By guest blogger Tony Sova of Softwired.
Insurance agency websites are typically pretty poorly designed in my opinion. Usually they are not very well branded and feel plain and sterile. A badly designed website is worse than not having a website at all because that is the first impression potential clients get about you. The second, and just as important, part of the equation is that the websites are not usually optimized for potential customers.
The Website
Design - The website needs to be designed in such a way that all of these processes work freely and easily. The very first thing about the website design is that it is attractive and dynamic. The website should be responsive and adapt to mobile devices to optimize the user experience.
SEO - The website pages need to be written and optimized for search engines. The key is to focus on one set of keywords or keyword phrase for each page. You don't want to have multiple topics per page otherwise it will confuse search engines, and you won't see very good results.
Internet Marketing - There are many ways to market on the internet using Google Pay Per Click ads, Social Media ads, Google Local, and content marketing to enhance the inbound marketing methodology and campaigns.
Regardless of the platform involved, the website should be built to generate leads by using the Inbound Marketing methodology. That is, to attract visitors to the website, to convert those visitors to leads, and nurture those leads into customers. What's even more important is that customers become promoters and feed back into the sales funnel for more visitors. This diagram gives a simple explanation of how this should work.
Attract
The process to attract visitors to the website is simple. We create Buyer Personas which are fictional characters with detailed descriptions that we market to. We create articles that answer questions that these personas are asking online.
Convert
Converting visitors to leads is a process of creating offers for those personas that are willing to share some information, such as name and email address, to receive the offer. We create Calls to Action and Landing Pages to facilitate this process.
Close
To close as customers, the leads need to be nurtured with email marketing and social media nurturing. Segmenting your emails into lists, which are targeted to your buyer personas, will increase open and conversion rates because the content is relevant and interesting.
Delight
Happy customers are the best references you can have. They become promoters of your services and refer people in their network directly to you. These leads are already converted and ready to become customers.
Take Away
So the number one take away that you should have, regardless of where you are in the process of marketing your agency on the internet, is to have a business blog. The posts should be targeted to your buyer personas to optimize the chance of being found online. Once they are on the website, make sure there are calls-to-action on every page so that the readers know what to do next.
