Tag Archives: marketing

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Creating a Marketing Strategy Will Boost Your Business

The reasons for having a marketing strategy in place to help your agency function effectively

 

It is important for any sized agency to make sure they have a marketing and promotional strategy. For those that might not let’s start by defining what a strategy is?

A strategy is simply future planning that helps you achieve your goals and objectives. So, a marketing strategy is a marketing plan designed specifically to accomplish your marketing goals for some period.

For instance, a marketing objective could be to become a market leader in your respective niche by delighting your customers. Therefore, the strategic plan would include comprehensive marketing research and creating a marketing plan to fulfill your customer’s needs. All organizations must have some clear marketing goals, which needs to be coupled with a marketing strategy to execute your goals.

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Creating Marketing Systems

Every agency should be seeking ways to manage the marketing and sales activities within their organization. Following are some of my thoughts about what makes up a full prospect and client experience management system. These are some of the components that I see as necessary to adequately manage marketing activities for both new business and existing clients.

Customer experience management

Prospect Database: This is the basic level of contact and activity information on prospects. It is the first place to start and most agency management systems do an adequate job of allowing you to maintain this information.

Campaign Management: Campaigns allow you to create an automatic process that will put the producer’s name in front of a prospect consistently over time. Most prospects are not ready to buy on their first contact with your agency. This is not a new concept. As I was developing a new book of business in the early 90s, I used a campaign management process to mail a letter (it was the 90s!) every month or so to my prospects so I could stay in touch. I wrote a lot of business because I was slowly building trust and a relationship.

Marketing Automation: This is a broad term that identifies the ability for an agency to create a process that will gain a prospect’s attention, capture their information, and automatically follow up with the information they requested. Whenever you fill out a form on a website with your contact information so that you can receive information, you are participating in a marketing automation process. This type of marketing system will help fix the biggest marketing problem I see in agencies—follow-up failure. Follow-up failure is the reason most agency owners think Internet-generated leads don’t work.

Effectively managing the marketing/sales process is key to the long-term health of every agency.

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Opportunity Management: Every agency sales manager should be able to tell, at any point during the year, if a producer is on track to make their production goals. Also known as pipeline management, information is gathered (by a producer or someone else) on the status of existing prospects, how likely they are to become a client, and the amount of revenue generated. This information allows everyone to know if a producer has enough prospects in the pipeline to achieve their production goals.

There are many different marketing platforms that agencies are using to try and help manage their prospecting and client account rounding process.

There is no agency management system that I am aware of that manages these steps well. This has been a frustration of mine for years. And, it’s unrealistic to expect your agency will have the marketing functionality you need in those systems unless the vendors provide an open and well-documented API (Application Programming Interface).

Vendors hold your data hostage. You should be able to “plug in” any third-party platform you think will work best. Salesforce.com is good example of what will happen when a company opens up their platform to any third-party developer at no cost.

Finding ways to effectively manage all aspects of the marketing and sales process—for both prospects and current clients—is a key to the long-term health of every agency.

How do you handle your marketing/sales process?

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6 Reasons to Use Squidoo to Promote Your Agency

People buy from people they like and trust. One of the best ways to build trust with people you don’t know is to provide high-quality information. You should want to share your knowledge about insurance and about the products and services you provide.

Use Squidoo to get more web traffic to your site.

In order to accomplish that goal, you have to make people aware that your website exists. I call this Mastering your Internet Presence. Having your cousin Lenny and the rest of the family read your agency website might be fun, but that’s probably not exactly the audience you had in mind.

One way to promote your agency is to use Squidoo.

Squidoo is a publishing platform—created by Seth Godin—that lets you create and publish “lenses” or articles, about the topic of your choice. It’s a place to express your perspective and share your knowledge about a subject. It’s also a smart way to drive traffic to your agency website. Here’s why:

Squidoo is free.

Most advertising is expensive, but you can create a presence on Squidoo for free. All you have to do is provide an interesting article and publish it at the site. A variety of readers then have easy access to your lens and links to your website. You’re building your reputation as an expert on your subject and it costs you nothing—except a little brainpower.

