How many people in your office have a phone book at home? If the answer is something approaching 100% then the average age in your office is probably north of 45 or 50, and your staff may be missing the profound and fast moving changes in communication patterns. What are those changes, and how can your agency contend with them?
Here are some statistics to think about1:
Communication is the life blood of any organization that depends on long term relationships to profit. If we are using only communication mediums (land line phones, snail mail) that are increasingly marginalized then we can expect several things to happen:
The disappearance of land line phones has resulted in vanishing phone directories, a household fixture for generations. There is no such thing as a cell phone or email directory. So how will people get in touch with the growing legions of the un-tethered? Do the growing legions even want to hear from us?
Let's take the last question first. One thing that has not changed in this sea of change is the clear correlation between improved account results and number of touches; retention, additional account sales, and referrals all improve as a result of systematic contact and development programs. Recent surveys show that 85% - 90% of consumers want to have their insurance program reviewed at least annually. That number has not changed in similar surveys performed for at least 20 years, so at least some things stay the same - customers do want to hear from us. The challenge now is how to reach out to customers and prospects.
Wall Street Journal staff writer Jason Fry offered some well reasoned and instructive insights about how to reach out in a recent article. "...wireless-only adults are reachable... through their homepages, blogs, MySpace and Facebook outposts and of course through their email...as phones get smarter...we're more likely to use them for text messaging or accessing our email, reserving voice calls for friends, family members and important colleagues...".2He is pointing out that not only are there a lot more alternatives for distance communication, but that more people are using them at the expense of landline calls.
Here are some things your agency needs to be doing right now, before it's too late...
If you don't have a twenty-something on staff to help seasoned employees understand the communication culture bubbling around you, hire one. Another alternative may be to contract out to a 'culture consultant' (consumer product companies do this sort of thing all the time). Use a customer, the children of customers, your son or daughter, the waiter or waitress at your favorite restaurant, the college intern working in your office, or anyone young enough to think about the world differently than you do. Listen to them and pay them for the information they provide.
What you want to hear, and what you want your staff to hear, is how they buy insurance, interact with their insurance providers, how they research and buy other products and services, and how they use the web, land line phone, cell phone and email to communicate with friends, families, and others. I say 'what you want your staff to hear' instead of 'what you want to find out' because the information about how twenty-somethings communicate is already out there - your challenge is driving home to your staff the importance of changing your communication methods.
Most agencies are still gathering email addresses. The time for that is long past. If you don't have them, make getting emails a priority by contacting all customers to update their records. And then start using the emails to communicate risk and safety information, to communicate changes in office hours or emergency procedures and to deliver annual reviews. Start using email as a deliberate, integral piece of your customer communication mix.
Can your agency communicate through your website? If you don't have a functional, interactive website get one, and get one that can function on a cell phone or handheld device.
Finally, you could experiment with a Facebook or MySpace page or blog for your agency. You may not find these experiments to be a smashing success in terms of traffic or business written. But being out there in these venues will send a message to prospective customers and potential employees: we understand how you want to communicate and we are trying.3
A recent survey makes a clear connection between the insurance industry’s use of technology, and our attractiveness to Generation Y. Take a look at the numbers and join the discussion.
The title might seem dismissive of website SEO - the practice of optimizing your website for search engines. SEO is increasingly important to the acquisition of new customers, but there are alternatives to generating website traffic that should also be considered.
There has been a recent spate of articles about SEO in industry forums. SEO is appropriate for local, independent insurance agencies; but often articles about optimizing websites for Google or Yahoo search can create the impression that search engine optimization is the one, single silver-bullet for generating web traffic and business.
As is usually the case, there is no silver bullet - it's a mix of traffic generating tactics that pay off. And among options available in that mix, print media and direct mail are viable means to get web traffic. Also missed in many SEO recommendations is Local Search registrations, a high ROI tactic because there is no cost to register (see the Local Search overview video at the end of this article).
What needs to be addressed first is that today's independent insurance agency needs a secure, interactive, information rich website that can be (and in fact is) easily updated with some frequency. If your agency isn't there yet, save your time ruminating about SEO and get your agency website updated. If you have a website that measures up to the Millennials, then read on.
