This blog includes posts on lead generation, eMarketing, Web Marketing, SEO and other leading edge marketing techniques.
-Alan Blume
All posts with the tag 'insurance marketing agency'
Are the Days of Direct Mail Marketing Dead For B2B Insurance Agencies?
Posted on December 28th, 2011 by Alan Blume
This blog is based on one of my most viewed blogs and articles called, “Are the Days of Direct Mail Marketing Dead For Insurance Agencies?” It was written in June 2010 and discussed the demise of direct mail as an effective, or at least long term insurance agency marketing solution. The US Postal Service was a prominent feature in the discussion, running massive deficits at that time, which as of yet appear unabated.
I received interesting comments, as some marketing agencies, service organizations and insurance agencies continued to extol the virtues of direct mail. But I think most of them today, would agree, there are much better, more efficient and environmentally friendly means to reach prospects. Some of these include:
- eMarketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Web Seminar Marketing
- Blogging
- Video (including YouTube)
- Insurance Agency SEO
For B2B insurance agencies, there are even more compelling reasons to go digital and eschew any thoughts of Direct Mail, which is appropriately called snail mail in this context. Direct mail is slow, difficult to measure in many ways including how many are opened by your target audience. And it’s difficult to determine if the physical mailer reached the person intended. Direct mail will continue to get slower (First Class mail will no longer be delivered next day) and more costly, as the inherent inefficiencies in the model continue to act as an economic anchor on the entire process.
The simple conclusion for B2B Insurance Agencies… If you haven’t stopped direct mail – do so – and do so now! Invest in your future with digital marketing, particularly methods that build a foundation for your future success. For more information, go to: Insurance Agency Marketing - http://www.startupselling.com/insurance-agency-marketing.html
Create A Buyer Persona — Spend Time With Prospects Who Can and Will Buy
Posted on December 4th, 2011 by Alan Blume
Target Your Buyer Persona
What is a “Buyer Persona”? Some organizations find it helpful to create a prospect persona. This can be a one or two paragraph written description of your ideal buyers. For example: Mike Jones is a CFO or senior financial executive who works at a company between $5 million and $50 million dollars. He’s held this position at least three years and seeks to improve the systems and efficiencies within his company. He does not make quick decisions, but is willing to try new things if they have a compelling ROI. He is in the early to mid-stages of his career, and has the credibility within his organization to drive a new initiative or convince others that his decision to allocate budget is sound. He can make the decision to purchase, but may seek to validate it with other team members. Once he decides, however, the sale is very likely to move forward. A Buyer Persona doesn’t infer that all of your buyers fit this single description, rather that it is indicative of your ideal prospect.
Let’s say you’re an insurance agency producer selling P&C, and you are targeting contractors. Your Buyer Persona might sound like this: Bob Smith owns a small 10 person electrical contracting firm. He’s been in business 10 years and his revenues are in the $2-3 Million range. His firm owns 5 vans and operates out of an older commercial building with modest offices and a garage. He is trying to keep costs in line because of the soft economic climate, thus his vans and other equipment are beyond their normal replacement cycle. Bob is a conservative buyer, but open to innovative suggestions as to lower costs and optimize coverages. If you have yet to do this simple exercise, give it a try. It can then be integrated into the Prospect Scorecard (www.ProspectScorecard.com) to better qualify and quantify your sales opportunities and pipeline.
StartUpSelling, Inc. provides outsourced insurance agency marketing, sales and lead generation services focusing in the areas of insurance agency eMarketing, web seminar marketing, insurance telemarketing, insurance agency SEO, insurance agency social media marketing and website development..
Insurance Agency Marketing Report Card for Web Centric Marketing Campaigns
Posted on October 2nd, 2011 by Alan Blume
How is your agency progressing with your insurance agency marketing plans? Are you talking about executing these important web marketing initiatives or actually accomplishing these tasks? Are your marketing initiatives yielding the results you seek, and are you measuring the campaigns to determine ROI? Are your programs traditional or web based, or some combination of both? Review the key insurance agency web marketing activities below, and see if your agency receives a passing grade. Check off each item and add your total below to determine your insurance agency web marketing grade.
___ Insurance Agency Emarketing – Your agency utilizes professional e-marketing campaigns offering a monthly webinar, newsletter or case studies and has developed substantial opt in email list (5,000+). You closely follow CAN-SPAM regulations and measure the efficacy of each campaign. You have no spam complaints and honor opt-out requests immediately.
___ Insurance Agency Website – You have an up to date website, attractive, easy to navigate, browser compatible with compelling and sticky content. Social media icons are prominent and link to your social media venues.
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___ Insurance Agency Blog – Your agency provides at least one blog, prominently displayed on your website, with 2-3 postings each week. Extra credit if you’re adding images to your blog postings.
___ Insurance Agency Video – Your agency has invested in website video vignettes, providing information about your value proposition, products and services. This video is leveraged on your website and blog (insurance agency vlog).
