Why Have a Website Your Customers and Prospects Don’t Even See?

In my last post, I talked about SmartsPro Marketing insurance agency websites and how we are positioning ourselves against our competitors.  To recap briefly, I divided them into four groups:  non-insurance, do-it-yourself, primarily providers of ancillary products and high-end consultants.

Frankly, I like the high-end website developers.  I like the way they get to the root of the matter.  Changing the agency culture to help the team understand and unleash its sales and marketing potential success is a brilliant strategy.  It’s all too common that someone buys a solution, then never faithfully executes it because inertia defeats them.

A classic case in point is the way agents will start a newsletter program, sending it to customers and prospects.  After a few months — if they even wait that long — they wonder why their phone doesn’t ring all the time with praise for their newsletter and requests for quotes.

The notion that prospects need to be nurtured and called before you can give them a quote and that customer loyalty is earned in the long run is completely lost on them.  It’s like biting into a potato before cooking it and wondering why it doesn’t taste better.

The problem with the high-end providers is that they’re very expensive and, frankly, a lot of firms really don’t need that much hand-holding.  They just need a competent vendor that offers a robust website that provides the functionality to accomplish sales and marketing success.

So that’s us.  That’s SmartsPro Marketing’s websites:  All the functionality of the high-end providers, at a fraction of the cost.

Is that our positioning statement then?  It could work.  But here’s the rub — and this is common when you’re deciding on a positioning statement.  Is that really unique enough?  Is there something that’s a little more unique about SmartsPro Marketing’s websites?

I think so.  It’s something that gets to heart of what’s been unique about our brand for the past 23 years.  The quality of the content we provide.

Each insurance agency website we build will have content from a current SmartsPro Marketing newsletter.  Each month your agency website will have up-to-date, professionally written content from one of the SmartsPro newsletters.

And here is what we think is unique about this.  With a website from SmartsPro Marketing, you bring newsletter subscribers to your website every month.

When your newsletter is posted each month, the agency will send an email to its subscriber list with a link bringing the subscriber back to your website to view the newsletter.  Subscribers will see your FREE quote buttons, they will see your social media engagement buttons, and they will see anything else you’ve put in your website that’s viewable from the newsletter posting page.

Our websites also have other features that capitalize on the marketing possibilities of the Internet, which I’ll discuss in future posts. .

But the essence of our positioning statement is:  Why have a website your customers and prospects don’t even see?  Bring them to your agency’s website every month.

Like an insurance agency positioning statement, our positioning statement doesn’t say all the other things we do well, but it does focus on what’s unique about our product or service.

So here’s the take-away for your agency positioning statement.  The first step is to evaluate your own assets.  What are your agency’s strengths and weaknesses?  Now evaluate your strengths within the context of your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, your history, your environment, everything you know about your agency.  So what is the one thing that addresses the essence of what you do well?  Can you say something that embodies how you want people to view your agency uniquely in their minds?  That’s the process of developing a positioning statement.