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:
(more…)

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:
(more…)

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:

(more…)

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.

(more…)

With the implementation of a significant capability to their latest version of their iPhone, Apple may have redefined online search and forever changed the way we as consumers seek out businesses in our local areas. If you’re a business owner or strive to be found online, this is a change that you should be taking very seriously.

Siri is a digitally voice commanded virtual personal assistant with numerous abilities. For the purposes of this post, we’re going to talk about the features that will have a direct effect on your business being found by your prospective customer now and in the future. Keep in mind that Android (Google’s mobile operating system for smart phones) and Windows mobile operating systems already have abilities that are inferior but similar in some ways to what Siri has and are planning even more advanced capabilities. In the long run, Siri represents a capability that will be ubiquitous to all smart phones within the next couple of years.

Siri (and similar future platforms) will affect your business in the following ways:

(more…)