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!

Today, everything is fast. The days of waiting patiently for dial-up Internet connection are long gone and now, we simply expect to be able to obtain all of our information and share our thoughts with the world instantaneously. There is a caveat to all of this lightning-quick content, though. As information is loaded onto the Web at an increasingly quick pace, those who post it are not taking the time to ensure that what they write is high-quality content.

Even if your readers are unlikely to carefully read through everything you post, glaring spelling and grammatical errors can be a serious turnoff and diminish the credibility of you or the organization that you’re writing for. Now that regular Facebook posts are essentially a requirement for retail companies and blogging is one of the most popular insurance marketing strategies, it’s more important than ever that online writers represent their business in a positive way by ensuring that their posts are clean of any errors.

Here are some helpful tips on how people can edit their own work quickly and efficiently, before clicking “publish:”

• Just because you write something at night doesn’t mean you have to post it immediately. Wait until the morning to edit it when your mind is sharp.
• Although it may seem tedious, you might be surprised how many small edits you will find when you read through a piece of writing several times. Read your writing at least two times before posting – once for continuity and once for spelling and grammar.
• Editing can be exhausting, so take time in between editing sessions to switch gears and work on something else like your company’s insurance website design.  Coming back to a blog post with a fresh set of eyes can make all the difference.
• Whether you’re editing your own or someone else’s work, compiling a list of common mistakes that you find can help expedite the proofreading process in the future. Going over this quick list before posting can help ensure that the writer did not make one of his or her signature mistakes when he or she was writing while tired or in a rush.

You might not think you have time to implement an editing process, but it’s important not to underestimate the value of high-quality content. Although the Internet has somewhat generated its own language, modern readers need to be able to breeze through content without stumbling over awkward phrases or grammatical errors. Dedicating a few extra minutes to quality control can help ensure that your words are heard and that you’re message is not undermined by simple mistakes.

Every industry has its own language – the Internet Marketing world is no different. For those of us who work in the industry, it can be so easy to get swept up in the jargon that we forget not everyone uses these terms on a daily basis. At Astonish Results, we’re constantly communicating with clients who do not have backgrounds in Internet Marketing, so it’s important that we stay away from the lingo we’ve become accustomed to and speak in plain English.

My goal for this post is to translate some of the terms we throw around most often into basic English. Here we go…

Internet Marketing

The practice of marketing products or services over the internet. It is also referred to as online marketing, web marketing, or digital marketing. Internet marketing includes websites, email marketing, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, and social media.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization – The practice of helping a website show up in the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Search engine optimization is an internet marketing strategy that analyzes web searches – from determining how the search engines are ranking websites in the search results to figuring out what people are searching for and what specific terms (or keywords) are being used.

SEM

Search Engine Marketing – also known as Paid Search – is the practice of increasing a website’s exposure through paid search tactics such as PPC (pay per click). In a very general overview, SEM involves paying to have a search result appear when a search is done for a certain keyword term. If someone clicks on your ad, you pay an agreed upon price. The goals are in line with those of an SEO strategy, but SEO involves organic results and SEM involves paid results.

Link Building

Link building is the practice of getting other websites to link to your site in order to boost rankings in the search engines. Having a relevant, quality website link to your site is like getting a vote. If the search engines see that other websites want to share your information and promote your website, then they are more likely to deem your site worthy of a higher search ranking.

Search Spiders

When we refer to search spiders, or web crawlers, we’re referring to the computer program that can browse the web to find search results. The search engines use search spiders to come up with a quick, up-to-date, organized list of what’s available on the web so the search engine can then determine how relevant the content is – this turns into the search results you see on Google, Yahoo! and Bing.

Unique Content

We all know about plagiarism and the negative consequences associated with it – providing unique content for your website and blog will keep you out of trouble. The search engines love fresh, honest, helpful content – doing so will make your site seem more useful. Every page on your website and every blog post should say something different. You cannot copy content from your website and post it on your blog – the search engines will recognize this as duplicate content and you could be punished. The best way to stay in the search engines’ good graces is to create unique content every time you write.

