Insurance Agent Web Power

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about ecommerce, ‘… (it) consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks’.  They say a little more of course, and concede there is often a physical deliver component, but for the most part, the classic definition of ecommerce involves little more than circuits and networks.

The Seduction of Insurance Ecommerce

And the idea of ecom is alluring, how can it not be?  You set up a website, humans find it and enter information, get coverage and pricing information, and then enter payment information.  On the other end,  money comes out, straight into the pocket of the insurance provider.  And there’s flaw number one with insurance as ecommerce from an insurance agent’s perspective:  There is no role for the insurance agent in the foregoing scenario.  If insurance consultation and purchase could be conducted this way, why would anyone need an agent.  This view of insurance and ecommerce was pretty much the thinking in 1995 and it hasn’t come to pass yet.

Life Insurance and Auto Insurance for Basic Needs Consumers

That isn’t to say that some insurance sales have gone mostly online, term life and personal auto are two examples.  But even there, many consumers would be better served by involving a trusted adviser.  I sometimes ask agents how often coverage options on an original car insurance quote submission end up the issued policy limits.  The answer is almost never.  That’s because, even for basic auto insurance, consumers don’t understand how to determine coverage needs or the interplay between deductibles and other credits.  And while term life quote requests are easy to complete, not every company offers advantageous rates to consumers with health concerns or  a little long in the tooth.  A little experienced guidance would come in handy for many term life prospects.

A Shot in the Foot?

Advertising by term life insurance companies, and particularly advertising by the likes of direct marketing giant GEICO, lead people to believe they don’t need an agent.  And that mentality extends beyond just those two products.  Insurance agents have lots of opportunities now to participate in ecommerce through auto and home rating portals for comparative rateers, like EZLynx and Silver Plume, and company provided website widgets that allow website visitors to quote and buy online.  But if we just throw these on our websites indiscriminately aren’t we just reinforcing the message being pounded out by GEICO?  Are we shooting ourselves in the foot?

Internet Communication with a Sprinkle of Ecommerce

Most agents are local businesses and are no where close to fitting a traditional ecommerce model.  Most insurance agents can deliver benefits that can’t be matched by ecommerce alternatives but they need to make the case for agency value proposition and that’s where internet communication comes in.  Using email, the agency website, and social media agents have multiple low cost channels through which they can reach out to customers and prospects and communicate differentiate value propositions; but we need to actively communicate and those communications need to include a clear and advantageous alternative to quoting and buying online.

There is evidence that consumers want, and maybe even expect, to be able to get comparison pricing online.  So let them do it, but also let them know that going lone wolf may not yield the best combination of price, protection, claim paying ability and service, and convenience.  And let them know you have a good alternative – your insurance agency.

There is a relatively new twist on squeeze pages courtesy of the evolution of Facebook as a business marketing tool.  Squeeze pages, for those of us who may not be familiar with the term, are those web pages that require you to give up your email address, and sometimes other contact information, in exchange for something of value.

Where insurance is concerned, that something of value is generally content – a ‘free’ download’ or access to something on otherwise protected web pages – white papers, top ten tips, and so forth.  I’m not a big fan of squeeze pages, though they do have their place.  But before I go into that, let me address the variation on squeeze pages, as seen on Facebook – so called, Reveal Pages.

Reveal Pages

Instead of ‘squeezing’ an email address out of you, the reveal page spin usually requires you to ‘like’ a business Facebook page before ‘revealing’ the content on the other side.  Revealed content is typically the same as found on squeeze landing pages – free PDF downloads or access to other web content.  Often, on Facebook reveal pages, the new ‘liker’ is entered into a contest of some type.  The visitor is also in more control when it comes to reveal pages, since their Facebook ‘like’ can be revoked with a one click ‘unlike’.

The Key to Making Squeeze Pages Work

The point of both squeeze and reveal pages is to capture contact information – leads, basically, with the traditional squeeze page, a new member of your social media community with reveal pages.  These approaches are used to gather names, phone numbers, and email addresses for further follow up.  Step one in the reveal page scenario is simply the requirement of a ‘like’.  But the reveal page can still require the visitor give up their contact info, just like on a traditional squeeze page, and reveal pages often do just that.  But often the quality of these leads gained through squeeze and reveal pages are poor – bogus phone numbers and special email addresses used just for squeeze pages, abound.

