Websites

What To Do After Your New Website Goes Live?

January 23, 2014 By jwhitaker Leave a Comment

Blog_LI Answer: start working on your search engine optimization. After all, you want to get your website ranked near the top of all the relevant search terms so people can find you.

One way to build a solid SEO strategy is to associate your website with as many keywords relevant to the kinds of insurance you sell as possible. A great way to do this is to write a blog using all the important insurance keywords that show up in searches. It’s a lot of work, but it pays off.

Another simple and very effective way to increase your search engine rankings is to get your website listed with as many directories as you can. You want to get listed with Google+, Facebook, etc. of course, but don’t ignore providers of local directories, such as yellowpages.com, Yelp! and others that can drive insurance business to you.

Want to know which directories you should get listed on? https://getlisted.org/ is a great resource. Just enter your business name and ZIP code and in seconds you’ll get a complete rundown on the found, missing and unclaimed listings for your business. You will also find links next to each listing source, which you can click on to create listings for yourself.

The more listings or “citations” you have, the greater your chances are of being top-ranked in the search engines. Getlist.org did a study to determine which citation sources are best for different businesses. For insurance agencies, yellowpages.com, superpages.com and statefarm.com got the top three rankings. Of course unless you’re a State Farm agent, that source will do you no good, but you’ll want to take a look at the rest of the list for tips on which sources to list your new website with, and start driving traffic to your site: https://getlisted.org/static/resources/local-citations-by-category.html#InsuranceAgencies.

By the way, as you progress in your efforts to increase your listings you’ll want to check the Listing Score posted for you on getlisted.org, which is located in the upper right corner above your results.

And one more thing, if you’re using a domain name that’s not the same as your agency name, Google, Bing and Yahoo probably won’t know who you are, which means it’s going to be hard to get these directories to even recognize you. If this is your situation, the first thing you need to do is submit your new website directly to Google (http://www.google.com/submityourcontent/), Bing (http://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url) and Yahoo (http://www.ehow.com/how_4770781_submit-website-yahoo.html).

Is Every Insurance Agent Like a Snowflake?

March 26, 2012 By jwhitaker Leave a Comment

First of all, they say every snowflake is different. As David Bradley points out on his blog sciencebase, this is true of larger, fully formed snowflakes. But not necessarily true of smaller, “simpler crystals that fall before they’ve had a chance to fully develop into the familiarly evocative hexagonal flakes.”

So, then, it could be true. Every fully developed insurance agent can be different like a snowflake.

I’m pondering this analogy because it’s clear that the number one most difficult thing for most agents to do when creating a website (or writing a marketing strategy, for that matter) is to figure out what makes them unique. This is important because they need to differentiate themselves from their competitors, so they can build a compelling case for why people should do business with them instead of their competitors.

Still, there are many fully developed agents in the U.S. today — probably the majority of the more than quarter million agents — who don’t know why they’re unique. Obviously the humble snowflake has an advantage in this regard; it doesn’t need to know it’s unique. But it doesn’t have a website or need a marketing plan either.

I maintain, however, that like a fully developed snowflake, every fully developed insurance agent is unique. And the sooner such an agent figures out how unique he or she is, the sooner he or she will start becoming even more unique.

Let’s look at few simple ways to discover your uniqueness:

Demographics. This is the easiest way to differentiate yourself. Specialize in a particular industry group, like restaurants, architects or wineries. If you sell individual and personal insurance products, specialize in young families, young professionals or senior care. Find a group with insurance needs and become the expert. Can you specialize in several industries or demographic groups? Sure, just create a different positioning strategy and website landing page for each group.

Geography. If you work in a small town or rural area, there may not be a large enough population for you to specialize in one or even two or three target markets. You have to be generalist. Fine, your specialty is knowing the needs of your community, being active in it and understanding its unique subtleties. On the other hand, if your business is in a large metropolitan area, you can become the 94044 (Pacifica, California) specialist in auto insurance.

Product knowledge or specialization. Maybe you’ve acquired deep product knowledge and sales skills in a particular area of insurance, such as business interruption or long-term disability. You are the expert and you write articles, blog posts and give speeches and presentations on the subject all the time. This doesn’t mean you don’t sell other types of insurance, too. Your specialty knowledge is the magnet that pulls clients and prospects toward you. By the way, this comment goes for any of these ways to be unique.