Search Volume

Search volume is the number of times a certain term is typed into the search engines on a monthly basis. When we decide which keywords should be used in your SEO strategy, we are comparing the search volume for hundreds of terms to determine which are the best fit. In addition to the search volume, we need to look at a term’s search competition before we decide to select it as one of your keywords.

Search Competition

A term’s search competition lets us know how many other sites are trying to be found for the term. If we find that a term has a search competition of 100% then we know it will be very difficult to rank for that keyword because a lot of other sites are also trying to rank for it. We want to find a term that has a high search volume and a low search competition when we are selecting your keywords.

There is much more internet jargon that we use on a daily basis, this was a peak at the topics we reference most often. What are some of the Internet Marketing terms you hear on a regular basis? Let us know if there are any terms you need clarification on and we can feature them in a future post!

One of the great things about a pay-per-click campaign in Google is the ability to access a myriad of data points to judge the effectiveness of your strategy.  The idea is to use all of the data available at your fingertips to make small changes to your campaign so that you can achieve two simple goals:

Sounds simple, doesn’t it?  It is – until you get a look of all the data that gets generated from a paid search campaign.  By the time most advertisers finish looking at their CPC (cost per click), CTR (click through rate), Cost per conversion, conversion rate, etc, their head begins to spin.

With so much information, it’s important to decide which is important enough to act on. My rule of thumb when it comes to deciphering this information is simple: your most important data is closest to your bottom-line business goals.  Why worry about CPC, when cost per lead is closer to the actual sale?  Why worry about the percentage of people who click on your ad (click through rate), when you can focus on the percentage of clicks that turned into a “conversion” (conversion rate)?

When I am working with one of our agency partners on their insurance marketing SEM, and need to do a “quick and dirty” assessment of their campaign’s performance, I have some go-to metrics that I look at first. Let’s take a look at three of them:

• How much have I spend already on this campaign?
• When is my budget projected to run out, based on campaign spending so far?
• What campaigns are spending the most?

After you get a handle on how much you’ve spent, you can get started on looking at metrics that show how your money is performing.  And the first thing I look at is…

One caveat:  as I mentioned in the beginning of this post, the most valuable metrics get as close to the “sale” as possible, so the ultimate indicator of performance is cost per sale (or cost per customer).  If you can directly attribute online sales to your SEM campaign, use a cost per sale as your substitute for CPO — this metric will tell you if your generated revenue is more than your investment in paid search.

• Is my website (more specifically your SEM landing page) effective at driving business?
• What keywords are most successful at driving conversions, and which keywords are just costing me money with very little return?

Your campaign’s conversion rate is a good indicator of how your landing page is performing.  If the page to which you are driving traffic is built with your conversion point in mind (a quote request form, for example), your conversion rate will benefit.  Since you’ve paid for the visitor’s click, you might as well pay attention to their behavior after they have cost you money. Your conversion rate will tell you if you are successful at converting costly visits into conversions.

Your campaign is capable of tracking conversion rate at the keyword level, which is a GREAT metric to be more efficient with your costs.  Does a particular keyword have a high conversion rate?  React to that by pushing up your bid and making that profitable keyword more visible.  Is there a certain set of terms that are costing you money but not producing conversions?  Pause or de-emphasize that term.

Use these metrics as a starting point in evaluating paid search marketing campaigns.  They’ll help you sort through all of the data that you can find in Adwords (or the SEM report that your marketing partner sends to you!), and get to the information that really matters.

If you get lost in all that data just remember to ask yourself one very important question: which data most directly impacts my bottom line?