All websites should be tuned for search engines, at least to some degree. At the risk of redundancy, here are a few of the more practical optimization practices already noted in other forums:
Whether your insurance agency goes beyond the fundamentals and positions SEO to play a dominant role in your agency's overall marketing and your web traffic tactics mix will depend on several things. Here a few of the more important considerations:
We at Confluency are often asked if we optimize the websites we provide for insurance agents. The answer to that question starts with another question: optimize for what? The glib answer is often 'insurance'. By itself, 'insurance' as a search term is highly sought after and oft used in search queries. There are two implications to this.
First, other large competitors (e.g., GEICO, State Farm, Nationwide, etc.) are competing and optimizing for 'insurance'. That means you will need to spend more time and money optimizing for that term and other generic terms (auto insurance, homeowner insurance, e.g.). The second implication is that the high volumes of traffic you might get if you could optimize for 'insurance' probably would be counter-productive. That is, you might do a bunch of quotes, but not write a lot of policies or keep those policies on the books. Think in terms of a full page Yellow Pages ad that promises CHEAP INSTANT INSURANCE. It might not speak to your target market and might generate the wrong kind of activity.
You should also be thinking of your insurance agency website as a place to 'land' for direct mail recipients and ad readers. It is important that you consider this website role, because consumers are already going to your website as a result of what they see in print.
Consumer research recently conducted by Google found:
Even more to the point are some auto insurance survey results released by comScore in late 2007:
Use home page thumbnails related to your ad and special landing pages for direct mail and print advertising to track the effectiveness of these tactics. Positioning interactive tools and other website resources in print ads or direct mail pieces allows you to expand your value proposition and call to action. And you'll have answers to the questions that for each dollar spent, how many clicks, how many quotes and how much new business (and profit) was generated.
Hopefully, this article has allowed you to think of SEO, not as the Holy Grail and a solution to all your web traffic and new business challenges, but as a another weapon in the broad arsenal available to you. If you would like to learn more, you may download free PDF versions of these Confluency publications:
Insurance Agency Websites: Elements for Business Success(PDF) Sales Tools and Tactics for Independent Insurance Agents (PDF)
How the Local Search Video was Done
Add Local Search to Your SEO Article
I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume you have both a digital camera and internet access. That means you have ability to produce short, quality videos, and render them for internet access. The cost of doing so is virtually nothing. In fact, if you use YouTube to render and store your video, the production cost is exactly nothing, and takes less time than scratching out a few paragraphs of text.
We used video to introduce this newsletter, and you can do the same. Digital and web videos are commonplace communication options for younger generations and a great way for your agency to appeal to potential employees and to communicate with customers.
You can use videos as a newsletter supplement by producing a short video series on safety; you could produce a welcome to new customers from the agency owner; a quick video could be used to explain resource and service options available on your website. The possibilities are almost limitless.
Here is a brief introduction to four services that you can use to get started right away.
YouTubeBy now, everyone knows YouTube. The service is free, and you can upload videos up to ten minutes in duration. The service transcodes your video to a Flash format suitable for playback in the YouTube player. Embed HTML code for your video is also generated so you can paste the video and player right into one of your insurance agency web pages.
EyejotEyejot exists primarily as a video email service, and has other applications for the creative minded. The email aspect allows you to record a quick video using your webcam and instantly push an email (or emails) out with your video automatically embedded in it. If you would like to see what one of these emails looks like, click here, provide us your email address, and we will send you a video mail. There is a free version of the service that allows you to record and send videos of up to one minute in duration. For $25 a year, you can upload videos recorded on your digital camera and the maximum duration is increased to five minutes, which is plenty for most purposes. Email the uploaded Eyejot video email to yourself, and the video will be saved in your in box. Once there, Eyejot will generate embed HTML code, like YouTube, which will let you paste the video and player into one of your agency web pages.
BloggerBlogger has been around for years (it's now a Google service) and allows you to set up your own website. Of course, the primary purpose of Blogger is to enable blogging. You don't necessarily have to use it that way, though. If your insurance agency website provider is unresponsive to your maintenance requests, you may want to create your own Blogger site and have the link to that site included on your agency website. Even if your website provider is responsive, you may still want a separate site for video (and maybe even blogging). The service is free, and adding text, images or video to a page couldn't be easier. Just remember to monitor the site you set up for comments and weed out any that aren't appropriate.
WordpressAnother popular, free blogging service. Everything said about Blogger applies here.
For more information about adding video to your insurance agency website, visit our new blog page: www.poormansplayground.blogspot.com
posted by cfluent at 2:55 PM
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