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As a business owner, you really need to look at the world of social marketing and the importance of how your consumers review your business. Recently I was traveling in Kansas to put on an insurance marketing workshop and was looking for a place to sit down with insurance professionals for dinner. So in today’s time, I simply logged on to Yelp and searched for restaurants in the area. Now what’s great about this is that it not only provided me with many different restaurants in my general area, but it also gave me reviews of the restaurants listed. Being from Connecticut, I’ve obviously heard a lot about Kansas City’s barbecue, so I was looking for a barbecue joint in order to get a flavor of the area’s famous food. From my search, I found several different barbecue joints and ended up choosing Jack Stacks that had over 70 reviews and a 4 1/2 rating (out of a possible 5). I looked at those reviews before I made my decision but most importantly, I made my decision based on what others had said.
The Strongest Impression
So what does Kansas City barbecue have anything to do with your insurance agency? Well, reviews are absolutely critical to your agency’s success because just as we looked up the reviews of those restaurants before we went out, many of our consumers and/or prospects are looking up our agencies in the reviews and seeing what other people have to say about our business. Remember, as a business owner rather than as an insurance agent, we sometimes get caught up in what we do and become distracted from instead working onour business. We need to put ourselves in the shoes of our consumers and start to market through their eyes.
Remember, Google reviews are extremely important for two reasons, the first being that it allows your prospects to understand how your agency conducts its business and how you take care of others. The second is about Google scanning words within your reviews that play into your website’s ratings. For example, a good but ineffective review is “Chris Paradiso and his staff did a great job.” The good portion is that they wrote a review and that it’s positive in nature. The down side though is that it doesn’t get into what we did specifically for them. An example of a very good review would be: “Chris did a great job explaining to me my homeowners insurance policy along with coverage for my auto insurance policy and the importance of an umbrella policy. I bought all my insurance from Paradiso Insurance because they took the time to explain everything with me.” This would be a great review because remember, Google reads and analyzes the words listed and makes the connection to our business because we sell homeowners insurance, auto insurance and umbrella insurance. Get out there and get reviews, it’s very important to your bottom line.
