Your insurance agency may be a small fish in a big pond, but that doesn’t mean you have to be fodder for the bigger fish. With the right approach to raising the profile of your business, you can stand out from the crowd and gain more customers. It doesn’t have to cost you a fortune either! There are a few things you can do to promote your own insurance agency that won’t require a lot of expertise or too much time, and there are options that are better left to professional services. The most successful small insurance agencies on record are those that apply a combination of self-promotion and the services of a professional marketing firm.

What You Can Do
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One of the main goals for every company with online marketing is to increase visibility. Blog posts are designed to bring in visitors who are searching for your product or service. Search engine optimization allows you to get in front of people with your blog post, so they can get to know you.

It seems like the rules change every time Google has one of its infamous updates. What mattered in SEO yesterday doesn’t make much of a difference today. So, how can you keep up with what works now and what doesn’t?
You may find it difficult to keep up with the changes or to know what you should be doing right now to optimize your blog. Here are a few key ideas to help you being improving SEO for your blog.
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Want to see your website improve in the rankings? Want more people to click on your site when they are hunting for insurance? If this is your goal, then you need to follow these three simple tips. No, these steps won’t make you a master of SEO, but they are basic tasks that can make an improvement in how well your website performs.

Remember the Humans

It’s important to focus on the search engines, especially Google, but you can’t forget about the humans who will be looking at your page as well. Google has made changes over the years to its algorithm in an effort to make search results more relevant to those who are looking for the information.

What this means for your site is that you must make sure that everything is relevant and appealing to your target audience. Begin with your URL. Choose one that is easy to remember. Make sure your company name appears in the title and meta description. Speaking of description, make it interesting and informative. Focus on what makes you unique and how that relates to the specific page that the description is about.
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When it comes to advertising online, the two main options are organic and pay-per-click or PPC. The debate between which one is best is ongoing, but when it comes to the insurance industry, organic always wins.

Understanding the Difference Between the Two

Organic advertising or search engine optimisation (SEO) comes from content that is geared towards the intended audience. It is reflected in the website content, blog posts and other copy that has relevance and value to the potential consumers.

PPC ads are those you see on websites and in other strategic locations that entice people to click on them. These ads may provide the impression of a large volume of traffic, but they don’t always provide valuable traffic in the form of visitors that convert to paying customers.
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Hosting a local event is a fantastic way to make your presence known both offline and online. The trick is to make it an event that everyone is talking about before and after it has concluded. This ensures that everyone spreads the word and more people know who you are and what your business is all about.

Choose the Right Event

If you want your event to be a success in all aspects, you have to begin by choosing the right event for your business to host. A grand opening is one option that all new and recently opened businesses should take advantage of. However, you should consider this idea even if you have been in business for some time if you had a major change in your company. Call it a grand re-opening to generate interest.

Here are some other ideas to use:
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Insurance is not the most glamorous subject in the world. It doesn’t always offer the most exciting ideas for promotion – unless you get lucky enough to have someone like Flo as the face of your insurance agency. Whether you are part of a captive or non-captive agency structure, it is absolutely crucial for your future growth to have a significant online presence. 67.1% of consumers use the internet to find their next insurance provider and that number is expected to raise to 78% by 2017.

On the other hand, insurance is a product that everyone needs, making it a highly competitive market. Of all the online market segments we compete within online at Influence Online Marketing, insurance agency marketing offers the greatest challenges for us and our clients to rank consistently. Insurance agency online (local SEO) marketing is particularly difficult due to the level of local and national competition; every local market is saturated with large national carriers advertising at the top of the search results in the paid results. Combine this with the 3 State Farm agents around the corner from you, separating your agency from the local competition can be particularly difficult. This is what I call the “double whammy” effect for the insurance industry; very few industries have this unique challenge. Creating effective strategies to market your agency over the competition is a must to stay alive. Here are the top four ways to promote your insurance agency online:
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Most businesses know the importance of hosting events to get their brand noticed by local patrons. It is an essential tool for offline marketing. What they may not realize is how much these events can help with online marketing as well.

The benefits of event marketing to help you establish a stronger online presence include:

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It’s never a good feeling for a business to get a negative review. However, it can be a golden opportunity to show that you care about your customers and want to work with them to achieve their satisfaction. This is not the case when the negative reviews are posted by internet trolls.

What is an Internet Troll?

You may not realize that there are people trolling the internet just looking for the opportunity to offer a negative review. They may or may not even be a customer. Their focus is to spread bad news about a company or product even if it is not true. Since reviews are based on personal opinion, they are seldom required to be substantiated. Potential customers may believe the negative information and be deterred from making a purchase or hiring the services of a company.
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Many insurance companies know the importance of having a website to enhance their online presence. Unfortunately, they don’t realize what features their websites need so they choose a low-cost design company or worse yet, do it themselves with a free site. When they don’t get any traffic, they don’t understand why. Here are four reasons your website is worse than having none at all.

Their websites are outdated.

A website that hasn’t been updated in years is worthless to you. No one is going to visit it and most people don’t even know it exists. Using the latest technology and adding fresh content is essential to keep Google and your visitors happy.

Updating your website also means ensuring that it is mobile friendly. With more people accessing the internet from smartphones and tablets, if your site is slow running, doesn’t load properly or isn’t easy to view on a mobile device, you will lose out.

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Picking the right SEO firm and marketing plan for your online endeavours can be a particularly difficult challenge if you’re working for or are running an insurance agency. I consult to a number of insurance agents and through my lead generation program, I probably speak to at least 200 insurance professionals a month. More than most SEO practitioners out there. I’m aware of the many challenges captive and independent agents deal with on a daily basis in terms of getting their business more local exposure.

Before we get too deep into this post, I want make one thing clear. I’ve tried to make this post as light and as succinct as possible. If we were to get into the “nitty gritty” of every situation, this post would extend to a multi-post series. If you have specific questions or concerns, pick up the phone and call me and I’ll be happy to help you with any questions you have about this post or issues you have with marketing your insurance agency locally.

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