It’s official now. Our firm name is SmartsPro Marketing. We just figured that since we’re now providing a broader scope of services, our name should reflect that.
One of the biggest reasons for renaming our company is that we are now offering insurance agency websites. We believe we have a great product, but what’s the best way for us to deliver that message in words? This week I’m going to share with you the process we went through for positioning our new product.
I’m always saying that insurance agents need to have a unique selling or value proposition, a way to position themselves in people’s minds so they stand out as unique in some way. Marketing people call it a positioning statement. For example, if your specialty is selling auto insurance in Daly City, you need to find a way to position yourself as the one Daly City agency that people in Daly City think of when they think about buying auto insurance.
A positioning statement explains how your business solves a problem in a unique way. Daly City Auto Insurance has a unique domain name: DalyCityAutoInsurance.com; they work with most of the top ten auto insurance companies doing business in California, and they serve free home-made cookies to anyone who drops by the office on Friday afternoons. Or maybe it’s soft-serve ice cream or pizza. Enough said about what makes Daly City Auto Insurance unique. (By the way, I made that agency up and so far, the domain name is not taken, if anyone’s interested.)
We’ve spent the last couple of years researching agency websites and we’ve learned a lot about them. What we’ve learned we’ve built into the SmartsPro insurance agent websites. But what’s unique about our insurance agency websites? How can we position ourselves against our competitors?
First we looked at our competitors. For the most part, I would divide them into the following groups:
- Non-insurance industry web designers who may or may not be able to design functionally adequate websites, but who don’t really understand insurance agency needs.
- Do-it-yourself providers who emphasize low cost and therefore deliver a poor product.
- Primarily sellers of other Internet marketing products, such as quote engines, lead management systems and leads. The functionality of their websites tends to serve the other products they sell.
- High-end marketing consultants who understand insurance agencies and sell not only Internet marketing solutions but help agencies adjust their culture to optimize their Internet marketing success — thorough and professional, but very expensive.
So, where on this continuum does SmartsPro Marketing fit? And what is our positioning statement? Stay tuned. I’ll explain next time.