And in some cases, the perceived value of the ‘valuable information’ just isn’t there.  Insurance agency squeeze pages usually come in the form of the ‘seven secrets for saving money on your auto policy’ or some such.  The problem with these ploys is that the information used extract contact information is readily available other places on the web.  The majority of consumers, if  the ‘seven secrets’ are really of interest, will just ask Google to take them to some other website.

But my biggest issue with squeeze and reveal pages aren’t in the pages themselves, my biggest objection has to do with sometimes misplaced priorities.  Most agents don’t get enough visitors to their websites or fans for their Facebook pages.  Quality content is fundamental to solving both challenges, but that content has to be free if traffic is to be active.  So often, unless your insurance agency is in a position to produce a lot of quality content for the web, or have some really exclusive information, content is probably better off published on the web with free and with open access.

Putting the Role of Your Agency Information, Website, Blog, and Local Search in Perspective

A picture is worth a thousand words, as the old saying goes.  In my case, a picture is worth about 10 webinars, 2 guides, 8 blog posts, 3 newsletter articles and more emails and conversations than I could possibly recount.  For years, I have tried to impress the importance of consistency in your basic agency information across the vast internet – and it is possible, in fact very manageable, to control the appearance of your insurance agency name, address and phone number in web directories and local search engines.  Through numerous blog posts, guides and  webinars I have tried to put the relationship and synergy between local and organic search results, your insurance agency website and blog, and now social media, into a comprehensible context.

And now, courtesy of Mike Blumental’s blog on Google Maps and local search, comes this infographic.  Kaboom!  All the many years of trying to communicate how all these work is captured in one tidy graphic.  It does a nice job laying out how the various manifestations of your insurance agency’s web presence fit together and it does a nice job integrating the concepts of search and social.

You can skip on over to full post on Blumental’s blog for a full explanation of the diagram, and I recommend it, but here are a few essential points captured so cleverly in this one image:

• The rings closest to the center of the ‘web equity wheel’ are most within your control – so control them
• Make sure your business name, phone number and website domain name don’t change  – that’s at the very center
• In the second ring, keep track of user names and passwords that access your directory listings and accounts where your business information appears.  I cannot tell you how many insurance agents had a (former) employee set up their Google Places account, later to find they cannot access their information to correct or update it.
• Insurance agency owners and managers should have complete control of your website and blog, so no excuses for not getting your basic business information right here, and no excuse for not promoting the kind of information about your products and services, the way you want.
• N.A.P., as it appears in the third and fourth rings out, refers to your agency name address and phone number, which also appears in the very center of the diagram.  This information shows up again to highlight the importance of controlling this information at the headwaters – those data providers that populate (hundreds and hundreds of) directories and local search listings downstream.  Again I say, to those insurance agents who represent Progressive, take advantage of their List Agent program and will make quality controlling your N.A.P. information a *lot* easier

I’m going to stop there since there is already a thorough explanation of the diagram at Mike Blumenthal’s blog.  But you get the picture (heh, heh, no pun intended).  A few questions I’d like to leave you with:  1.  What kind of progress have you made building your agency’s web equity?  Are you stuck in the middle?  2.  If you are working on your social media presence in rings four and five (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), have you skipped over some of the details in the inner rings?

There are more than a few Facebook time lines that can be found on the web…some, highlight all the often controversial changes to Facebook’s privacy policy, others highlight the meteoric growth in popularity of the social media phenom, and several include changes to Facebook features.

More recently, in February, Facebook made major changes to page layouts including doing away with tabs, announced the wind down of FBML,  but added the ability for business pages to feature ‘likes’ and included a new ‘photostrip’ at the top of Facebook pages.

In the second half of 2010, Facebook added a Places feature, with the ability for Facebook users to check-in to a location with a mobile phone but did away with Facebook Connect.  In all, Facebook has averaged 5 – 10 significant changes per year, all of which require some thought on the part of page administrators and many of which change the way in which insurance agencies use Facebook.

click to see complete infographic

To some, the constant change and Facebook flip-flops are disconcerting.  But not to those who developed a social media marketing strategy before jumping into Facebook…or any other social media channel.  If you haven’t already created a social media strategy for your insurance agency, here are some considerations to help you along that path and minimize the angst of the constant Facebook changes:

1.  Who do you want to reach through social media?

• customers
• potential business customers
• potential personal insurance customers
• age groups, sex, other demographic criteria

2.  What social media do your targets use?

3.  How will your use of social media integrate with your insurance agency website and other marketing and communication initiatives?

