As an insurance agent, it is a constant goal to attract and keep your customers. Having reliable products is one factor in being able to provide great services. However, one crucial component to reaching success may not be as obvious as you think. With social media on the rise, it is important to create quality content that not only engages customers, but encourages them to share.

According to Top Rank, a recent study by Exact Target found that 55% of Facebook users have “liked” a company and then later, decided they no longer wanted to see that company’s post. You don’t want this to happen on your social media outlets. Therefore, you must do everything you can to keep customers reading with relevant posts and provide content that can be easily shared. The following are tips on how to do so:

Tip #1 – Know Who You’re Talking To & Provide Relevant Information

A review of your social media accounts can help determine who your current followers are, what they tend to share information about, and the format in which they use to share socially. Once you see what your audience is sharing and “liking”, you can attract their attention by producing relevant content. In addition, by promoting your agency through contests, giving helpful information, and providing tips on safety, this will help increase your visibility.

Tip #2 – Think Outside The Marketing Box

In order to increase social shares, you need to place focus on your insurance social networking strategy. This can be done by updating your Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin around 1-3 times a day, but remembering to keep your content fresh and interesting. In addition, you can search for followers that you believe will be interested in your services. By building up your community, you can watch your agency grow in social success.

Tip #3 – Love Lists

Twitter lists are a great way to segment different types of followers, or recognize them as an expert in a particular field. By making the additional effort to organize your audience, share relevant content, and making information easy for others to share, you can see the benefits of your strategy in the numbers.

Once you develop an engaged audience, this will allow you to become a community leader on your social outlets. Consider social sharing a way to gain additional prospective clients, contributors, or employees that could inspire the growth of your business!

As an insurance agency in a digital world, there has now become an increasing need to understand your customers. However, this applies not only to face to face meetings, but through social media outlets as well. Therefore, in order to relate to your customers, you need to know how to communicate with them on a variety of levels.

According to SocialMediaToday, you should never be too busy to spend time getting to know each of your customers. A couple years ago, socializing with customers was taboo to some. However, now a days, one of the few ways to understand your customers is socializing with them, specifically through social media. A key factor in learning to do this is through having social media literacy.

By interacting with your clients in their own language, this will make them happy and feel like they have a personal relationship to your business. In addition, to continue to strengthen your social networking strategy, the following are 4 steps you can take to boost your social media literacy:

With a new year comes new learning experiences and changes. Therefore, take action with your insurance social networking strategy and build on your social media literacy. Once you grasp this concept, you can leverage that knowledge to build your business to bring it down a successful path!

If your company is active on social media as a part of your insurance agency marketing, you know probably know that many of your employees are also active online. They probably have Facebook and Twitter pages, and maybe even LinkedIn profiles. As a business owner, you have to consider what might happen if someone says or does something inappropriate on the Internet.

Consider this: An employee has a problem with a client, and complains about that client on Facebook. The client sees that your employee is talking badly about them publicly, and drops you as their insurance agency! Nightmare, right?

The sad part is that situations like this happen every day. Social media should serve as an extension of customer service, and that’s why it is so important for you, as an employer, to create a social media policy for your employees. Your team should be made aware that policies on harassment, ethics, and company loyalty extend to all forms of communication, both inside and outside the workplace. But how do you go about creating this policy? Here are some tips:

A great social media policy can prevent online mishaps while at the same time encouraging employees to utilize social media in a productive way. By creating and asking employees to sign your policy, you’ll be sure everyone understands the role of social media in your company!

Having an offsite blog in addition to your insurance website has many advantages. Not only can you increase traffic to your Virtual Insurance Office, but you also have the ability to draw in readers and create conversations through comments. Utilizing this tool will help you learn more about your customers and help them better understand all of the products you have to offer.

According to SocialMediaToday, receiving comments provides insight into the readers’ thought processes, which will help you better understand their needs as well as challenges. This advantage is why it is crucial for you to write value-driven content in order to better relate to your audience. In addition, the more honest and quality content your produce, the more trust and credibility you build with your customers.

Therefore, by increasing the number of comments on your blog, the more viewers will take notice. This is because you will be showing you have the ability to engage and have a conversation with your audience. The following are three tips on how you can increase your comments on your offsite blog:

Tip #1: Make it easy for the reader to comment

People who are new to blogging often forget to turn on their comment feature. Is the comment section large enough for the reader to find it? Do you require only minimum information from the viewer before they can comment, such as their name and e-mail address? If it’s technically difficult to leave a comment, readers will leave the page. Therefore, make it easy for them to start a conversation on your offsite blog!

Tip #2: Ask Questions!

Remind your readers that you want their comments and opinions by asking them a question at the end of the blog post. Ask them directly to share their response in the comment section. You can mention a direct call to action like “Let me hear your thoughts by writing in the comments below”. The more specific the request is, the more likely the reader is to leave a comment. So encourage your reader to take action by leaving a comment and participating in the conversation!

Tip #3: Always respond to people who comment

People don’t want to feel like they’re ignored. This is why taking the time to respond to readers who write a comment shows that you are paying attention to them. This creates an opportunity to further engage with that reader. When other readers see that you are interacting with the people commenting on your blog, they will feel more encouraged to join the conversation!

