Is It Time To Sell Your Insurance Agency

Top 5 Reasons To Consider Selling

5. You still have more filing cabinets then computers

4. You have an actual fax machine that prints out faxes

3. Your still cold calling and walking around town doing stop ins

2. You don’t have time to use Social Media

1. You don’t need to do any marketing because you get more business then you can handle from referrals alone!

There is major reform happing in the insurance industry and it’s not just with Health Insurance. The role of the insurance salesman and his agency are changing quickly. Unfortunately change always causes casualties…… will your agency survive?

Commissions are getting cut….. On-line sales are now occurring…… It’s all about who can do the most volume!

LinkedIn Basic Tips

1. Use Your Profile as a Destination In an informal check of LinkedIn search strength, I did a Google search of 20 contacts. In every case, regardless of how visible they are on the web, LinkedIn profiles appeared on the first page with the vast majority appearing in the first five results. Keep your profile current to highlight your experience and Insurance expertise but anyone online given the strength of search results.

2. Linking Content via Applications As the site has evolved in the past few years it now offers a number of opportunities to share content from the site directly. Your LinkedIn network should be a strong source of support for your news and updates as your contacts are likely connected to your industry. By utilizing the available tools to link to your blog, twitter feed, or to create polls you can share helpful information with this network that may be passed along further to create new connection opportunities for you or your business.

3. Connect with New Contacts in Groups and Answers LinkedIn Groups are a great way to identify other users with similar interests and needs. In addition to the inherent benefits of learning from others, Groups offer a number of benefits for each user. You are able to view other members contact information and participation in a group or the LinkedIn Answers section allows you to highlight your ideas and insight. By providing useful information to others you will improve your own reputation as an expert resource on select topics. The creation of Open Groups is of benefit in a broader sense as well since discussions can be viewed by anyone on the web and picked up by search engines.

4. Research Potential Most LinkedIn users are familiar and comfortable with the people search capabilities of the site to find potential connections. Don’t forget to utilize other search tools on the site though as there is extensive data available to you. A very simple search of “public relations” provided over 11,000 listings nationally and indicates where I have a direct or indirect connection to that company. Using the search tools available it’s easy to track current openings, identify key leaders at the organizations, and recent additions or departures. Are these helpful for job seekers? Absolutely, but this information is of tremendous value for a new business discussion or a sales inquiry as well. Perhaps you have a contact from a prior project now on the inside.

5. Recommendations As either an employee or a business, a recommendation can carry a great deal of weight in the eyes of future customers. By essentially collecting success stories in advance you have the ability to create a testimonial page on a highly-trafficked, well-established site that can lead to future opportunities based on your work appearing in searches for specific keywords by others. These provide concrete examples of a (hopefully) good experience with you in a personal manner. It’s word of mouth promotion in a neighborhood of 90 million professionals. Not a bad target audience for most and one that shouldn’t be missed.

Magic Formula That Gets You Web Traffic

Again as I’ve mentioned before…. all I do is talk to hundreds of insurance professionals a month about websites, technology and social media. I am amazed at how many think there is some kind of secret thing out there that will get them website traffic without them doing or paying a thing.

Honestly if you’re not actually creating your website yourself from scratch you don’t stand a chance. That is…unless you want to invest literally hundreds of thousands a year into your site.

My advice to the common insurance broker is this. You likely have a very nice site. I am sure it’s optimized fairly well. However it’s not going to beat out the likes of the top players in the lead generation game. So go out there and market the site to your social media distribution. If you do it right you’ll get viral distribution and more leads then you need! I guarantee you one thing…. Doing nothing will likely lead to nothing!

New Facebook Analytics Features

"Like" Button Analytics

For the first time, Facebook will provide data on the behavior the "Like" button triggers, including views, clicks and visits. Businesses will be able to use this data to test the impact of placement on "Like" button click-through rate.

Businesses that use any of the Facebook Social Pugins (Example: Recommendation Plugin located in the right sidebar of this blog) will be able to see performance metrics such as "Like" button impressions, rate of comments and a breakdown of interaction by demographic information. Additionally, the demographic details available to businesses will include age group, gender, language or location.

As part of this update, businesses that are using Facebook Insights for websites will get distribution and engagement metrics related to their content's performance on Facebook in real-time. This new data will enable businesses to optimize content and adjust its placement based on performance.

Many marketers will be excited to know that the Facebook Insights update will also include more content-related metrics. For example, businesses will be able to look at impressions, referral clicks and the most popular stories on the site.

Computer Illiterate

I was talking to a gentleman who was the CEO of a very large insurance agency yesterday. The agency had over 50 employees and supposedly 10,000 clients. He was very proud to tell me that he basically never touched a computer. In his opinion it was beneath him and he had staff members to do it for him. He had an MBA in finance from Cornell blah blah blah………


My translation is, this guy was completely computer illiterate. He had built up these protecting walls around him to hide his massive weaknesses. Honestly with all of the internet marketing going on out there would you hire this guy to run your firm? He basically had no idea what pay per click advertising was and seethed when social media was mentioned.

My point is, things are changing fast. Back in the day this guy was probably a genius. However now he is basically in the minority, computer illiterate and becoming less valuable by the second. Don’t be like him, keep pushing yourself to evolve with the rapidly changing technology.