In every case, posting the content online you write for your agency is never enough. Just because you make a blog post or a press release available on the internet doesn’t mean that everyone will access it. Let’s be honest, these posts are often tucked away on websites and in order to get the word out you need to do things like post them on your Facebook and Twitter accounts in the hope that your friends and followers will relay the message. However, sometimes even that isn’t enough so it becomes necessary to consult alternative methods to link sharing, one of these methods being social bookmarking. Bookmarking websites have been around for a while, but only recently have they begun gaining steam in the business community. While most people use these for news and finding unique articles, your company should be implementing them to grow traffic to your insurance agency website. But how is this done? How should your agency go about sharing content on social bookmarking sites? It’s easy!

Your best bet is start off with three of the most common bookmarking sites—Digg, Reddit, and Stumbleupon. These sites—especially Stumbleupon and Reddit—are commonly used for internet users to share links of news articles or anything interesting they find on the web. Websites are separated and shared via categories, so for instance topics such as “news,” “entertainment,” and “lifestyle” are commonly browsed tabs. What sets apart social bookmarking from social media is that social bookmarking allows you to reach an audience outside of your community on Facebook and Twitter. If done correctly, your links will hopefully show up in lists under whatever category you choose.

In order to bookmark a link, you’ll need to create a login for every site you want to bookmark with. For now, we’re going to use Reddit as an example because not only is it one of the most visited bookmarking sites, it’s the 45th most visited website in the U.S., according to Alexa.  After registering and creating a username and password, you’re ready to begin bookmarking! To start, jump to Reddit’s homepage where you will see medium-sized text reading “Submit a link” in the upper right hand corner. You’ll be brought to a page where the next step is to fill out information regarding the link you’re posting. Whether it’s a blog post, press release, or any other form of content, it’s important to make sure your title is creative and eye-popping while also including your keyword. If you’re having trouble coming up with a catchy title that includes the keyword, don’t worry; making the title stand out is the most important thing and in some cases it’s okay to omit the keyword. Once you come up with a title, all you need to do is copy and paste the link from your post and you’re site is bookmarked!

Once you start bookmarking your pages, make sure to keep posting them on your social media sites as well: the goal is to reach as many people as possible. Once you start bookmarking every piece of content you post online, you should start seeing better results and more hits to your website.

In addition to Reddit, Digg, and Stumbleupon, here are additional bookmarking sites to consider: Delicious, Jumptags, and, of course, Google.

Of course you are part of the social media world- you know how important it is! So you comment, post and interact with others and their positive comments, posts, re-tweets, and “likes” always make your day at work worth it! Now think for a second- what would you do if suddenly your audience was gone? Suddenly, there is no one following you and no one is interested in what you have to say. There is no doubt that would be devastating!

If you do not take the time to interact with your clients, this will happen! It’s time to embrace your followers. These are the people who are hearing you out. They are there for encouragement and support and they deserve to be recognized. Whether you are on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, there are so many ways to show your appreciation. Here a few ideas from to get you started—think of it as a quick social network training tutorial!

On Facebook:

-Send an inbox to a client you haven’t heard from in a while

-Comment on a client’s victory or “like” it

-Give your opinion when a client asks for one via status

-Share a funny Youtube video and watch everyone’s reactions

-Share a link to someone you know will appreciate it. Put it on their wall!

-Start a poke war with a good friend! (Hey- it’s there. Let’s use it folks)

On Twitter:

-Send a personal “thank you” in a direct message

-RT a follower’s post that you found funny or interesting

-Start a random conversation with a @follower you haven’t heard from in a while

-Ask a question to generate conversation- serious or silly. Example: “Who watched last night’s episode of Family Guy??”

-Ask your followers for advice. Example: “What book should I read next?”

On LinkedIn:

-Send an inbox over to a new connection saying hello

-Work with one of your connections? Give them a great recommendation for their page

-Refer a friend to one of your connections

-Like/Comment on an update in your feed that speaks to you

It’s clear that there are many ways to show your appreciation to your social sphere. Now, do it! They do not call it SOCIAL MEDIA for nothing! Your audience will appreciate your gestures and will be sure to reciprocate. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how you grow in the world of marketing. You may not see results over night, but the more involved you are with your audience, the more people will respect you and your business. Ready, set, grow!

