It’s no secret that it’s becoming increasingly important for small businesses to take advantage of the benefits of social media. Because social media platforms are constantly updating and innovating their software, it’s necessary for small businesses to keep up to date with the changes and happenings in the world of social media. Thankfully, you have this excellent blog as a resource when it comes to receiving advice! To kick off the week, here are some additional ways for small businesses to get ahead with social media.

A Plan and Strategy Are Key

Many small businesses often create social media accounts without any clear plan intact. They simply see that the major corporations are doing it and haphazardly sign up but don’t utilize it to their advantage. While you may not have as many resources as larger companies, social media is still an inexpensive way to spread your band. Whether the goal is to increase web traffic, sales or online presence, having a specific goal and strategy in mind is essential. Otherwise, your Twitter and Facebook will look like chickens running around without heads!

Interact!

It’s easy to simply post photos, links and quotes from your social media accounts. The key, however, is to reach an interaction level with your audience that will cause them to spread the word of your social presence. Promotional components such as contests, trivia, and virtual gifts will help engage your friends and followers to a much higher degree and keep them wanting to get your status updates and tweets. Remember, if you’re not supplying quality online content users will not hesitate to either unlike your Facebook page or stop following you on Twitter.

Make Yourself Available

One of the underrated aspects of having social media accounts is actually checking them on a consistent basis. There are too many brand pages out there that look more barren than Antarctica that can and will lower the reputation of a business. Large companies have the luxury of employing community and social media managers whose main job is to run the social accounts. However, since you’re a small, independent insurance agency your only option is to have someone add these tasks to their additional workload. Whether it’s you or another employee, it’s imperative that posting is relevant and done on a daily basis, and we recommend at least one Facebook post a day and at least three tweets per day. You never know, your availability online may be what prompts a potential customer into contacting you for business!

Aside from these three tips listed above, there are countless ways to better manage your social media presence. Use these to your advantage, and always come back to our blog for more social media information that will improve your insurance agency website!

Conducting your own keyword research can be difficult enough – it’s important that you’re not overlooking small tweaks that can really make a difference in the success of your strategy.

When it comes to keyword research, make sure you’re not doing the following:

• Using broad match data instead of exact match dataSearch volume and competition rates are two very important metrics to consider in your keyword research. While a keyword may look amazing in the broad match data view, that’s really not the case. Broad match keywords tend to have a lot more traffic than exact match, but this won’t help your strategy. The catch with broad match keywords is that you cannot guarantee what combination of the words within each keyword phrase people are searching for – there is no precise science to broad match keyword phrases.The number for exact match keywords tells you how many people are looking for that exact keyword phrase on a monthly basis. Using this data in your strategy will ensure that you know exactly what you’re getting into in terms of what the traffic and competition rates are for your keywords.No tool is 100% accurate in reporting search volume data, but with exact match, you can get the best data available – this will help you decided which keywords are right to target.
• Having Unrealistic Expectations
  This is big point. You cannot be unrealistic in your expectations of your strategy. Keywords with high search volume are definitely terms you want to include in your strategy – but not at the cost of competition. If a keyword has a high search volume and a really high competition rate, then chances are that’s not a good keyword for you. Sometimes, you have to sacrifice a little search volume in order to get keywords that you can actually compete for. Volume is a one of the most important factors in creating a strategy – but it’s not everything.
• Researching Keywords Without Variation
  Search engines, Google especially, are placing a lot more importance these days on humanizing content and keywords. You really have to consider both the user who will be reading your site and pleasing the search engines when you’re building a strategy. In this regard, it’s important to make sure you explore all variations of a keyword. For example, someone who is searching for auto insurance could actually be looking for a number of things, such as an auto insurance quote, auto insurance rates, etc. Same goes for plurality as well – i.e. California insurance agents versus California insurance agent. It’s important to humanize your data and research as much as possible and make sure the context of your keywords is correct.

There’s a lot that goes into keyword research and building a solid SEO strategy, but sometimes remember the “little” details can really help. Are you performing any of your own keyword research? Share your tips and tricks with me on Twitter, @Astonish_Shawna.

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.

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!

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.

As social media has expanded over the past couple of years, it is obvious the affect it has had on our society.  We have now become more fast paced and invested in understanding the true definition of communication.  According to the Harvard Business Review, the future of social media stands right in front of us.

From Washington, with Obama utilizing Twitter for his campaign, to millions of Facebook users all around the world, it is clear that social media as something spontaneous reflecting how we behave in the real world is coming to an end.  We are entering an age of social business, bringing about a purposeful, planned, orchestrated, and integrated way of doing business in a social context.  This strategy allows one to complexly make a message feel personal to the outside, while on the inside, the organization is planning and navigating every move.  As further evidence to the shift, one can look to technology.

