If you’re own or manage an independent insurance agency and you are trying to figure out your internet marketing needs, you are way ahead of many of your competitors. Be careful with this decision because it’s a big one. This isn’t something you want to trust to a relative of one of your employees, or a kid, from church, who is handy with WordPress, this is a serious marketing decision for your agency and one for which you should hire a professional who understands your business and who is trained in and understands Internet Marketing. Here are a few things you should know.
1. This isn’t rocket science. You can get your arms around the basics fairly quickly. It does require you to forget all of your conventional pre-conceived notions, but you’re smart and you can figure this out.
2. Figuring out the basics is only the beginning. I’ve never seen anything quite as dynamic, fluid and moving as Internet Marketing. The rules change almost daily, sometimes slightly and sometimes drastically. Hard to watch if your real job is selling insurance.
3. You need to make a long-term commitment to the process but you don’t have to sign an long-term contract. When you want to quit you want to make the choice yourself.
4. There is no cheap way to do something right. If you want to something cheap, be prepared for cheap results.
5. Replacing a “brochure ware” website with a new “brochure ware” website might make you feel good but it won’t generate anymore revenue than your last “brochure ware” website.
6. Treat your website like a football coach treats his best tackle. Looks aren’t important. Function is.
7. If someone is willing to guarantee results within a relatively short period of time for a fee that fits your budget and it sounds so good that it’s almost too good to be true, that’s because it is…too good to be true.
8. Educate yourself so that you know what the professionals are talking about but remember you’re not the professional, your the insurance guy who is now an informed consumer.
9. Decide if you want to pay a fee for information on how to do all of the work, or if you want to pay a fee to have someone do all of the work for you. The work consists of writing articles, blogs, and social media posts and creating and posting videos. In addition, it includes monitoring links, making sure your articles are crawled, and monitoring keyword progress and positioning on the search engine result page.
Those are my nine random thoughts for today. That’s all that I can think of at the moment. Happy selling. I would love to hear your comments, or add number 10 if you think I missed something.