Personality. Is there something special about you, something unique about your interests or personality? Do you wear a kilt? Do you always play Santa at Christmas? Were you formerly a high school football coach who took your team to the state championships several times? Are you an avid golfer, skier, mountain climber, whatever, who’s got stories to tell and knows everybody that’s anybody in your vocation? Well, I could go on, but you get the point. Build your professional brand around your personal brand.

If you still haven’t figured out what kind of snowflake you are, I’ve got one more idea for you. Have your customers audit you. This can be quite a valuable experience for several reasons. I’ll show you next time.

Design Rules for Insurance Marketers

March 21, 2012 By jwhitaker Leave a Comment

Successful insurance marketing can often rely as much on graphics as on words. Good graphics enhance any message. But what if you’ve got an appealing message, accompanied by poor visuals? Poor visuals put a greater burden on content, so if the message isn’t well structured and compelling, the entire slide show, website or newsletter suffers. More importantly, good graphics can mean the difference between someone noticing your website, newsletter or ad—and your message getting through—and just bypassing it.

That’s why any good insurance marketer needs to be aware of some design basics. Even if you leave the design details to others, you should know what works and what doesn’t. Fortunately, there is a great resource available that’s clear, straightforward and easy to read, “The Non-Designer’s Design Book: Design and Typography Principles for the Visual Novice,” by Robin Williams.

Every well-designed marketing communication piece, as Williams points out, follows four basic design principles that you should be aware of:

Contrast

Sameness may be okay for the words on the page of a book, but the elements of an ad, slideshow or website should be very different from each other, depending on the content. Contrast makes the page visually attractive. Williams says the key to this rule is making elements look very different from each other and not being wimpy about it. Wimpy creates conflict, not contrast. Contrast means pairing a thin line with a thick line, a graceful old-style font with a bold sans serif font, a cool color (like blue) with a warm color (like orange), a wide-spaced column with a narrow column.

Proximity

Group related items close together. That means, for instance, on a business card don’t put your address, phone numbers and city in all four corners of the card because you think this looks fancy. Think of people trying to read your contact information as their eyes wander all over the card: it would be confusing and annoying. By organizing your contact information into a single unit – for instance, below your name and company (another single unit) in the middle of the card – the card will communicate better visually and intellectually.

Alignment

Text and graphics should not get splashed about anywhere there happens to be space on the page. Items may be grouped differently (according to the proximity principle) but they should all follow the same rules of alignment. On this page, for example, every element of this article – headline, dateline, social media buttons, text – are aligned along the same invisible left border. This creates one cohesive unit and tells the reader that all these elements belong together.

Repetition

Another word for repetition is consistency. Use the same font and font size for all your headlines. If you use a certain kind of graphic for bullet points in one place on your website, use it everywhere you have bullet points. Pick a set of colors as your theme and use them consistently. Repetition unifies the design of your communication piece.

These four principles of design from Robin Williams’ book are one highlight of her book. I highly recommend the entire book.

Is Visiting Your Insurance Agency Website Like Going to the DMV?

March 19, 2012 By jwhitaker Leave a Comment

Does it make visitors want to pull up a chair and stay for a while? Or is finding useful information like to trying to figure out which line to stand in at the DMV?

One of the ten biggest problems with insurance agency websites is poor design and functionality.

Make it attractive and pleasing to look at and, just as important, make it easy to navigate.

When visitors arrive at your site, show them how your site is organized, so they can find the things that interest them.

Divide the material on your site into chunks: About Us, Our Services, Get a Quote, Service Center, Newsletters, Our Blog, Contact Us. Use titles like these for each section in your navigation bar, with pull-down menus that further define the content in each group.

Make sure your website has a clean and consistent look throughout. Font styles, headers, graphic images, sidebars and footers should have the same look from page to page. Don’t crowd your page with lots of busy graphics and dense text that doesn’t align consistently on the page either. Let the pages breathe with plenty of white space. Limit your choice of font families to one or two, though contrast using a sans serif font for text and a bold serif typeface family for headers can heighten visual interest. These style choices will make reading your website easier, give it a more coherent appearance and present a more professional image.