Over the past several years, innovative companies who have geared their mindset towards the future have begun to understand the value of monitoring conversations.  Therefore, they have purchased software licenses from platforms such as Radian 6.  Additionally, the notion of listening to social conversations is only a small portion of understanding social business.  The true opportunity lies in scaling and operationalizing “social”.  Thus, if the next phase of social media is operating as a scalable social business, then expect to see an increase of activity in the following:

Organizational Design: Social media is focused on parts of an organization or business where communications and marketing encourage social media tactics, while a social business is redesigned to look through a lens that is more holistic for the organization.  For further proof, we can look to Facebook, where business and brand pages deal with both customer “likes” and complaints.  Corporate Facebook pages are great examples of the need for marketing, PR, customer service, and HR to all figure out how to work together.  This is because users on Facebook don’t make the distinction behind which department is running what and to them, a company page represents all departments.

Social Business Intelligence: The rise of social media has led to many technology solutions, allowing organizations to become involved on conversations happening across multiple digital public spaces.  Organizations that have become accustomed to listening in on conversations are now positioned to take the next step and convert listening into organization-wide business intelligence.  Socially intelligent organizations will be able to adapt to conditions in their environment and eventually predict and plan for future scenarios.

Cultures of Collaboration, Co-Creation & Shared Value: The most significant recent business case, which illustrates the business side of social, comes from creating an ecosystem.  This idea operates by having value enter into it and then extracted by multiple stakeholders for mutual gain.  An ecosystem, by definition, is sustainable.

The relationship between social media and social business is complicated.  On one hand, the public desires authentic interactions in social spheres from real people and expect a real-time response.  On the other hand, a business or organization requires a system to be in place that coordinates activities.  Therefore, the oncoming shift is moving from a focus on external media consumption to the internal business integration of what it means to become social and connected. Is social media something you have included in your insurance agency marketing plan? If not you should make sure to include it, social media really is becoming the number one way to communicate with your audience.

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.

It’s no secret the influence social media has had on Americans especially those in younger generations. What once started out as an application for people to meet and interact online has now become a super highway of sharing personal and public information. With this data, businesses and search engines are able to follow trends and tendencies among users and see what types of topics and products are popular and, more importantly, unpopular.

In recent years social media use has exploded at exponential and alarming rates. Now, not only do younger people use these platforms, but adults do as well. While Facebook and Twitter have over 700 and 200 million users respectively, it’s impossible to deny the influence they have had on society and culture. It’s especially been helpful for businesses. When information about the product is supplied and repeated, more traffic is brought to the company. With Google’s new social media platform Google Plus gaining in popularity, businesses are obviously at a disadvantage if they are not spreading their brand via social media.

Although most users access their social media accounts on computers, a new trend is beginning to emerge in how consumers gather and spread information: Smartphones. Ever since the release of Apple’s iPhone in 2007, mobile companies have been churning out phones with World Wide Web capabilities at rates that seemed impossible five years ago. Smartphones are so popular that, according to a recent study, of the people that own cell phones, 42% have a Smartphone. That’s closing in on 50%, and it’s only going to increase. Eventually, the inevitability of technology will cause every phone to be a smartphone.

So what does this mean for social media marketing? How does the increasing usage of Smartphones affect your agency and the way we use social media?

Because so many Americans have smart phones, information is being gathered and shared at the highest rate the world has seen. Social media marketing, and marketing in general, is in over its head with the ability consumers now have to see everything that is going on in the world wherever they may be. Consumers use Smartphones for surfing the internet as well as accessing their social media accounts. Individuals are notified of any happenings and updates on social networking sites through their cell phones in real-time. The consistent connection to social sites means agencies can remind and update followers about their capabilities, offerings, importance and much more. Additionally, advertisements are always in view of the user as well. Simply put, your agency has the opportunity to be sending messages and information to your followers wherever they are at all times, so why not take advantage?

Smartphones are overwhelmingly changing the landscape of business and marketing. Because information is now available anywhere, it’s up to you and your agency to implement a social media strategy that will provide constant updates for your followers with smartphone access.

With social networking applications teaming with Smartphones, spreading your brand has never been easier.

Monitoring your social media campaigns can very easily become an addiction, and a waste of time, if you do not have the correct goals and boundaries in place.  There is always the temptation of straying from the path when you see something interesting on the social network you are working on at the moment, all I can say is stay strong and re-focus on the task at hand.  By effectively screening your social profiles you will be able to capitalize and improve upon the following results:

• Boosted rankings in the search engines
• Bring in more qualified leads
• Increase business/brand exposure
• Drive more traffic to your website
• Improve sales
• Decrease marketing costs

In order to reap the benefits of monitoring your social channels there are a few things that must be put in place.