Businesses that have an online presence often develop personality traits depending on how they engage with people online, and your online web presence is one of the most important selling tools you’ll ever have. You can control how you’re presented online, where you’re presented, and what kind of people notice you. However, building a great web presence takes a lot of focused energy, and doesn’t just happen on its own.
Many insurance agents believe that simply having a website means they have a web presence, and this couldn’t be further from the truth. Building a great web presence involved a combined effort of website functionality, social media practices, inbound marketing, online reputation management, online PR, and more. It also means controlling how your messaging comes across in content and in frequency. Not only does creating these online assets take work, but maintaining good standing in each takes practice.
Fortunately, building a great web presence is easily attainable once you break it into pieces, understand the steps involved, and get used to practicing these insurance agent employee tips in your everyday work life.
Monitoring Tools
Whether you know it or not, people online might already be talking about your insurance agency – some might be good, and some might be bad. It’s important to know what’s out there, and how you can highlight good reviews and bury bad ones. Luckily, there are several tools out there that can help you automatically monitor your online reputation.
Google Alerts – Google alerts is a free tool that allows you to enter keywords, like your business name, and have alerts email to you whenever something with that keyword is published online. Many times these can be meaningless, or be set off when you update your own blog, but sometimes they can be your first line of defense against bad online reputation management.
Google Blog Search – Similarly, Google’s free Blog Search tool allows you to search for your name or business name in blogs. This is especially helpful if a disgruntled customer decides to blog negatively about you, or someone writes a positive review that you can share with your followers.
Technorati – Technorati is a content syndicator, and publishes and indexes thousands of pieces of content every day. Since it collects content from all over, it’s worth regularly searching for keywords to see if there’s any good or bad press.
Once you’re aware of any content out there that may be saying good or bad things about your insurance agency, you can start to manage these pieces of content. Sometimes contacting the webmaster to have the article removed is helpful, but not always. Other times, you can use SEO to get better content ranked above the bad content to try to bury any negative feedback. Unfortunately, however, negative feedback on the internet is sometimes around forever.
Use Inbound Marketing to Your Advantage
Once you have an idea of your online reputation, you can begin promoting yourself. The insurance industry has a bad reputation for being overly promotional, so take a more subtle approach. Nobody likes a hard sell unless they’re really invested in your product. Inbound marketing for insurance agents can be a perfect solution, since marketing efforts like SEO and Social Media Marketing can lure searchers to your website without being promotional. If you don’t know how to run your own SEO, many search engine marketing companies can offer inbound marketing consultations to insurance agents at an affordable rate.
Social Media
Whether you personally use social media or not, social media marketing is perfect for insurance agencies because of the vast audience of potential clients that are actively using social media every day. However, social media can either help or hurt you depending on how you use it. Overly promotional or sales-y posts will surely turn off your followers.
Social Mention Tool – Much like Google Blog Search, the Social Mention Tool allows you to search social media for any mentions of you insurance agency to comb for good or bad reviews.Use & Broadcasting – It’s best to use social media to offer helpful tips, advice, and knowledge about your industry. Establishing brand recognition and industry knowledge should be on the forefront of your social media plan.Response and Engagement – Social media is a great tool for forum-style conversations, customer service, and more. Make sure you spend at least half of your social media posting time responding to peoples’ comments and questions, retweeting or sharing others’ content, and mentioning key influencers to build engagement. Also remember to be timely with any responses.
Make Sure Your Website is Working
Your website is the hub of all information about you, and any inbound marketing and social media you do points to your website. Make sure your website is well organized, clear, and engaging – and that it offers strong call to actions, plentiful advice, and channels to contact you with. Testimonials, work samples, and more are also great ways to hook your audience.
Use Review Sites Effectively
Review sites like Yelp, Google Places, and more are popular ways for customers to vent or boast about the service they’ve received. Make sure you list yourself on review sites, and regularly monitor for reviews. Consider responding to bad reviews with an apology, discount, or other level of service to try to change their mind, or at least a general response with contact information if it was a situation you were correct in and worked to resolve with an unruly customer. It’s important to open yourself to reviews, whether good or bad, for the feedback your customers can provide you as well as for customers to see responses to display your attention and engagement with your customer base. You can also use these reviews to fine tune your customer service and offerings and work to improve your insurance agency or business.
Taking the Temperature of Your Leads
When following up with leads, try to gauge their interest level by their frequency and depth of their responses. If you’ve been following up with a lead over and over for months and they never write you back, take that as a sign to back off unless they express interest first. Nagging a disinterested lead for too long can come off as desperate or inappropriate and result in lost business and potential negative word of mouth.
Use Networking Appropriately
Similarly, when networking try to gauge your audience’s interest level before giving your elevator speech. If you’re at an event that’s specific to insurance or business networking, that is a time it would be appropriate and acceptable to lead with business talk. However, if you’re at a social function, like a party or wedding, keep the conversation casual and light unless someone else expresses obvious interest in your business or services. Getting an unwelcome insurance (or any!) sales pitch is unpleasant, and will also leave a bad taste in their mouth that might result in a lost potential lead for your insurance business if it were pursued appropriately. If you do get some peoples’ email addresses from networking events, refer to the previous tip about following up with a networking lead. If they don’t engage back within the first few emails, take a pause unless they reach out first, or consider a new approach.
By following these simple steps, you can control how you’re perceived online, and what your online presence says about your brand. Devoting some effort to monitoring and engaging online could make the difference on whether or not you close that next sale, or whether or not you retain the customers you have.
About the Author: Justin Brown is an insurance marketing expert working as the Marketing Content Manager for the Bankrate Insurance companies NetQuote, InsureMe, and AgentInsider. He provides insurance agents and risk managers with the latest news and marketing tips to help them grow their business.