In this third post on improving your independent insurance agency’s website, we focus on your site’s content. There is some content that is obvious to include, like your agency’s contact information and a description of your services, but just having the bare minimum won’t make your agency attractive and memorable to potential clients.
According to a recent study, 78% of consumers see custom content as a sign that an organization wants to build a good relationship with them. By giving your clients the content they want, you will also attract other agencies and industry leaders, thus increasing your site’s reach.
The first step is to know who you’re reaching. Ask questions like:
Where do my clients and potential clients live? How old are they?
Do they spend more time on their phone or their computer?
What challenges do they face?
What information can my agency share to help them?
Once you’ve honed in on who your audience is, start thinking about what they need. Here are a few popular content items that you should consider adding to your website:
FAQ section
Online quoting
Online claim filing
Links to online raters
Online change requests
Printable certificates of insurance
With all of these content items, be sure to include a strong call to action. This is typically placed at the end of a page and in the last step of any online process, telling the user what to do next. To help generate leads, you can include a “contact an agent” or “share this quote” – anything you can do to try and capture user information.
In addition to the resources mentioned above, it is a good idea to reach out to your target audience in a purely educational format, providing valuable content by way of a blog. You can easily generate blog content by:
Jotting down notes as clients ask questions or have concerns and address those questions: you will soon find you have a steady stream of inspiration
Making your blog personable: Highlight staff members, clients and local events
Sharing industry tips and tricks that can be picked up and shared by other sites: this increases your reach, and your links, boosting your online reputation
We at SIS love sharing relevant info and tools through our blog. One tool we are proud to share is the new 2014 Partner XE, which includes dozens of upgrades to help your agency. To get the full story on what Partner XE can do for your agency, contact us today!
In our last post, we looked at ways to make your website stand out, showing your agency’s reliability and great service. But, no matter how great your website is, it doesn’t mean much if it can’t be found.
Most potential clients will do an online search for independent insurance agents in their area and, if you want to be on that list, you’ll need to use the right tools to optimize your site for search.
There are many ways to optimize your agency’s site, but we’ll focus on three of the most efficient ways for independent insurance agencies:
Backlinks
Search engines have different ways of judging reputable websites, and one of the most common and well known is the number of reputable sites linking to it. You can gain links by asking for them from business partners or networking groups. You can also get links by writing great content that valuable sites want to share, or by writing as a guest blogger. Just be careful about which sites pick up your posts. While gaining links from reputable sites bolsters your searchability, links from poorly-ranked sites can hurt your online reputation.
Social Media
Social media brings you a double benefit: additional links each time you post a link to your site, and presence outside of a search engine. More and more people look to social media before bringing their business to an agency, and your presence on social media shows them you’re committed to serving your clients in every way possible. Plus, it’s another place where your agency can be found online, and will help drive traffic to your beautifully designed site.
To experience social media success, ensure you are posting quality content and you’re posting often. The better and more relevant your posts, the more likely they are to be shared, bringing you even more quality links to boost your search engine ranking
Local Focus
The best way to get local search traffic is by adding locality to your website’s page titles. When search engines look at your pages, they’ll focus on these titles first, and then on the words on the page. Simply adding “Columbus” or “Ohio” to the titles of your site’s pages will boost your credibility for an “insurance Ohio” search. Also, make sure your address is included in the footer on every page of your site – the more your agency’s name and its location are found together on the web, the more likely your site will pop up when someone searches for a local insurance agency.
You should also list your website on local listing sites like Google+ Local, Yelp, Bing Places, Internet Yellow Pages, and Yahoo! Local. This will again link your agency name with your location another place
As you implement these techniques to make your site findable, you may come across more ways to build your online presence. If you’re a Partner XE users, you can share these tips with our user group. To find out more about Partner XE, its community and functionality, contact us today!
Your website is the online storefront to your independent insurance agency. When potential clients go window shopping, you want them to stop at your agency and come in. If your website looks sloppy or outdated, you’ll give the impression that your agency is sloppy and outdated as well. Ultimately, when a client sees your website, they are gathering information to answer the question: “Can I trust them?”. If you can’t be trusted to keep a good website, why would they trust you with their business?
Show these potential clients your agency is a trustworthy partner! In order to have a website that give this impression you’ll need a few key elements.
Attractive design
First impressions are important. Make sure your site has a pleasing look. Stay away from large blocks of text, and avoid clutter. Also, make sure your site is built so that it can easily adjust for smartphones and tablets, and won’t take too long to load on each.
Easy Navigation
Make sure your site is organized in a logical manner and that pages are named appropriately. This includes using valuable keywords in page titles, so they can be easily searched and indexed by search engines (read more in our next post!). If a user can’t find what they’re looking for, they are likely to get frustrated and leave. By making your site easy to use, you’ll keep them around – and research shows the longer a user is on a website, the more likely they are to make a purchase or request more information.
Valuable Information
Great websites give users exactly what they’re looking for, and none of what they’re not. You want to give potential clients access to things that make their life easier, like online quoting or claim filing. When a potential client sees these features, they’ll see you value client experience, making them more likely to bring you their business. Be careful about putting too much information in one place, however, as it can look cluttered and be overwhelming.
Strong Call to Action
No matter how great your website looks and functions, you won’t find success without giving users a clue on what to do. With a strong call to action, you bring users along in the buying or lead capturing process. A good call to action effectively uses size, shape, color, placement and wording to get the message across and compel users to take the next step.
Once you have a website that really shows off your agency, you need to make sure people can find it. In our next post, we’ll look at optimizing your site for web search and other ways to get your name out there online.
SIS knows online presence plays a big part in making your agency know, and we can help by streamlining data between your website and our innovative agency management system, Partner XE. Contact us today to find out more!
