Five to ten years ago if your insurance agency had a website, it likely had no purpose other than being a virtual billboard. However, it presented your agency as successful to the consumer. Now at least ninety percent of all insurance agencies have websites. This means the crème is rising and the agencies who “have a site to have a site” are starting to sense things aren’t going the way they anticipated - At least from the perspective of using the website to generate new business.
Fast forward to 2011, social media has exploded and all you are hearing as an agency owner is “You need to be using social media to get new clients.” So you either hired someone to create your presence or you have done it yourself. You were excited for the first few weeks because you thought you understood how it worked. However, now you look back and think you wasted a lot of time with absolutely no results. In my opinion, all you’ve done is repeat the same mistake you made with your website. You now have a social media presence “to have a social media presence.” It has absolutely no purpose, no strategy and it was never made part of your daily model.
The reason your website has been a failure is because you never figured out how to consistently generate consumer traffic to it on a daily basis. You may have even spent a lot of money on SEO experts to help. This is where social media comes into play. Through a good posting strategy, it can allow you to generate that daily consistent traffic that you always craved, even if you’re just an average Joe with minimal computer skills. Hopefully at this point you understand you need to connect with people on social media, then post information that make them “interact” so your posts go out to their connections, increasing your potential traffic. If you can do this every day then you will generate the traffic you crave. The next question is how to get that traffic from social media to your website?
Getting traffic to your website
The real answer to your struggle is to have a corporate website that is designed to be synchronized to your social media presence. Think of the website as being the core foundation and the social media presence being the hands that pull the people in. We know everyone is on social media on a consistent basis. The question is how do we bring the people from social media to our websites? The answer is to literally put the website on the social media pages. In short, bring the website to where the traffic is!
Here is an example of an insurance agency currently doing this, go to www.ekandek.com you will see a website that is client friendly, traditional and promotes their social media presence. Now click on the “Shop For Insurance”, look it over and remember it. Now, go to their facebook insurance agency page, www.facebook.com/ekandek, on the left side click “Shop for Insurance”. What you will see is their website, built right into the facebook page. Ek and Ek doesn’t have to worry about getting people to their website, they just have to get people to their facebook page, which is much easier to do a on a consistent basis. The consumer doesn’t want to leave social media, this agency recognizes this and solves the problem by allowing the consumer to review or share their products without ever leaving the social media experience!
To be honest, this is a technology, service and innovative strategy that I offer at www.benefitstore.net ; however I am not trying to sell you on it. I am trying to wake you up to the fact that this is what other insurance agencies are doing. They have a virtual game plan in place to get their brand out to people and get the phone to ring again. It’s very likely that all of your frustration is based on not being pro-active virtually, not having any type of game plan and basically going to bed at night and hoping people will come to you.
I said it at the beginning of this post; almost all agencies have websites and most have social media presences. As we move forward in the future you’re kidding yourself if you don’t think the internet will play an even larger role in the insurance industry. It’s time to review what the top agencies are doing and at least create a hybrid model for your agency if you want to keep pace and not fall to far behind.
