Internet Marketing is new and exciting to many of us in the insurance business. There seems to be a lot of pent up demand for SEO to the point where it sometimes feels like there’s a land rush happening and I’m driving a three-wheeled wagon. Just this morning I had a senior executive at a large regional agency ask me if I thought some of the things we were doing, content-based SEO, web site lead-capture, and drip system lead conversion, were almost obsolete and if we should be moving on to the newest, latest and greatest like Morgan Stanley’s The Mobile Internet. So, I looked into this and according to Morgan Stanley’s report Mobile Internet is 5th major computing cycle in the last 50 years, the four being Mainframe in the 1960’s, Mini Computing in the 1970’s, Personal Computing in the 1980’s and Desktop Computing in the 1990’s. Fascinating report and something to start working on now in order to stay ahead of the curve.
However, while it’s important to pursue mobile marketing and social network marketing, if you haven’t developed a plan for fundamental SEO combined with a sound marketing plan that includes lead capture and conversion, you should probably make that your priority since, in terms of prospective clients, that is where the numbers are right now. There are still a lot of people who are not on Twitter and Facebook and not everyone has a Smartphone. While things change very rapidly in this new world, the basics remain the same. The search engines are more concerned with user experience than they are with advertiser results. If the user finds what they are looking for then the advertisers will come, which is why content is king. Not just content for content’s sake but real relevant content that is easy to read and understand, content that someone can scan with their eyes and quickly ascertain whether it meets their needs. Once someone decides to read your content it should become it’s own call-to-action prompting the person to the next step which should be clicking on relevant anchor text in order to get to your web site. Links are very important, but content is the tie-breaker. As for the latest and greatest. We’re looking into the Mobile Internet but we only have so many resources and Internet Marketing is the priority internally and for our customers. Stay tuned there are big things happening next week. And if you haven’t done so already, check www.programbusiness.com It’s brand new! Tell me what you think.