Responsive website design refers to designing a website that presents itself in the best possible way for the device it’s being viewed on. The SIS website uses responsive design, so if you’re using a desktop computer try changing the width of this window from stretching all the way across your screen to shrinking it as small as it will go. As you change the size of the window, you’ll see parts of the site rearrange themselves. That is responsive website design.
Why Responsive Design
More people today are using mobile devices like phones and tablets to access websites than ever before. You never know how someone may access your site, so you want to prepare for all possibilities.
Traditional sites can cause a few problems when viewed on a smaller screen like on a phone.
The text can appear very small. The size of your font and the length of your lines of text might look nice when they appear on a computer monitor, but they could be unreadably small on a phone screen. A responsive website will resize the text and change the line breaks to keep everything readable.
Traditional menus can be difficult to use on a phone. Typical website menus that require you to hover your mouse over one item on the menu to see the other menu-items that are “below” it in the menu-order sometimes don’t even work on a phone. Instead, responsive websites usually entirely change the menu to function as a drop-down list, making it much easier to navigate on a small screen.
Many site layouts are designed for wide screens, not vertically aligned phone screens. Your computer screen is probably horizontally aligned. That means if your site were designed only for your computer monitor it would probably have multiple vertical elements (like sidebars). When the width of your screen is only three inches across, though, it can be difficult to make sense of what you’re looking at. A responsive site will take sidebars and move them from the side of the screen to below the other content when viewed on a phone.
How to Use Responsive Website Design
Taking advantage of the benefits of responsive website design is surprisingly simple. Many of the common website-building tools (like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal) include templates and tools to help you build a responsive website. If you are working with a marketing partner to build your site, ask them about responsive website design, and make sure your site will be responsive.
Your website is complicated mix of technology and marketing. It’s an intersection of many of your agency’s services, helping you gain new customers and keep the ones you have. Because of the important role of your website, it’s important that you invest in it and make sure it is up-to-date. You need to consider the different roles your site plays to make the right investments in it.
Digital Storefront
You know to make sure your storefront or office looks nice because potential and current customers will consider your storefront to reflect the kind of business you run. No matter how simple it is, your storefront is an expression of your brand.
Think of your website as your “digital storefront.” It will form important first impressions for potential customers, and your current customers will see it as a reflection of the service you offer. You want to make sure your website – from how fast it loads to what it looks like – reflects the business you run. It should match the brand you want to convey and provide functionality to help you gain new customers and keep the ones you have.
Inbound Lead Generation
Your website should be built in a way that helps it earn new business for you. There are two components to building a site that will do this for you: an effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategy and the ability to collect website visitor information via website forms.
Improving your SEO will cause you to be found more for searches on Google and other search engines. The best SEO strategies are built into websites from the ground-up, beginning with when the website is first being conceived. Your SEO strategy should target specific local searches in your area. For instance, if you’re in Columbus, Ohio, you’ll want to specifically target searches like “auto insurance in Columbus.”
Once you get prospects on your site, you want to make sure they contact you to buy insurance or learn more about your services. Your site should include effective calls to action (like “Request a quote”) with website forms that allow prospects to easily contact you.
Self-Service
If your site doesn’t include self-service functionality yet, you should begin thinking about if this kind of functionality would be a good fit for your business. “Self-service” refers to the ability for customers to take care of some services on your site without needing to take up your time or the time of those in your office.
You might want to think about allowing customers to print off auto-ID cards, for instance. There are other self-service capabilities your customers may be interested, too. If you talk to them you’re likely to find more. Allowing your customers to take care of these services automatically through your site frees up the people in your office to take on more important tasks.
Your website is a hub of activity for your agency. It’s important to keep it up-to-date to help you gain new customers and keep your current customers impressed with your service.
Texting has quickly become one of the most popular and efficient pieces of insurance tech. Almost 90% of consumers say they’d like to be able to text businesses. It improves communication by making it easier to get in touch and get a response from customers and prospects, streamlining outreach with automation and integration into agency systems. Studies show that 98% of text messages are read, compared to 20-30% of emails and phone calls.
Texting is one of the tools all your team members can use, from producers to CSRs, as it speeds up communications and helps your agency move.
Social media marketing is nothing new in the larger marketing industry but may be novel for independent insurance agencies. This tool is something all agencies should include in their insurance agency marketing strategy for several reasons. Social media can help your agency show off your expertise, build trust with customers and prospects, and help you better engage your customer base. For independent agencies, social media is an excellent tool to amplify their valuable local and personal connections with their communities.
Whether your agency is on social media or not, you’re being discussed in the social media space. Join in that conversation! Get your agency started by following a few simple dos and don’ts in the social media sphere.
The insurance industry isn’t known for embracing change quickly: maintaining the status quo can seem easier than adapting new insurance tech. Despite this, insurance agencies tend to face a greater cybersecurity threat than other small to medium-sized businesses due to the sensitive and valuable data they collect from numerous avenues.
With cyberattacks on the rise, and the COVID-19 pandemic forcing many agencies to leave the traditional way of doing things behind, the need for insurers to maintain cyber regulation and compliance has never been greater.
With this in mind, here are four ways insurance agencies can secure their insurance tech to protect their business, employees, and clients.
In our 
Responsive website design refers to designing a website that presents itself in the best possible way for the device it’s being viewed on. The SIS website uses responsive design, so if you’re using a desktop computer try changing the width of this window from stretching all the way across your screen to shrinking it as small as it will go. As you change the size of the window, you’ll see parts of the site rearrange themselves. That is responsive website design.
Your website is complicated mix of technology and marketing. It’s an intersection of many of your agency’s services, helping you gain new customers and keep the ones you have. Because of the important role of your website, it’s important that you invest in it and make sure it is up-to-date. You need to consider the different roles your site plays to make the right investments in it.