Fear has a lot to do with the unknown. SEO is still a relatively new development in the marketing industry, so it stands to reason that many companies are hesitant to dig into it. I’ve outlined five of the top reasons companies fear search engine optimization in hope that eventually we can quell these fears. The more you learn about SEO, the less intimidating it will become and the easier it will be to implement a solid optimization strategy.

Fearing SEO or being intimidated by all of the work required of a successful strategy is no reason to steer clear of this proven marketing tactic. According to G.I. Joe, knowing is half the battle – so start your education today. If you can grasp the fundamentals of SEO, then you are one step ahead of the pack. If you don’t have the time to implement an SEO campaign on your own, team up with a consultant but be sure to stay away from the false “quick results” scams out there. Then prepare yourself for some hard work and eventually you’ll see some astonishing results!

Feedback from your customers can be one of the most valuable tools in your internet marketing strategy. By way of the “old school testimonial,” the local SEO review takes it to the next level. At this point, your agency has probably gathered a plethora of testimonials from your customers. You should have even put them on your website. Now ask yourself – how can I make testimonials have an even bigger impact for my agency? The answer is simple; ask your customers for local SEO reviews!

What is a local SEO review? Basically, it is a testimonial that a customer leaves on your local search listings – i.e. Google local, Yahoo maps, etc. It’s important to get authentic reviews on your local listings – this will not only boost consumer confidence in your agency, but it can also push you higher in the local SEO listing results. If your agency’s local listing is not only well optimized, but also has 10 5-star reviews, you’re going to rank higher in the local results than an agency with no reviews.

So how do you get local reviews? Just ask! It really is as simple as that. In the same way that you ask customers for testimonials, you can ask them to leave reviews on your local listings. You can send your customers a link to your local listing, whether it is Google or Yahoo, and ask them to leave their testimonial there.

Here are some examples on how to ask:

• “I’m glad you’re happy with your new auto insurance quote. Would you mind leaving your feedback in a review on our local listing? Here is the link.” Or “You can find it here.”
• “Thank you for your testimonial. Would you mind leaving this as a review on our local listing too? Here is the link.”
• “It was our pleasure getting this claim worked out for you so quickly. Would you mind leaving a review of our service on our local listing? You can find it here.”

Do you have reviews on your local listings yet? Get started as soon as possible – start asking your customers for their feedback today. Have any creative ideas on how to ask your customers to leave authentic reviews to your local listings? Shout them out on Twitter, @Astonish_Shawna.  Just remember – all you have to do is ASK; if you do that, then you’re headed in the right direction!

The internet started as a revolutionary platform for information and communication, and guess what? It’s still revolutionizing the way we inherit and consume information, albeit much differently than how it was ten years ago.

Ten years ago there was no Facebook or Twitter and communication between friends was based on instant messaging and phone calls; even texting hadn’t become as widespread as it is today.

Now?

Facebook seems like it has become the norm for communication among younger generations. Email has been replaced by Facebook messaging, while phone calls have been replaced by texts and wall posts. Instead of calling friends to see what everyone’s plan is for the night, it’s now acceptable to post a status update reading, “what’s the plan tonight?” with links to various profiles of friends.

Facebook and Twitter have undergone significant changes since their debuts in 2004 and 2006, respectively. Remember the old Facebook layout? If you don’t, then we’re not surprised, because that was the layout all the way back in 2005. In order to keep up with the changing uses for the internet, social media accounts have to change, too.

So what changes have social media platforms made, and how does your insurance agency adjust and adapt?

Social media platforms change based on what they think people are currently using the internet for. For instance, Facebook was one of the first websites to really understand that users wanted to share photos as much as possible. On their initial run, photo space was limited, and now? Unlimited. Foursquare started up because the developers realized that people wanted to know where their friends were and what they were doing. And now recently, they have altered their website to allow users to not only check into places, but check into events as well. Although social media platforms all have different services and philosophies, they do have one thing in common: acceptance to change.

