are saying email marketing is dead. That it's being replaced by text messaging. And to a certain extent, they may be right. But I also think they're wrong, and here's why.
You need an email address for pretty much everything on the Internet today, from signing up for Facebook to purchasing something online. This is not going to change any time soon. As long as people have email addresses, email marketing will have a place in the digital agency marketing mix. Not every email you send will be read, but by consistently being in consumer's inboxes, you are more likely to get noticed.

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9 Mistakes to Avoid Making on Facebook

 You've decided to use Facebook as a way to connect and engage with your customers online. There are many great things you can do on Facebook: share a side of your agency your customers don't normally get to see, connect with your business partners in a new way by liking their pages, share your insurance knowledge and expertise.
However, there are some things to avoid doing as you might actually drive followers away.

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