Simple layout and design choices will help people find their way around your page. The basic layout of a website is a header with a navigation bar under it, a sidebar to the left or right (or maybe both), the main content area in the middle and footer at the bottom of the page. The diagram on this page illustrates the basic architecture of most websites.

Surprisingly, you can do a lot with a basic layout like this. The header contains the name of your agency and main contact information. The navigation bar displays links to other key content pages. Sidebars may contain quote buttons, your newsletter sign-up button, buttons for Facebook and other social media, and pull-quotes from testimonials or links to other popular pages on your site. The main body of the page, in the middle, is for the subject content of the page, such as policy descriptions, profiles of your key people, your newsletters, your blog, etc. Use the footer for required or supplemental content, including links to legal material, such as your privacy policy.

The quality of your content must be compelling and appropriate for your target audience, but if the architecture of your website – the “living room” you’ve built for your Internet guests – isn’t inviting and comfortable, visitors won’t stick around very long.

The Ten Biggest Problems with Most Insurance Agency Websites

March 11, 2012 By jwhitaker Leave a Comment

Even when they pay lip service to the concept of being a trusted insurance advisor, most of the insurance agency websites we see are nothing more than online corporate brochures or storefronts for quote engines. There’s nothing wrong with either of these approaches, if that’s what you really want. Maybe you’re just trying to build your agency’s image and save on printing expensive brochures.

Or maybe you want to minimize policyholder servicing costs and capture a quick commission. If you really intend to be a conduit for one-off sales from direct writers and that’s your business plan, hats off to you.

On the other hand, if you own or work at an agency that focuses on building long-term relationships with customers as a trusted insurance advisor, you should ask yourself:

Am I happy with my website?
How does it help—or hinder—in building relationships with prospects and clients?
Am I providing the content and services that support the image of a trusted insurance advisor?

If you have a website and you sincerely want to be a resource to your clients and have them depend on you for insurance advice as they would an attorney for legal advice, chances are good that your website is underperforming.

Let’s just look at design for a moment. Most insurance agency websites are not designed to be customer-friendly. They may look great — or not. But looks aren’t everything. Most agency websites:

Don’t do a good job of positioning the agency’s unique value proposition.
Don’t make visitors feel like they want to get to know the people who work at the agency.
Don’t invite visitors to do business with them or even get to know them.

Nice design, lousy performance. Sometimes the problem is there’s too much focus on design. A lot of insurance agencies miss the forest for the trees with this approach. They focus so intently on creating a sophisticated design with high-end gadgets and special effects that they miss the whole point. They think the main reason to have a website is to buff their corporate veneer and validate their credibility.

As I said before, if this is your intention, fine. But let me suggest that you’re probably wasting the best marketing tool in your Internet tool kit. The purpose of a website — and even agents with websites that focus on one-off product sales will agree — is to build relationships with people so you can eventually sell them products.

Poor design, lousy performance. Sometimes a website is poorly designed and can’t accomplish much of anything. DIY websites are cheap, but the problem is they show it. They lack structure and, as a result, text pours down the page without visual relief; sidebars are loaded with copy that distracts from the main theme of the page; and random graphic devices either scare people off the page or leave them bewildered.

But whether an insurance agency website is well designed or not from a purely aesthetic standpoint is almost irrelevant when you consider all their other problems if they’re supposed to be customer-oriented — rather than corporate status symbols or merely window dressing for quote engines.

Here’s a list of the ten biggest problems with most insurance agency websites. In my upcoming posts I’ll discuss each of them.

Your website doesn’t give visitors a reason to stay

There is nothing unique about your agency or your website

There are no people on your website (except maybe in stock photos)

No testimonials

Your website has little or no valuable content

No “calls to action”

No social media presence

You have no SEO strategy

Under the hood your website is so arcane it takes a web designer to change a phone number

Your website builder doesn’t know insurance agents, doesn’t understand your business plan and aside from posting the graphic on your website doesn’t know what a trusted insurance advisor is.

If you’d like your insurance agency website to avoid these pitfalls, you should consider using SmartsPro Marketing to build your insurance agency website. You can read about our websites here.