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?

Following the news that Google has acquired Zagat to bolster local reviews, more attention that ever should be devoted towards asking your clients to review your performance and give you reviews on your local listings.

As a business owner you obviously want multiple five star reviews, all of which declaring you to be the best insurance agency ever, but the somewhat elusive local review is not the easiest to obtain. Also, you may be thinking that you want the review but only if it is going to be positive and five stars. After all, I don’t want BAD reviews all over my Google Places account. After reading this post, you may have a different opinion of the local reviews.

How to Attain Good Reviews?

The first step to good reviews is to always keep customer service in mind when you are interacting with your clients. There will be the occasion where a customer is irate or upset about something that has happened to them. As a business owner, it is your job to do your best to serve them and offer helpful solutions to their problem. Many good reviews can come from experiences that start out negatively and are turned around with exceptional customer service.

Make it as easy as possible for your customers to leave you a positive review with a combined strategy of making the effort to provide the best customer service possible and directing customers to a page with buttons to all of your local listings. From there you simply e-mail, post to Facebook or Tweet out the link to your Local Reviews Page. Now, leaving a great review for your business could not be easier.

When a person posts a review on your Google Places listing, they are taking the time to let you, and the rest of the world know how their experience with your business went. Whether they had a negative experience or an exceptional experience, you will reap the benefits that a review can give your listing.

Granted, if every review you have is a 1-star review with negative comments about you or your employees, you may want to speak about the interactions they are having with clients. But if you have some good and some bad reviews, that is fine. Your company’s reviews are authentic customer accounts from people who have used your services. Remember that your reviews are essentially word of mouth insurance marketing for your agency. These referrals can get people to pick up the phone or drive to your brick and mortar location so they are important to monitor and stay on top of.

What to do with a bad review?

It is a very real possibility that someone could leave a negative review about your business on your listing. So what is the best way to deal with a negative or less than satisfactory review?

Monitor and respond; you may think that a bad review will hurt you more than help you but you should think more about the content of the review. I hear all the time that “I only want positive, 5-star reviews”, the reality is even bad reviews are filled with keyword rich text. Here is an example of a 1 or 2 star review that I have seen;
“I do not recommend anyone to this agency………….them, it speaks for all the representatives……… I was a previous customer………back to get auto insurance with them when I was transferred to ******………to tell me that my auto policy was cancelled due……….and I STRONGLY DONT RECOMMEND anyone to this company unless you wanted to be treated like dirt. They are not the only insurance agency in orange county!!! “
If you look at the review it is pretty harsh but, there are few keywords that a search engine will find that can help return this local listing as a relevant search result for someone searching for insurance in Orange County.

When it comes to reviews, it is a best practice to respond to the less than stellar comments by offering an explanation or helping the customer ultimately find what they are looking for. By responding to the review, you are seen as a proactive business owner that really cares about his customers and that can go a long way for developing future business. You will be seen by the online community as someone that wants to do right by people, find out how to improve for next time or even offer a mends.

Be Proactive:

Give your clients an outlet to express their feelings on your site. Offer your unsatisfied clients a form to vent before they take their frustrations out on your local listings or review sites. This may not catch everything but it gives you the opportunity to respond to a review before it is public.

Once you receive a negative response, follow up with the customer immediately and try to make amends. Customer service should always be paramount in any interactions with customers but now, providing a high level of customer service can lead to an increase in traffic to your site and revenue to your agency.

Your local listings should be a large piece of your overall SEO strategy and can really produce great results when utilized correctly. Taking the time to ask your clients to review you and your agency is very important and will give you valuable feedback on how you can continuously improve the way you serve your clients.

By now, it’s safe to say that we all are aware of how crucial blogging is to one’s overall Internet Marketing strategy. Whether you publish content weekly, 3 times per week or even daily it’s likely that the time will come when you are struck with writers block. It’s not easy to create content that not only naturally incorporates your keywords but is also readable, entertaining and something your readers will want to share.

