Insurance Agent Web Power

Coupon ideas for insurance agency Google Place pages or Twitter Tweets…

So what if you can’t offer special sales on insurance policies?

We all envy the pizza parlors and retailers who can offer limited time discounts and sales. Adding a coupon to a Google Place listing or announcing a special offer via a Twitter Tweet is easy for them. Not so much for insurance agents. How can you offer a sale or limited time discount on a car insurance policy? You can’t, but the good news is you can use tweets and coupons…you just need to step outside the box a little.

From Google Place page for Mission Mountain Winery

Here are just a couple of coupon (or tweet) ideas you can use to get customers and prospects to drop into your office. Remember, you can use internet communications to finesse off line behaviors and vice versa.

1. Offer give aways to the next 50 people who stop by your office to say hi. To go cheap – use insurance company provided merchandise.
2. Offer to make a $10 donation to one of 5 or 6 charities in the name of visitors.

Be sure to limit the promotion to a set time period, let people know that they need to present – or at least mention – the coupon to get the goodies, get visitors to ‘check in’ using Facebook Places when they are in your office (put up a poster), set up some light refreshments for visitors (coffee, tea, cookies) and set up a workstation so they can get quotes while they visit – but no pressure, encourage customers to get the coupons and share with friends.

Any thoughts or additional ideas?

Businesses that have products or services to which consumers have a strong emotional attachment.  For instance, a friend of mine runs a business that markets reggae and Rastafarian themed clothing, posters, and other products.  All they have to do is post a song lyric or two to their Facebook page each day and poof! – over 1,000 ‘fans’ and multiple comments each day for each post.

Insurance is harder.  There are two times when the emotional attachment to insurance is strong: 1)  When someone’s premium increases or coverage gets canceled, or: 2) After receiving fast and complete indemnification after a claim*.  Those attachments are at opposite ends of the spectrum – so what’s in the middle?  What is the fodder for those daily Facebook posts  – the song lyrics of insurance, if you like?

I was going to use this blog post to offer up some suggestions, but PC World beat me to it.  Here’s an excerpt from their July article, Secrets to Using Facebook to Market Your Business:

Customers want to be informed and engaged, not pitched and harassed. It’s OK to tie in your products and services where they’re relevant, but don’t simply use the Facebook page as a platform for marketing soundbites.

You can post news or stories related to your business and provide unique commentary or insight. You can also use the Facebook page to provide tips, tricks, or information content. Rather than just talking at the audience, though, try to incite comments and feedback from the members to foster a sense of community with the customers.

*OK, so there are lots of other negative emotional attachments to insurance:  I don’t understand my policy paperwork, or bill; I can’t get anyone to respond to my questions, etc.  In the Yin-Yang philosophy of life and business, each of the negative emotional attachments can also be turned to positive experiences.

I see an increasing number of companies specializing in websites for insurance agents that claim to provide search engine optimization (SEO) with their service.  But almost none of them are really are.  More website providers, maybe most at this point, include what is called a content management system (CMS).  CMS allow regular business users, with limited to no technical expertise, to manage and update their own websites.  Using a CMS, you can add content like images and video, add or edit web pages, and importantly you can control key page elements that search ranking algorithms use to determine page rank relevance.

And while there are differences between the various CMS options out there, most all of them remind you to include those key page elements by providing blanks for page title, meta description, meta keywords, and so on.  But including reminders through a CMS is not the same thing as delivering SEO.  In fact, it’s not even close.  To give you an analogy, think about what it takes to fulfill your tax obligations with the IRS, and at the same time, minimize your tax burden.  It’s easy enough to go online and download a Form 1040, and all the blanks are there.  But possessing a blank tax form does not automatically fulfill your tax obligation, the same way having a CMS with all the web page elements for you to fill in does not mean you have search optimized your website.

Obviously, there are advantageous ways to legally complete your tax forms.  But it requires a bit of knowledge about what is both legal and advantageous to complete your tax forms in such a way as to minimize your tax burden.  And the same is true for your CMS:  a bit of knowledge (and fore planning) are required to fill in your page elements in such a way that your web pages get ranked by Google and the other search engines.

Does it matter which CMS you select?  That question can best be answered by a quote from a recent Marketing Sherpa article, “Overwhelmingly, good search engine optimization with a CMS is really more about how you implement the CMS and not necessarily which CMS you select.”  So, in order to make the leap from CMS to SEO requires a plan and effective implementation of that plan.  A good CMS can be tremendously helpful in implementing many SEO plan elements, but CMS without a plan is no more useful than a blank tax form.

The F.C.C., stymied in its efforts to ensure a level playing field for web content providers, has been holding side meetings with large internet players to find a way to regulate some form of net neutrality.  While the F.C.C. quest to see that no web content is favored over any other content continues, the New York Times reports that a deal between Google and Verizon, which in part will guarantee preferential treatment for Google’s YouTube videos on the Verizon network, may be struck as soon as next week.  Once one large content provider, like Google, agrees to pay a delivery service, like Verizon, for faster delivery of content, other deals are sure to follow.  And as with everything else, the cost of these side deals will be passed on to end users…and smaller content providers, who can pass on or pay the tariffs that internet service providers will be able to command, may see their content slowed down.  The end of the ‘free’ internet may be at hand.