4.  Who will be responsible for updating your social media channels and how much time and expertise do they have?

5.  What objectives will you set for social media marketing success and how will you measure those objectives?

I don’t like to use this blog space as a commercial for Confluency Solutions, but I couldn’t help it this time.  In a  recent video blog post Google’s Matt Cutts answers the question:  what are the three things you would do to optimize SEO for 2011.

Number 1: Optimize for speed; it is a page rank factor, but more importantly, all evidence shows that, when web pages load quickly, site visitors do more on your site, resulting in better ROI.  Confluency has done a lot of work over the last 12 months, making our sites faster and faster.  Right now, nearly all of the websites Confluency has engineered rank in the top 1% of the fastest websites in the world.

Number 2: Make sure everyone in your organization understands good content management practices and make sure you are using good internal linking strategies within your website. Confluency recently added an automatic linking feature within our website CMS to further improve internal linking and we just kicked off a new process to make it more simple than ever for agents to understand and engage in sound content management practices, all at the cost of 20 minutes a week.

Number 3: Engage in social media marketing.  Social media activity can result in direct traffic to your insurance agency website and will also mean occasional back links to your website, which is good for SEO.  Confluency has long provided guidance to the agents we work with on using social media as a business branding and marketing tool and we are now rolling out a service to provide social media marketing directly for those agencies who want those marketing initiatives handled for them.

Three for three.  Not bad for a day’s work

Insurance agents, and businesses in general, sometimes have a hard time getting their heads around ROI (return on investment).  Confluency Solutions measures what I would call direct website ROI:  calls, and online requests for insurance quotes; conversions to policies and average commission.  And the ROI numbers are good.  Annual reviews identify areas where insurance agency website ROI can be increased.  These generally fall into three categories:

1.  More website traffic;

2. Higher levels of traffic conversions (% asking for quotes and better quality prospects);

3. Support for other agency marketing and customer development initiatives. The reason many of us have a hard time getting our heads around ROI is that most of these measures (like website traffic, e.g.) don’t have a place in ROI calculations.

Social media, like Facebook and Twitter, are even murkier.  Where do increased numbers of Facebook fans or Twitter followers enter the P and L statement?  The short answer is that they don’t.  However, social media and website activity does contribute to ROI – the measures mentioned in the preceding sentences would fall into the category of ‘transactional precursors’ or what we sometimes call leading edge indicators.  Put another way, if your website visits increase, at some point you should expect a net increase in quote requests, insurance policies written and new sales commission.  Ditto for Facebook fans and so on.

If you are interested in quantifying your insurance agency website and social media activities in a hard-nosed, bottom line way, then take a look at the excellent slide set on the topic from Oliver Blanchard.  Not only does it contain good information, but it’s pretty darn entertaining as well:

God reached his hand down from the sky
God asked Noah if he wanted to die
He said no sir, oh no sir
God said, here’s your future: it’s gonna rain

—Here’s Your Future – The Thermals

Just a few years ago, the very future of internet music phenom Pandora hung in the balance as the RIAA tried to impose it’s legacy cost structure on this legitimate music delivery service, and by extension, every other streaming service. Today, Pandora thrives and legacy music delivery systems, like CD’s and radio are losing listeners.

According to a recent study from Edison Research, listening to the radio longer predominates as a morning activity for 12 – 24 year olds, dropping from 74% ten years ago to 41% today.  In the same time frame, 12 -24 year olds have chosen to purchase 62% fewer CDs.  This age group spends an average of 3 hours a day on the internet, and when it comes to acquiring tunes for their music libraries, they cite illegal downloads or transfers as the 2nd and 3rd most popular means of augmenting music collections.  Between the lines:  we don’t care how you manufacturers and distributors want to supply music, we want it the way we want it, ‘legal’ or not.

To fall back on another popular music reference, the video documentary chronicling former Clash front man Joe Strummer’s Clash history is titled The Future is Unwritten.  That’s not exactly right.  The stats mentioned here lead to some very obvious conclusions.  Here’s your future.