When you’re struggling for ideas, where do you turn? Perhaps you scour the office for industry-related updates or maybe you check your favorite news station’s website; whatever you do to dig up some blog-worthy ideas can easily be combined with these tips for creative content creation:

Behind-the-Scenes Insight

Your blog serves many purposes including the need to: to increase your overall SEO efforts, thus increasing traffic and generating leads – as well as highlighting your agency’s culture. The goal with any good Insurance Marketing strategy is to capture the attention of prospects, retain current clients and inevitably grow our business. To do so you have to position yourself at the forefront of your consumer’s mind; and how do you do that – by separating yourself from the competition.

When you think of insurance, what comes to mind? Most often you’ll envision accident scenarios, policies and claims. But there’s so much more to what you do and who you are, so showcase that on your blog. Do you celebrate employee birthdays with a giant cake? Maybe you volunteer with a local charity. Perhaps you have launched a friendly office-wide competition…take Astonish Results for example and our office’s RFM Weight Loss Challenge! By providing current clients and prospects with a sneak-peak into what life is like at your agency you are allowing them the opportunity to connect with you on a different level and build a relationship that goes beyond simply selling them an insurance policy.

Appeal to the Season

Changes in season are the perfect starting point for an informative, yet appealing blog post. You can coordinate your blogging efforts with the ever-changing weather patterns; think about including information about recent storms, local damages and how to best prepare for severe weather.

Seasonal posts can stretch farther than what may be falling from the sky. Think beyond weather and consider the activities that your consumers may participate in during any given period of time. Perhaps in the winter you talk about preparing your vehicle for the colder weather or in the summer you highlight the watercraft insurance policies your agency can offer its avid boaters. Nearly everything has its own season; weddings, back-to-school, holiday prep, etc. focus on providing useful, valuable information that can apply to your consumers’ everyday lives.

Tips & How-To’s

One of the most popular and well-received blogging styles is those that include tips and “how-to” information. Alongside your mission to gain a competitive edge, increase your agency’s visibility and strengthen your SEO, your blogging should also serve a greater purpose—providing value to the reader. You should strive to craft content that can positively impact your current and prospective clients, give them the facts, advice and general knowledge they both want and need.

These types of blogs can include general insurance tips, such as how to keep particular premiums low or can span across a variety of topics such as how to protect your home from burglars or fires safety tips for one’s home and office.

Current Events

Another aspect of your blogging strategy is using your content to brand your agency as a credible, knowledgeable expert – and better yet an active community leader. To do so you need to know what’s going on in the world around you and how it both applies to and affects the lives of your consumers. Developing a reputation for your agency which portrays you as a trusted resource for valuable information and news can help you both draw in readers (and prospects!) as well as keep them coming back for more.
When blogging about current events, make sure that they are either applicable to the industry or specific to your local community. Look for changes in legislation, new acts or regulations or even choose to stay up-to-date on the constantly evolving issues with health care. Perhaps a new driving-while-texting ban was passed in your state; that would serve as a quality blog post as well as provide you with the opportunity to incorporate some auto insurance information within the content. Or maybe flood damages reached a record high in your region, explain what this might mean for area homeowners and their insurance premiums.

Whatever you choose to write about, make sure your blogs are always valuable, interesting and portray your agency as a leading insurance resource. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box—do what you can to make your insurance content appealing and share-worthy.

Have any suggestions? Where do you go when your content has you stumped? Share your suggestions and comments with us below and feel free to check out our additional blogging tips for making the process more enjoyable!

Here it is — the last installment of my series on driving qualified visitors through your paid search (SEM) campaign.  In part one of this series, I discussed PPC keyword selection as the first two steps in qualifying traffic, and in part two I showed you how to optimize your ad copy in order to drive traffic from the visitors that you’d most prefer.

Remember that qualifying your paid search traffic has two parts:

Also remember that, as compared to organic search traffic (where you welcome visitors in all phases of the sales funnel), the most effective and efficient SEM campaigns can focus on driving visits that produce conversions.  Let your organic search optimization efforts drive the “information-gathering” traffic, use your PPC campaign to target the “purchasing” consumer.

Now that we’ve covered three steps to improve your campaign, let’s dive into the next tactic that will help you drive valuable clicks:

Step 4: Create Landing Pages to Promote Your Conversion Point

You’ve set up your PPC keywords, you’ve created some unbelievably enticing ad copy to get your audience to click … now what? The process of converting your traffic from visitors into customers is technically over, as you’ve now received a visitor from your SEM campaign.  But the most effective PPC campaigns do not stop optimization until after the most important part of this process – the conversion point.  If I am running a campaign to sell a widget, and I’ve received my captive audience through paid search, I want to make darn sure that I make the final piece of their purchasing process is both obvious and easy.

