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Here at Paradiso Presents, we are passionate about all things marketing, but many times this requires us to use various technologies. When it comes to digital marketing, there are a lot of tools to consider, from email marketing, to social media marketing, to marketing through your insurance agency’s website. Well, I’m here to tell you that if you don’t have a digital marketing strategy in place, you’re missing out on a lot of leads.If you take the time to embrace technology one step at a time, you could see an uptick in traction in the online world. If your agency isn’t already making the most of digital marketing, let’s talk about how you can take on technology, one step at a time.
Social Media Marketing
First, let’s talk about social media marketing. If you’ve been following our posts about social media marketing, then you’ve probably noticed that we’ve written a lot about various social media networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, and others. This sounds like a lot to take on at once, but instead of throwing in the towel, let’s just start in one spot. If you were to pick any one of these social media networks to focus on initially, I would first point you to Facebook. Facebook is probably the strongest social media network right now, having the most users, engagement, and interactions.
To get started on Facebook, you must first have a personal profile, just as I do with my profile as Chris Paradiso. After you create a Facebook profile for yourself, you can move onto making your company page while you’re signed in, by clicking this link. After that, Facebook will ask you all of the details about your business to get you started, and you just have to fill out anything it asks you and complete the initial process for getting your company page started. After that, your company page will be live, and you’ll be ready to start marketing through Facebook. To post to Facebook, simply push out a message using written and visual content in Facebook’s post publisher:
Remember, it’s important that you use a lot of visual content, such as pictures or branded visuals, because visual content gets 94% more engagement online than content that doesn’t have visuals. Simply posting text updates will not be enough. It’s also important to balance your posts about your products and services with your personable posts, this way people will want to connect with you online. Just remember to post consistently; at least one post a day is our suggestion for Facebook. Once you’re more familiar with all of this, and it’s not as overwhelming to take on all at once, you can move onto a little bit more advance Facebook tactics, by visiting this post about Getting Started with Facebook.
Agency Website Marketing
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, your insurance agency’s website should be your digital marketing powerhouse where all of your digital marketing efforts come together. If you’re on social media, you should have links to your social media networks on all of your web pages, either at the top, the side, or the bottom. Your contact information should be present on all of your web pages at well, listed at the bottom, with your phone number in the upper right hand corner of your website (because that’s where your prospects will look for it first). Your agency website should also include rich, visual content, to keep your visitors visually engaged. It’s also important that your agency website is Search Engine Optimized, or SEO’d for short, this way you can compete with Google search results for people searching for insurance in your area, so that prospects will hopefully visit your website before visiting your competition’s websites. It’s not your job to SEO your website as an insurance professional though, so we’ll leave that to the pros.
After you’ve hit these fundamentals with your website, it’s important to recognize that simply having a website alone and letting it live online is not enough to generate leads. You have to consistently update your website’s content.One way we do that at Paradiso Insurance is to regularly blog. With our blog, we post helpful information that our clients and customers can hopefully appreciate, while including visuals that reinforce our insurance agency’s brand, and conclude with a call to action for our customers and clients to direct them to one of our products and/or services.
Here is an example of one of our agency’s branded blog covers.
The branded elements, fonts, and logo all remind our audience that the content is coming from Paradiso Insurance, and we reinforce that message with the text included in the blog as well. We try to offer helpful advice, tips, and information for our audience, so that they appreciate our post, and hopefully commit to following us online. We also keep our website up to date with things like including our mobile app, updating our aesthetics to meet our branding guidelines, and adding additional information or updating old information on web pages as time goes on.
The Verdict?
Now, I know that some of you are reading this and thinking, “Jeez, this is all still a bit too much technology for me.” That’s okay, because I know that your primary responsibility is to sell insurance. Recognizing that it’s not your job is fine, but ignoring the responsibility to digitally market you and your insurance agency is not okay. This is where the time comes for you to hire a full-time social media/digital marketing professional to work in-house , and I would recommend that to any agency, not just those struggling with digital marketing. By hiring an in-house marketing professional, you can focus on what you’re best at, while your marketing professional can take the time to learn your agency’s brand, market your services efficiently into the social world, and craft branded visuals that will keep your audience engaged. I believe that every independent insurance agency across the nation should have at least one marketing professional in-house working full-time, and that’s why I personally have hired two. If you need help looking for a social media marketer, please email me at cparadiso@paradisoinsurance.com, and I’d be happy to shoot you our job description as well as give you a few recommendations in your search.
As always agents, best of luck to you in all of your marketing efforts, and remember, technology is not a bad thing, it’s here to help us. It’s just something you may have to take one step at a time!