Insurance agents don’t need to drag their collective feet on the way to a prosperous future.  61% of all Americans use Facebook, more than half do so at least twice a day.  And that 12 – 24 age group – your future insurance consumers – they don’t read the papers (only 4% read a paper almost everyday).  You know where your future is, and if you want to do business in the future, you know where your agency needs to be.

Clock radio photo under Creative Commons license http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexkerhead/

It seems like I’m on some kind of SEO Truth-Quest lately…last month I posted an article pointing out that CMS (content management system) is not equivalent to SEO.  I was driven to do that by claims I was hearing in the competitive space for insurance web marketing  that essentially amounted to this:  We give you CMS so therefore your site is search optimized.  If you want a summary of the article, it boils down to this:  NOT.

More recently, I came across some literature from an insurance company who is providing their agents with *free*, search optimized, websites.  It reminds me of an office Christmas party I went to years ago, during which we had to exchange token gifts with a co-worker whose name we drew from a hat.  My giftee wanted a Jaguar for Christmas.  I got her one – a toy, Match Box, Jaguar.  Hey, it *was* a Jaguar.  Likewise, there is SEO and there is SEO.  Robust SEO takes time, effort, and expertise, and as wonderful as it might seem to get SEO for free, you probably aren’t getting much; of course, if you really want to know if you are getting SEO value, take a look at your website analytics after a few months – that’s the proof.

There are levels to SEO, and I suppose someone can say they provide SEO, even at the lowest levels, but it seems disingenuous to me to claim search optimization without providing any details.  Below are four levels of website search optimization – I’ve started with the most basic level – some form of which I suspect the aforementioned free SEO really consists of.  But next time you come across a website provider who claims to deliver SEO for a price that’s too good to be true, go back and ask them which of these SEO components they are actually delivering.

Site Structure – This includes having a well organized website, including elements like xml site maps, good meta data, URLs and H1 tags, using canonical URLs and server header response tags where appropriate, highlighting the most important site content by keeping it near the top of your site map, and architecting a website for fast page loads.

Content – Unique content, for a variety of reasons, is king in web search.  Keyword research and optimization is important; for instance, if you have a choice between using the phrase ‘car insurance’ or ‘auto insurance’, in your page copy, which would you choose?  Hint:  one is searched on a lot more than the other.  You cannot optimize one page for everything, so a well SEOed website will use separate pages to concentrate on one or two keywords each.  Ease of editing and adding web content in and of itself isn’t an SEO practice, but it sure does make practicing SEO a lot easier, so I’m including it here.

Internal Site Linking – Some SEO practitioners view how well a site is linked within it self as accounting for 25% or 30% of SEO performance.  Confluency Solutions subscribes to that view – your most important pages should be linked to and from other pages within your website and different, keyword rich, link text should be used.

External Links or Back Links – Google and other search engines consider each third party website link back to your insurance agency website as a ‘vote’ for your website.  More weight is placed on what Google considers higher authority websites, but any legitimate* link will help improve your website’s search visibility.

SEO Today, Gone Tomorrow – Search ranking is extremely fluid:  your competitors** are changing their SEO and the search engines are constantly tweaking the algorithms that rank web pages for relevance.  More robust (and generally expensive) SEO monitors your page rank for key search terms, as well as your competitors’ and watches for changes in search engines ranking formulas; this leads to periodic modifications of your website.

Visitors are Nice But Conversions are Money – Put another way, 10 website visitors a month, all of whom become clients of your insurance agency is a better bargain than 100 website visitors, none of whom become customers.  Robust and full featured SEO will help you define conversions and make changes to improve conversion rates – and get the money.

I also notice that some insurance website providers will do a *free* evaluation of your current website.  (Geez, I wonder how that will come out?)  Again, you have to be skeptical about what you get for free.  At Confluency Solutions, we offer an SEO audit and road map, but it’s not free.  A thorough SEO evaluation can take 8 – 10 hours, and it’s hard to give that kind of time (and work product) away for free and stay in business.  Confluency’s SEO road map can be used to make improvements on an existing website or can be taken to a third party for implementation – it isn’t a sales trick to get you to become a website customer.  How much depth and specificity does a free website evaluation go into?  Is the information sufficiently detailed so you can improve your existing website or use the evaluation as a blueprint and have someone else build your website?  If it covers the elements itemized above, it will.  If not, it’s probably just a sales trick.