___ YouTube – You have created a YouTube channel leveraging the website video mentioned previously, and are working on expanding views of this channel.
___ Insurance Agency Social Media Marketing – Agency executives, agents, producers, account managers and service teams are using LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to expand your insurance agency web marketing reach. Extra credit if you have standardized your employee profiles on LinkedIn and have created a professional company page on both LinkedIn and Facebook.
___ Insurance Agency Webinars – You have created a professional webinar series for your prospects (and clients) and have established a following where you receive 50 – 500 registrants per webinar.
___ Client Testimonials – You have professionally branded client testimonial PDFs, describing how your insurance agency improved service, coverages or solved a unique problem for a multiple accounts. Extra credit if you have both written (PDF) and video testimonials.
___ Value Proposition, Elevator Pitch & Telemarketing Pitch – Your agency has vetted all three versions of these pitches, published them across your agency and practices them periodically at sales meetings and company meetings. These are refined and polished over time as your agency and the marketplace continually change. And, of course, the value proposition is the theme of your insurance agency website, prominently displayed on your Home Page.
___ Collateral – This is actually eCollateral, electronic fulfillment that can be printed on demand if needed. This eCollateral is professional, branded and conveys your value proposition and services. It is used for email information requests and for producers as they work their respective pipelines. eCollateral is critical for lead response and professional lead handling.
___ SEO – Your insurance agency SEO long tail keyword analysis is complete and your website has been professionally optimized. Your insurance agency appears prominently in organic search results (SERPS).
Now it’s time to determine your grade. There are 11 insurance agency marketing initiatives listed above. When we refer to “ongoing” initiatives in the grading, it means that your agency is providing an ongoing monthly webinar series or biweekly e-marketing campaigns for example, not simply one or two of these campaigns per year. Here is your grading criteria:
Insurance Agency Web Marketing Report Card
A – 10 or more of these are completed and ongoing. Congratulations, you’re a top web marketing agency and are well on your way to creating an enviable marketing foundation.
B – 8 or 9 of these are completed and ongoing. Great job, you are well on your way to creating an insurance agency web marketing machine. If video or SEO is a missing item, tackle this quickly, these initiatives offer great marketing value to agencies.
C – 7 of these are completed and ongoing. You receive a passing grade, but there is important work to be done.
D – 6 of these are completed and ongoing. About half of these web marketing initiatives are in need of attention – and your agency should find a path to tackle these as quickly as possible.
F – 5 or less of these are completed and ongoing. The web marketing train has left the station, and your agency is not aboard. Determine which of these open initiatives can be done quickly, assign them to a competent internal source (or outsource that function) and move forward. Social media and SEO often work in tandem and you can move from an “F” to a “B” for example, very quickly.
Many agencies lack the internal resources and expertise to accomplish these initiatives. Even if the tools are available, they may lack the knowledge to properly use them. In these cases, agents and brokers can often outsource these types of tasks to a competent insurance agency marketing firm.
Insurance Agency Digital Marketing Platforms or Insurance Agency Marketing Solutions
Posted on December 26th, 2010 by Alan Blume
Recently, we’ve seen the advent of platform based or digital marketing technologies for insurance agencies. Insurance agencies have the option to purchase an integrated website and eMarketing platform in return for a long term commitment, which can run 2-5 years. These digital marketing platforms typically create a new website, blog and offer an eMarketing platform to communicate with prospects and clients. The advantage to this approach is that it allows insurance agencies which have an existing marketing staff with the time and skill to leverage this technology, to expand the web marketing reach of the agency. Or, after investing in one of these digital marketing platforms, an agency can opt to hire the staffing to create, run and monitor their ongoing insurance agency marketing campaigns, blogs and website SEO refinements.
The downside to the platform approach is the converse of the statement above, namely that the agency must execute all of the marketing on their own, utilizing in house personnel and in house skills. This is where the rubber meets the road, as most agencies have limited resources and budgets to attack their specific marketing initiatives. Some technology providers may infer that these systems almost run themselves. This is a great concept in theory, but pragmatically, they take time and expertise. After all, if an agency intends to assemble a prospect list of 5,000 targeted emails and then routinely send out these email campaigns, the agency better make sure they know what they’re doing. For example, domain spoofing, email authentication, Bayesian poisoning and the FCC CAN-SPAM Act are just a few of the challenges insurance eMarketers will face.
This brings us to the second major option. Typically, for about the same investment, insurance agencies can outsource these marketing initiatives to a competent insurance marketing agency. Insurance marketing agencies often provide the platform or tools to accomplish these types of insurance agency web marketing initiatives including:
- Insurance Agency eMarketing
- Insurance Agency SEO and SEM
- Insurance Agency Social Media Marketing
- Insurance Agency Web Seminar Marketing
- Insurance Agency Website Creation and Updates
And, it is important to note a third option, a hybrid of sorts. Those insurance agencies with sufficient budget and patience can opt for both a insurance agency digital marketing platform, and outsource their web marketing initiatives to a proficient insurance marketing agency. This can be highly effective for agencies which want an in house platform but lack all of the skills to effectively utilize the technology. In some ways this is similar to the approach of information technology giants such as IBM, which offers a comprehensive IT outsource service to many of their corporate clients.