Once I’ve paid for this click, the last thing that I want the visitor to do is get distracted, bored, confused or frustrated. I want to subtly but firmly guide them through the conversion (or transactional) process.  That’s why the landing page in a paid search campaign is so important.  I’ll give you three quick tips to create an effective landing page, all geared towards promoting a conversion point.

Note that the page is simple, does not contain too much text, and provides no linking away from this page.  The visitor, who has arrived on a very specific keyword search (including the word “quote”) is confronted with exactly the type of information that they have requested, and are more likely to convert as a result!

There you have it – four easy steps to generating and converting qualified paid search traffic! Apply these tactics to your campaign and you just might get a more efficient use of your marketing dollars.

If you ever had the thought that you cannot blog, trust me, it’s not true. In my own experiences, I have found out that anyone can be a successful blogger to contribute to your agency’s insurance marketing efforts.

When I was first approached with the idea of blogging, I was a little skeptical to say the least. I didn’t think I would have the right writing style for it, and I honestly didn’t think that I would enjoy it. I soon found out that I couldn’t have been further from the truth.

I am very analytical. In middle and high school, I was on the math team. No joke, there were weekly meetings, even competitions. So how is someone so number-centric able to write, and do it well? I’ll tell you!
Have the Right Attitude
Your attitude toward something is almost always a deciding factor in your success. If you come into something with the idea that you will fail, you have no doubt already sealed your fate.

Always step into new experiences with a positive attitude. Know that there aren’t any downsides to trying something new. At best, you have discovered a skill you never knew you had. At worst, you gave something a good, honest try. You will also learn something in the process. If those are the only outcomes, there is no reason to not try writing a blog post or two!
Pick a Good Topic
Once you have a positive attitude, it is time to pick a topic to write about! This is probably a longer and more frustrating process than the writing itself, honestly. After all, when you are researching, there’s a whole internet of possible topics! How on earth are you expected to pick just one?

When you are searching for a potential blog topic, try not to get too bogged down with ideas. Keep it simple, and keep the following in mind:

Pick a topic that is relevant and interesting to your audience. Ask yourself this: what are people coming to your blog to read about? Make sure your topic answers this question.

Pick a topic you like. If you don’t like the topic you write about, no one will enjoy reading it. Picture for a moment being a high school English teacher. It would take all the patience in the world to get through a stack of thrown-together and last minute essays on Friedrich Nietzsche and nihilism written by 16 year olds. Can you even imagine the torture?

This is something that you must avoid putting your readers through at all costs. If you write about something you like and are passionate about, you don’t run the risk of your reader’s eyes glazing over.

To really avoid putting your readers to sleep, make sure to read your blog over after it is written. Make sure that you can read it fluidly, and fix any awkward wordings that are hard to avoid when writing. This is a very important step in writing, because sometimes what sounds good in your head when you write needs a better logical flow once is it actually on paper.
Show It Off!
After you have written and revised, take pride in what you have done! You are now a blogger! Show your new creation to friends and co-workers. Nothing will motivate you to cultivate a new skill like praise.

Then it is finally time to post your work! Putting your writing on the internet may seem strange or scary at first, but be assured that it will become old hat after a while.

And remember, with a plan of action, a positive attitude, and some practice, anyone can be a blogger!

Keeping up with the latest local search optimization tactics in addition to maintaining your overall insurance agency marketing focus can be a formidable, but worthwhile task. Changes to the Google algorithm can occur without warning and effect how local search results are shown; there has never been a better but more difficult time to rank for high volume, local keywords.

Over the past 12 months, there have been changes in Google Places with tags, check-ins, deals and other extraneous but relevant information pulled into your Places listing. More information than ever was used to determine rankings for local search. Even third party citation sites like Yelp, Insider Pages and CitySearch were all pulled into a Google Places listing and given weight in rankings.
As of late, it has been suspected that Google has placed less emphasis on the third party review sites with the appearance of the RED “write a review” button on listings. Also, Google displaying reviews from Google users exclusively and placing links to the third party sites under the listing.
Your first thought might be to only go after the Google listings. But rather than putting all of your eggs in the “Google Reviews only” basket, a more robust and natural approach would involve a review strategy that is more diverse and includes several different local citation sites.