*Links you buy from an offer claiming to be able to deliver hundreds or thousands of back links aren’t going to be legitimate

**Competitors in this regard aren’t necessarily other insurance agencies, but rather, other websites competing for the same keyword.  These could be law firms, medical care providers or even directories.

I have noted with interest how consistently consumer-marketing savvy insurance companies use numbers to substantiate their sales propositions.  Independent insurance agents will sometimes do so as well, sometimes citing combined years of insurance experience, for example.  It turns out that those numeric citations are all important to maximizing on-page web conversions.

No One Pays More When They Switch Their Insurance?  Insurance Agencies Need to Quantify Value Propositions

Well, almost nobody pays more.  We’ve all seen the ads touting how much money some insurance company has saved their customers.  For instance:

Progressive:  You could save over $500 on car insurance.
Nationwide:  Save up to $43 every month.
State Farm:  …save $489 on your car insurance.

Independent insurance agents can make the same kind of claims as the large companies with the large advertising budgets for the same reason the large insurance companies make claims of savings – few people switch insurance unless savings are involved.  And agents do make claims of savings -  just not in the same way.  Agents more often make claims in qualitative terms.  Consider these excerpts from some otherwise attractive insurance agency websites:

Independent Agency #1:  Our agents work hard to provide you with the best protection at the best price.

Independent Agency #2:  Our goal is to make sure your family has the best protection at the lowest price.

Independent Agency #3:  We’ve got you covered — at a price you can afford!

Quantitative assertions are far more compelling.  As Marketing Experiments pointed out during their recent home page optimization clinic, people tend to be more skeptical about qualitative assertions.  In a sense, using quantitative statements to back up your value claim ‘proves’ that proposition – at least to a skeptical, page-skimming website visitor.  And that credibility increases web conversions.

Value Statements Aren’t Just About Lower Insurance Premiums

Quantitative support for value propositions, can and should extend to every facet of your agency’s value proposition – especially on the web.  Again, here’s a few more examples from the insurance companies with consumer-marketing chops.

So…you say you are ‘experienced’…how experienced?

GMAC:  …our experience.  More than 60 years of it…

Allstate:  …the support of 75+ years of experience.

You want me to believe that the insurance purchase process is easy?  Tell me *exactly* how easy.

Progressive:  Get rate and coverage options in about 6 minutes.

Here are a few opportunities missed, gleaned from independent insurance agency websites:

Independent Agency #1:  …finding insurance has never been easier.

If you are like me, you probably find yourself asking ‘easier than what?’  Here’s an alternative:  ‘In less time than it takes to make a grilled cheese sandwich, you could save $439 on your car insurance.’  Even though this statement doesn’t provide an explicit quantification of *easier*, we all have an idea that making a grilled cheese sandwich doesn’t take very long.  And given the option of whipping up a gooey cheese delight or saving $439…well, I know what I would pick.

Independent Agency #2:  …we can search more insurance carriers than your typical Agency.

How many companies can your *typical* insurance agency search?  How many companies can your agency search?  The numbers that answer these questions substantiate the claim that Agency #2 can actually save a consumer money.  Without some values illustrating the difference, any claims the agency might make based on superior carrier choice seem thin.

Independent Agency #3:  We value the business of all of our clients; you are not just a number.

Of course you value all your clients, but how do I know your clients feel valued?  It wouldn’t take much effort to implement a survey and quantify how valued your clients feel.  It would be a lot more compelling to be able to say that ’95% of our clients rate their service experience as excellent.’  Confluency Solutions includes a survey tool (and a default insurance service survey form) as part of insurance agency website admin so agents can quantify client happiness.  But there are plenty of free or inexpensive survey tools available, like Survey Monkey, so that any agency can quantify the satisfaction of clients.

Here are some other ideas to help quantify agency value propositions:

• Expertise – the percentage of agency staff with advanced designations like CPCU or CIC.
• Community Involvement – Number of times staff volunteered for community or charitable events.
• Superior Protection  – percent of occasions when the agency was able to increase liability limits while reducing or keeping premiums level.

Arriving at numbers like these for your agency may involve some extra work, but not much.  And the improvement in website conversions and sales will be well worth the effort.

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.