Once you learn to master the art of writing strong, unique content, you can watch the comments roll in! Always pay attention to how your audience reacts to certain posts or what they seem to enjoy about what you have to offer. By focusing on the audience, you will increase the success of your onsite and offsite blogs!

As a Search Engine Marketer, one of the questions that I get asked most by clients is “What determines my position in Google search results?”

It is a popular point of confusion — clients have a separate SEO team establishing the importance of using keywords on their website in order to gain visibility in search results while their SEM team touts the ability to use marketing budgets to force Google to place their advertisement in search results on important keyword searches.  While SEO (search engine optimization) is a merit-based system of ranking, SEM (pay-per-click) is an auction-based system that allows advertisers to gain visibility based on keyword-specific bids.  Let me explain!

PPC results, as we all know, appear at the top and right side of Google search results.  There are ten available positions on each search result page (normally three at the top and seven on the side).  On the surface, Google uses a simple formula to determine how these results stack up against each other.

PPC ads are ranked using this formula:

Ad rank = keyword bid ($) x quality score

Keyword bid (or CPC bid) is the maximum dollar amount that you are willing to pay for each click on your ad for that specific keyword (“car insurance”, in this instance).  Quality score is a Google metric that determines how relevant and useful your ad is to the search engine user. The higher your quality score, the better. Google actually assigns a quality score for each keyword that you wish to advertise for (1-10 scale).

Quality score measures “relevancy” by looking at two things: your PPC advertisement and the page to which you are directing traffic after the click (the “landing page”).  Both must be directly related to the keyword on which you have placed a bid, or else Google will assign you a poor quality score.

For example, if your PPC campaign contains insurance related keywords Google will:

What happens if you have a poor quality score? Good question.  In most instances, this poor quality score will be reflected in a higher required cost per click or in a lower ad rank (if you do not compensate by increasing your keyword bid).  In other examples of ads that are not remotely relevant to their associated keywords, Google will simply not show the ad in search results in an effort to improve their user experience. Remember, Google’s ultimate goal is to provide the exact information that it believes its user is looking for.

Google will determine your specific click cost on a keyword-by-keyword basis, using the formula above. But remember this when wondering how your cost per click is calculated in Google: just because you have bid $4.00 per click for a particular keyword doesn’t mean that you will pay that much.  It is the maximum that you will pay for that keyword.  All things being equal, the advertiser will pay will pay the minimum amount for their ad’s position as possible.  If the quality score is the same for two advertisers competing for the same keyword, the high bidder will pay only $0.01 more per click than the next highest bidder and be placed one rank higher in search results.  Confused?  Don’t be.  Let’s look at an example:

Advertiser 1 has a maximum keyword bid of $10.00 for the term “boise auto insurance”, more than any other competitor. They have a quality score of 8/10. Advertiser 2 has a maximum keyword bid of $8.00 for the same keyword, with a quality score of 8/10.  They are the second highest bidder.  Advertiser 1 will be in position 1 in search results, with a cost per click of $8.01.

You won’t always pay a per-click cost equal to your maximum bid, which is pretty cool!  You can further improve your cost efficiency by doing things to raise your quality score, but that’s a different blog post for a different day.

There you have it – a quick explanation of how Google determines your position and cost in Paid Search results.

Everyone knows that good public relations is essential for any business, regardless of how large or small it may be. Public relations plays a role in how the public perceives your company, whether or not people find your business to be reputable and the level of expertise your employees are believed to possess. While big corporations may have an entire team of PR experts working on their behalf, smaller companies do not have to forgo some of the most effective PR and insurance marketing strategies just because they think that they do not have room in their budget.

Here are some of the low-cost, yet highly effective PR tips for small businesses:

• Write articles on industry-related topics and submit them to online services like ezinearticles.com. This will help establish your credibility as an expert and help drive traffic to your company’s website if you use back links within the article.
• Submit press releases on new initiatives that your business has taken on, charities that you are involved with or simple current events that relate to your company.
• Profile your company on Wikipedia so that when potential customers want to get more information on your company, they can find it on multiple sites.
• Get active within your industry by attending trade shows. This can be a great opportunity for networking.
• Use social media to help brand your company and reach out to other businesses and potential customers. Not only is it free, but it gives companies the chance to show their office culture and make their employees more relatable.

Good PR doesn’t require a fancy agency or lots of money. Whether you just want to get your company’s name out there or put your insurance marketing ideas into action, it’s all possible with a little dedication and with the power of the internet. Take some time today to think of creative ways to execute PR strategies for your small business and you may be surprised by the results!

Have you ever thought about how much the English language has changed over the past decade? Words have shortened in length, while others have become specific to certain regions, and some have even incorporated numbers into them.  This alteration of the spoken and written word is all thanks to the Internet, and specifically, Twitter.

According to the New York Times, many scholars the fields of linguistics, sociology, and psychology are looking at Twitter for real-time language data to analyze. Twitter’s appeal to researchers is its time saving abilities and vastness. In addition to language, moods are also being gauged on a more global level.