Social media platforms are always changing, so it’s necessary for us to change with them. If we don’t, then we’ll fall behind and we won’t be able to successfully implement them back into our lives and business strategies. It’s always funny when a website like Facebook drastically changes their layout: there is always a public backlash, but users will begrudgingly continue to log in because they can never get enough of Facebook.

So how should your insurance agency be adapting to changes in social media? Simple: as much as you can. As social media platforms change, your agency must change with it in order to better acclimate itself for future success. The old saying is, “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” which directly applies to this situation. If Facebook or Twitter makes an adjustment, you should make sure you and your social media team are aware of the changes.

Perhaps the biggest change within the last year is social media’s adaption to mobile phones. Mobile is primed to become a large part of social media in the near future, with LinkedIn announcing that they are revamping their mobile application in an effort to streamline the way users interact on the actual website and the application. Also, the new Apple mobile operating system, iOS5, is going to have innovative Twitter integration. It also does not hurt to mention that Facebook is the most downloaded free mobile application ever.

As an agency, it’s crucial to step up your game when it comes to the internet. The internet is where many current and potential customers spend a lot of their time whether it’s for work or for personal use. Keeping your agency up to date on the internet—especially social media—will allow your company to remain competitive in the online field and add traction to your insurance agency website.

Don’t be afraid of change!

Since the release of Twitter, there has been a misconception about its purpose. Many people believe that it is only useful for viewing status updates from those that you are following. In reality, it is so much more than that.

Although Twitter is a great way to keep your friends updated about events and other interesting information, it can also be utilized as an effective insurance marketing tool. Twitter is a practical way for businesses to keep their existing customers updated regarding any company news, events, and new product information.

While there are so many different tools available to help you get the most out of Twitter, I am going to narrow down a few of the more popular tools that can help you set the framework for your insurance sales strategy.

Here are a few basic applications that can be used to help you get started on promoting your business on Twitter:

Socialtoo.com:
Socialtoo is a free, handy tool that has many different uses! With this tool, you can:

• Keep track of all the people who have followed or unfollowed you on Twitter
• Have the ability to send a confirmation message to anyone that decides to follow you
• Follow people that follow you
• Blacklist users you do not want to associate with and prevent them from following you
• Follow anyone that has followed you in the past
• Create surveys

TwitterTools
If you run your own WordPress blog, then this is a must have! This plugin gives you the ability can integrate your Twitter account and your WordPress blog together.

This tool allows you to pull your own tweets into your blog and also allows you to create new tweets on your blog posts from inside WordPress. With this tool, you can quickly notify your friends on Twitter when you made a new blog post.

TWhirl

Twhirl is a tool that allows you to post Twitter updates, follow your friends and search for specific tweets. Most of the features that are available on Twitter are also available on Twhirl.

With Twhirl you can:

• Post short 140-character updates about what you are doing
• Follow your twitter friends and read all their updates
• Send users direct, private messages

Social Oomph

Formerly known as TweetLater, Social Oomph is a service that offers users the ability to enhance their tweets and actually send them through an e-mail! The purpose of this application is to help you be more productive and save time with your social activities on Twitter, Facebook, and even your blogs.

You can either opt to take advantage of the free service or sign up for the paid service. The free service allows users to schedule the occurrence of all your Tweets, track keywords, receive e-mail digests of keywords you specify, and efficiently view your mentions and retweets across many accounts.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a Twitter application that is integrated with Twitter’s interface. This allows those who are logged in to send and receive tweets. You can also view other profiles. In comparison to many other Twitter applications, this is one of the more popular ones.

With TweetDesk you can:

• Quickly send out tweets
• Receive G-mail notifications in your inbox
• Unicode art including smiley faces, arrows, and even upside down text!

Although there are an overwhelming amount of tools available to help you maximize your insurance marketing strategy, hopefully you will take advantage of a few of these tools. Some of these applications you will find are easier to use than others, but it is important to figure out which ones will work best for your Twitter marketing strategy!