That all sounds great, but how will you execute this new plan?

Encourage your customers to leave reviews for your business on their preferred site. Google may be a place that many people start their search but it won’t be the only place users will go to find information out about a business. Give your customers a nudge. Incorporate review buttons in a conspicuous location on your site to direct traffic to review sites directly from your site.

Point Your Customers in the Right Direction.

Develop a one-sheet to hand to customers or e-mailed along with your products or services confirmation e-mails. Asking for the review in the sales process will help it to become part of the culture of your agency. Utilize your e-mail list and send out a review e-mail with a link to a handful of prominent review sites to make giving your agency a review as easy and painless as possible.

DISCLAIMER: Make sure your service warrants a good review. By telling your customers to give your products or services a review, you become vulnerable for bad reviews. First and foremost, make sure that you are giving your customers the best customer service you possibly can. Typically, when you make a conscious effort to provide excellent customer service, obtaining five star reviews can become less of a chore.

People want their opinion to be heard, so when your company provides an above average customer experience, point them in the direction a review of your site. Remember also that below average or poor experiences can lead to a poor review of your business. That’s ok. Take a moment to respond to the review and offer a solution to the problem. People will see that you are actively monitoring your reviews and you have taken the time to remedy the situation and do right by your customer. Consider this…

Are Your Reviews Honest?

When you see a business with 50 reviews with five stars do you become a little suspicious? Maybe they really earned all of those five star reviews but most likely some of those reviews were not genuine. Instead of trying to get as many “perfect” reviews as you possibly can, monitor your reviews and deal with the good and bad reviews as they roll in. Thank someone for a good review and address the concerns of a bad review. Being a proactive business owner will say more about your business than 50 five star reviews can. You can also learn where you may need to improve as a business.

GET MORE LOCAL REVIEWS FOR YOUR BUSINESS TODAY!

Try this, each month select a winner from your reviews and try to get in touch with that person. Alert people to the drawing and highlight the winner on your on-site blog and social media sites. When people see that you actively monitor your local reviews and actually select a winner every month for a prize, people will be more likely to 1. Leave a review because there is something in it for them, and 2. Interact with your business on social media and blog pages. This is a great way to get people interacting with your business on a continuous basis.

Keep in mind that customers that leave positive reviews are much more likely tell people about your business. People who refer their friends and family to your business are also more likely to write a review for your business on a local review site. Connecting with the local user is the end goal and finding new and innovative ways to make that connection that will be beneficial to your business now and in the future.

In my last post, I began to tackle the idea of “qualifying” leads and visits that come to your site through paid search advertising. After all, if we can help it, we’d rather pay for only those clicks that are coming to your site by completing the action that we desire: purchase, sign up, download, or upload, just to name a few conversion points that online marketers target.  Remember that qualifying traffic has two parts:

If you can optimize your paid search campaign to achieve these things, or at least get better at them, you are well on your way to using your marketing dollars efficiently.

There are several ways to do this tactically. Part 1 of this topic talked about the importance of targeting value-based keywords as well as utilizing “negative” keywords to eliminate traffic from visitors who have very little chance to convert.

This blog post investigates the next step to qualifying search traffic: ad copy optimization.

Step 3: Use Ad Copy to Tell Potential Visitors EXACTLY What You Want Them to DO

Your text-based ad that appears in Google’s paid search results is the last thing that visitors see before clicking through to your site, and thus, incurring you a potentially expensive cost per click. So why not make sure that those users know exactly what they are about to see or do before they add to your Google bill? You can do just that by using language in your ads that talks about exactly what the user will find on the other side of the click.  Let’s continue with an example from our friends in the insurance industry who are trying to get visitors to request a quote for their personal insurance. Can you spot the difference between these two pieces of ad copy?

Ad copy #1

California Auto Insurance

Questions about car insurance in CA?

Click here for more info!