Although some say this research can’t prove Twitter to be an accurate emotional barometer, it is proving extremely valuable for understanding how language varies among different demographic groups.

A team of computational linguists at Carnegie Mellon University, led by Jacob Eisenstein and Brendan O’Connor, used geocoded tweets to build maps of regional language use across the United States. From the data, hidden patterns of informal English were found. For example, New Yorkers preferred the slangy phonetic spelling of suttin to sumthin (for something) and Californians wrote koo or coo for cool.

Randal E. Bryant, dean of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, saw the real-world applications of Twitter for research: “The key finding was that seemingly meaningless slang and jargon can reveal important properties of the author’s identity, a point of interest for both corporations and the intelligence community,” Mr. Bryant said.

With all of this new research arising, you should make sure the language you are using in a blog post, tweet, or Facebook post is relatable and can be comprehended by your audience. This can be incorporated into your internet social networking strategy through writing about unique and interesting content that your community will enjoy reading. Regardless of how Twitter exchanges may appear on the surface, this social media tool can help uncover truths about our social interactions that are more serious than we think!

There’s no way around it – Google is the head honcho of the search engine world. If we want our websites to show up in the search results (and stay there) we need to acknowledge Google’s webmaster guidelines. While we may not follow these guidelines to the T, it’s clear that following Google’s suggested best practices will mean a healthier life-cycle for our sites.
Google breaks down their guidelines into three main sections: Design and Content Guidelines, Technical Guidelines, and Quality Guidelines. Let’s take a look at what Google wants from each category.

Design and Content Guidelines

• Easy to Navigate
• Provide useful, relevant content
• Keep the number of links on each page to a reasonable number
• Include appropriate keywords in your content

Technical Guidelines

• Test your site to be sure it displays correctly in different browsers.
• Optimize your site speed and performance
• Regularly monitor your site’s performance
• Allow search spiders to crawl your sites without session IDs

Quality Guidelines

• Don’t try to trick your users or the web with cloaking (presenting different content to the search engines than you users).
• Avoid tricks to improve search rankings.
• Don’t take part in link schemes

Specific Quality Guidelines

• Avoid hidden text and links
• Don’t use cloaking
• Don’t create multiple pages or sub-domains with duplicate content
• Don’t fill your content with irrelevant keywords

Overall, Google wants websites to provide unique, useful and relevant information on sites that are easy to use – the end goal being happy searchers. This was verified with their recent Panda update which focused on increasing the exposure of sites with quality content. As we always say here at Astonish Results, quality content is king.

Bloggers Beware: Five Common Writing Errors to Look Out For

In today’s fast-paced world, online writers are expected to be able to pump out fresh and informative content on a regular basis. Furthermore, it is essential that this content is readable, shareable and correct. People who blog for their business carry a lot of responsibility since every piece of work they publish can reflect on the credibility of their company.

As all writers know – whether they publish online or in print – it’s all too easy for mistakes to slip through the cracks and make their way into a final copy. However, simply being aware of some of the most frequently made errors may be enough for bloggers who want to avoid making them in the future. The top five include:

• Mixing tenses
• Misplacing apostrophes in plural or possessive words
• Missing words, often prepositions like “to” or “in”
• Dangling participles or modifiers. For example, in the sentence “Researching insurance marketing, the team developed a great idea,” the first part of the sentence is “dangling” because it is not associated with the subject that the author intended.
• Lacking proper subject-verb agreement

These types of errors may not be as glaring as misspellings, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t apparent to attentive readers. Keeping these things in the back of your mind can help ensure that the content you post to your company blog is engaging and easy to read. Nothing can drive people away from your insurance website like content that requires re-reading in order to understand it!

Normally, when you think of customer service, you visualize a person talking with someone else in a face to face conversation. However, with so much social media and technology being used in the business, it has become increasingly difficult to recreate an in-person meeting between client and agent. Yet, this doesn’t mean all hope is lost.

In order to keep your customers invested in what you have to offer, you need to utilize different methods to add the human factor back into your services. According to the blog ErnestBarbaric, where marketers often go wrong on their social media sites is they create no conversations, no relationships, and no questions are being asked or answered.

One tactic you can use to make sure you are reaching your audience is by logging out of your account, opening a new window, and reading it the same way a new visitor would.  You don’t want it to lack personality or read as a self promotional site.  Instead, it should be inviting and relatable to your audience.

In addition, each network you have needs to have a clear reason as to what purpose it serves. Clarifying the purpose of any specific channel helps define strategic objectives, measurements, and tactics you may use. You should be educating, reaching out to new audiences, spreading your ideas, and providing customer service.

The most important method you should use to connect with your clients is by putting people first and the brand later. Rather than having your audience talk to an automated entity, put a face to your account and have them speak with a real person so they can identify with your services.

This component of insurance social networking is important to understand. It is hard for someone to have a conversation with your agency as a whole when they find you on the internet. However, having someone running and conversing with the clients one on one will benefit your business greatly and make your audience feel more comfortable. Listen, converse, and be human to create personal relationships with the people you care about most.