In this era of specialized skills, outsourcing specific functions can be a preferable path to internal staffing when one considers the plethora of skills needed and the hiring costs associated with these skills. For insurance agencies seeking new methods to create robust insurance agency lead programs, insurance web marketing is certainly a key to the foundation for future growth. In house, outsourced or some combination of both, this is an area that insurance agencies both large and small will need to address in the coming New Year. Go to http://www.startupselling.com/insurance-agency-marketing.html for more information.
Insurance Agency SEO, Page Rank, And Inbound Links For Organic Search Engine Ranking Results
Posted on November 16th, 2010 by Alan Blume
Some companies think SEO is mainly about page rank and inbound links, and that improved search engine ranking results for insurance agencies take a long time. From our experience, this is not the case. For most agencies, dramatically improved results typically happen within 60 to 90 days. What do we mean by dramatically improved results? Insurance agency websites that are ranked page 10 or lower will see many of their top keywords result in placement on Google page one and page two. This is not accomplished by building hundreds or thousands of inbound links, rather this is determined by very specific utilization of insurance agency on page website optimization, and external content creation.
Another misnomer pertains to page rank. At one time, page rank was the ultimate guide for search engine ranking success. Today, it is merely one of the attributes to consider, and in the insurance agency space, most assuredly not the most important attribute in achieving high rankings. Consequently, fear not if your agency has a page rank of zero and has less than a dozen links. You can still achieve Google page one rankings for many, most perhaps almost all of your preferred long-tail keywords.
Lastly, let’s discuss keyword search tools. Some companies suggest that an agency does their own keyword research, perhaps using some of the free tools on the market. This can work for those agencies with time, talent and technical acumen pertaining to SEO. There are, however, much better tools available to assess keyword efficacy. These more advanced tools are capable of tracking competitor rankings, daily or weekly changes, the snippets which are actually pulled by each search engine, which pages or an agency website are associated with the rankings and snippets, and a ranking index by keyword which shows increases and decreases by keyword and competitor. With these advanced tools, SEO becomes much less of an art, and more of a science, to ensure top insurance agency search engine rankings for their preferred long-tail keywords. If your agency is hearing vague statements and receives no type of performance guarantee from an SEO vendor, it’s likely the vendor is uncertain about SEO, and probably not your best choice to move your agency to a top SEO ranking.
Are the days of B2B cold calling/telemarketing over?
Posted on July 27th, 2010 by Alan Blume
My answer to this question is, “it depends on the industry and prospect profile”. Telemarketing (or cold calling) can be very effective when properly approached and applied to a specific niche and B2B target profile. There are many newer methods of marketing B2B products and services, but highly targeted, niche cold calling can still prove effective for your B2B business. Ultimately, however, the days of cold calling will come to a close as eMarketing, Social Media Marketing, ePublishing and other web centric methods prove to be more effective and less expensive. But today, cold calling or outsourced B2B telemarketing can still be highly effective for certain niches and prospect profiles.
For example, one of our clients is a truck insurance agency located in the southeastern U.S. This insurance agency focuses on smaller trucking firms with 2 to 50 trucks, though most of their prospects fall within the 2 to 15 truck range. We currently provide them with an average of 6 appointments per week in only 10 hours of calling per week. We have seen the scenario repeatedly for transportation insurance agencies targeting smaller profile trucking companies, and, we’ve seen it for B2B clients which focus on a vertical niche, everything from sales consulting, to CPA firms, from training companies to cloud computing software solutions.
Though our preferred approach revolves around a fully integrated, comprehensive and web centric approach to marketing, we have found consistently high yield results for these vertically oriented companies, which have seen returns anywhere from 2X to 10X on their telemarketing investment. Cold calling can also be done on a tailored basis by sales people, calling high in their targeted prospect accounts, which combined with a personalized email can yield effective results. We describe the difference between salespeople’s cold calling and telemarketing from a numbers perspective. Our appointment setters are expected to yield about 25 calls per hour, documenting changes in position, direct phone number and of course delivering pitches along the way. This means that in 60 hours of calling per month, the phone is dialed about 1500 times, or 18,000 times per year when fully extrapolated. Sales professionals time is much better spent on other activities, they do not have the time or patience to deliver this volume. Obviously, telemarketing is not just about volume: a well defined and consistently refined script is essential, resulting in an appointment every two hours, which is subsequently very worthwhile to the salesperson, CPA, small business owner or producer (using insurance agency jargon).
Thus, in our opinion, though the days of telemarketing are dwindling for many B2B companies and industries, there are still instances where it is highly cost effective, if done professionally and properly, where high quality B2B telemarketing can yield cost effective results.