CA-auto-insurers.com

Ad copy #2

Auto Insurance Quotes

Get your free car insurance quote

from Acme Insurance today!

Acme-insurance.com

The first ad entices users to click through to a page that is offering broad, generalized insurance information. This could include answers to the questions “what is auto insurance?”, “where can I find a list of California insurance companies?”, and “where can I get some general insurance questions answered?”.  This ad doesn’t speak at all to the conversion point, and instead will attract many visits from people looking to satisfy general insurance informational search queries.  This will lead to clicks (and cost) from visits that will have a much lower conversion ratio (conversions/clicks).  Many of these people will find what they are looking for (or worse, maybe not!), and immediately exit the site with their search intent satisfied.

The second ad speaks much more directly to a subset of potential visitors who are looking to do a particular thing with their insurance search: get an insurance quote.  The headline (top line) and description lines speak directly to this point, leaving little to the imagination in the way of what lies on the other side of their click.  This will accomplish the two goals that we’ve discussed when trying to qualify traffic:

Research has shown that the better you can match your ad copy to the actual search that the user performs, the better chance you have in acquiring that user.  This is reflected in click-through-rate (CTR), which measures the number of clicks as a percentage of those who are exposed to the ad. If the ad appeals to the searcher, they will click on it.  If we can match our ad to their actual search query, we’re more likely to get the click, and if we target our ad and keywords to specifically target an insurance quote, we’re more likely to get the conversion.

That, folks, is the definition of a qualified visitor!

Stay tuned to this blog for our next step in driving qualifying our traffic: paid search-specific landing page optimization.

Maybe it’s because I am a writer. Or maybe in general, I am just a bit biased—but if there’s one thing I have learned rather quickly about insurance marketing, and Internet Marketing as a whole, it’s that nothing can bring you genuine results quite like high-quality content can.

Over the course of one’s life it’s likely that they will dabble in blogging. It can also be assumed that at some point they will quit—throwing their hands up in defeat, unsure of why they even began in the first place.

It’s the same issue with many of today’s companies. Business owners hype themselves up over the prospect of blogging; beyond excited and enthused to start generating more leads through insightful, educated text. But like anything that is truly good for you – seeing progress and real results takes time.

Here’s an interesting statistic: according to Technorati, 95% of blogger abandon their blogs. But…why?

Is it because we simply can’t commit? Or maybe does the initial excitement of sharing one’s thoughts just fizzle out? Perhaps it’s our need and infatuation with immediate validation.

We tend to be a results-driven society, and rightfully so – we want to know our efforts are paying off. However, one of the major reasons for such low blog success is because the vast majority of us can’t seem to accurately predict exactly what our blogging efforts will achieve. We expect things to happen faster – and be easier for that matter. But in reality, to see real results from content marketing initiatives, like blogging, you need time and patience.

As the web continues to evolve so does the thought process within the marketing industry; more and more companies are making the digital switch and with that switch comes some serious revelations. The realization has been made that by creating unique, branded content you can spread the wealth across web-based platform.  Let’s face it – great content is effective everywhere – on Facebook, Twitter, within a blog post, an email and beyond.

So how do you create content that “gets clicked”? How do you tailor the perfect message that will engage your current consumers, while also drawing in prospects? How do you generate content that really drives traffic and conversions?

Try incorporating these 3 triggers in your content marketing messages:

Appealing to your consumers’ emotions is one of the most important aspects to consider while crafting your marketing messages and content. People are motivated by their emotions; whether it’s fear, happiness, guilt or passion. Get the gears moving by creating content that your consumer can easily relate to – that will cause them to develop an emotional response to what is being said. Once the seed is planted, they are engaged and thinking about your message, you have now paved the way for your agency to offer up a solution.

Time certainly is the next element that triggers people to take action in accordance with your carefully tailored marketing message. If you have found an outlet in which you can provide a solution to a problem within a specified amount of time – whether it’s an immediate quote or complete coverage review – people are likely to jump at the chance to take you up on your offer.

If there’s anything that can help transform content from text to conversion tool, it’s the act of using words to portray value. We live in a society that is always moving – addicted to the buzz of being busy – not to mention a society that constantly hits people with marketing messages all day long. From logos to commercial jingles, there is product promotion everywhere; and many of us have gotten used to tuning it all out. By including an element of value within your content you are separating your message from the masses.

The primary thing you need to think about when crafting quality content is what you can say that is valuable to your consumers and prospects. What can you say, or do, that will benefit their lives? What do they really want to know? What is the ultimate goal that they want to achieve when purchasing your product or service?

Overall, it’s clear that there is so much that can be accomplished through content marketing—but to really achieve you have to be dedicated and patient. You cannot expect to see yourself gain hundreds of new leads overnight, nor will you rise in the search rankings after just 2 blog posts. However, what you can expect is to achieve success overtime. Commit to producing quality, unique content in the form of Facebook status updates, tweets, blog posts, white papers, press releases and more – and you are bound to see positive results.

So it seems that online paid advertising spending is here to stay, no? The latest estimates show that online advertising spending will crest at $31.3b this year, which is an increase of 20% over 2010.  That’s “b” … as in “billion”.  This is more than a case of an industry that has reached its peak and is slowing its growth rate — it is an industry whose growth rate is double what it was projected to be at the end of 2010.

I’ve already spent time in this space talking about how paid search marketing is set to take off for the rest of 2011, but now come some new details about where that search growth is coming from. Paid search marketing is comprised of many components, including the familiar Google search results.  But now we know that, behind that explosive increase in online ad spending is something called “display advertising”.   Display advertising is a marketing tool that allows you to show eye-catching ads across various Google search properties (web sites) that are relevant to your business.

The difference between traditional paid search advertising and display campaign advertising is twofold:

Why is that important for you?  It highlights the idea our familiar “search real estate” is always changing. Five years ago the only conceivable avenue for those forward-thinking enough to engage in paid search advertising was to run ads with Google AdWords for PPC.  Now, we have to pay attention to different areas of growth in the industry, where people are getting their ads from different web properties, no longer just from a Google search.  Consider these three pieces of information regarding display advertising:

-        With Facebook advertising, I can run a hybrid image/text ad that only shows my advertisements to women, ages 18-35 in the state of Rhode Island. (Side note: Facebook hit 687 million users worldwide in the month of May)

-        With LinkedIn (the world’s largest professional network with over 100 million members), I can reach all users who have listed “insurance agent” in their profile

-        Twitter (one of the world’s most visited sites) has started serving third-party text ads on its webpage (how long can it be before it incorporates display ads?)

At this point, I want to take a step back for a reality check. The latest comScore data shows that Google Search advertising continues to dominate the landscape, and it shows no signs of slowing down. The fact is Google’s current market dominance and innovative approach to business means that it isn’t going away, or in the words of Mike Tyson, “fade into Bolivian”.

However, as the projections show that Display advertising is the driving force behind an overall growth in online marketing, I ask you two questions:

-        Can you afford to ignore this new mode of digital advertising?

-        Are you the type of company who is going to be at the forefront of a growing advertising trend, or will you be left out?

Contact me with any questions that you have about expanding your SEM advertising into display marketing.

“How can digital marketing help grow my agency?” This is a very common question these days among independent insurance agents. If you missed the Astonish Results and NetVU Webinar last week on Sales and Training tactics for your agency, it can be viewed in its entirety below. During the webinar we answered the question, but first we had to define digital marketing.  Digital marketing is a bit different from traditional marketing (radio, TV and Print).  While traditional marketing is geared toward mass advertising (spray and pray methods), digital marketing is a purpose-driven, metric-minded approach to marketing a product or service to the “modern consumer.”
The modern consumer consists of 85%-90% of ALL consumers who search online FIRST before buying any product or service.  In order to effectively market to the modern consumer of today, you must have a plan.

Digital marketing is a blended strategy comprised of a lead generating website, effective email marketing, a consistent social media strategy, and a solid Search Engine Optimization initiative. This coupled with strong agency leadership, the right people and process and incredible sales skills will help pave the road for future success.

Astonish Results has a passion to help independent insurance agents grow their business.  It’s so important that independent agencies adapt to the ever-changing landscape around them and adopt the available digital marketing strategies to truly market and communicate more effectively to today’s modern consumer.

See the full recorded webinar on sales and training for the independent insurance agency here.