It’s easy to Squidoo.

You don’t need many computer skills to use Squidoo. It’s user friendly and easy to understand. There are helpful tutorials that teach you how to optimize your lens for the best results. You’ll also find convenient, easy to use tools that make your lens painless to maintain and update.

It enables open communication.

When people visit your Squidoo lens, you should communicate with them. To start, you can use the Guestbook module to reach out and communicate with people who visit your lens. At the same time, you can use this tool to track and visit websites or the Squidoo lenses of visitors.

It’s a good way to create back-links.

Squidoo is a good way to create back-links. Back-links help increase your page rank in search engines and that’s key to increasing readership. You need all the back-links you can get, and Squidoo is a great place to start building them.

You can earn money on Squidoo.

Besides increasing traffic to your website, you can make a little cash along the way. Earn royalties when readers visit or make money with affiliate marketing. Google AdSense can match your lens with advertisements that complement your topic. There are other ways to earn money with Squidoo, and you can even choose to share some of those earnings with your favorite charity if you like.

It works.

The best reason to use Squidoo is that it can work. Oh, it’s not going to work quickly. Like your website, it takes time and effort from you before you begin seeing results, but it’s worth it.

Squidoo is effective, free, and easy to use. Try it. I think you’ll agree that Squidoo is a smart way to drive traffic to your website.

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Is the Sales Funnel Obsolete?

“Youtility is massively useful information, provided for free, that creates long-term trust and kinship between your company and your customers.”—Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is about Help Not Hype by Jay Baer

From my very first days in the insurance industry when I began to learn how to sell insurance products, I was taught the marketing and sales funnel.

The sales funnel was a visual representation of the steps that you needed to lead a prospect through in order to get them to the point where you could close the sale. Once they made a buying decision, you learned how to make them an advocate of your agency. Suspect, prospect, customer, client, advocate—that was the process.

And it worked.

I used the sales funnel—or marketing ladder—to visualize the marketing and sales process. I have been a big fan of this type of thinking. In 1990 when I began to sell commercial insurance as a new producer at an agency in Texas, it was a core part of the marketing process I used to build my book. I believed in it so much that I began using it when I taught agents about marketing campaign management and marketing automation. I even wrote a series of articles for Rough Notes that is still available today.

Many insurance sales trainers continue to rely on the sales and marketing funnel as a key component of their sales process training.

But I suspect sales funnel thinking has been obsolete for a number of years; the industry just hasn’t come to accept and embrace this change. I believe the sales and marketing process has changed more dramatically in the last five years than in the previous 30.

Buying patterns have also changed drastically. The Internet allows consumers to begin their search for product information without us knowing they are a prospect. This change in information access may have broken the sales funnel as we know it. The big question is whether or not a sales funnel is still a viable model for the sales and marketing process.

The sales funnel relies on the theory that someone comes into the top of the funnel and sales fall out the bottom. But is that really true in today’s world? It seems to me that a large percentage of today’s consumers follow an erratic path of engagement with businesses that sometimes results in a purchase.

Jay Baer, in his book Youtility, states that “technology adoption has profoundly altered how consumers interact with information and with businesses.” He goes on to say: “In 2011 the Corporate Executive Board surveyed 1,900 B2B customers to uncover insights about purchasing behavior and found that customers will contact a sales rep only after independently completing 60% of the purchasing decision process.”

As I mentioned above, the first time I was truly responsible for creating sales was in 1990. Back then, the whole sales funnel was controlled by the sales person. You’d cold call somebody and manage the sales process all the way through the funnel. As the sales person, I had all the information the prospect wanted, including pricing and discount options. I controlled the sales process.

If Baer and others are correct—marketing by providing “massively useful information” is now key to helping hidden prospects find you and learn more about you and the products and services you offer. Useful marketing builds trust, and trust fosters relationships.

Today, successful sales is more about self-service marketing than ever before. To find and attract the invisible prospect you need to be able to be very helpful. And your prospect may not start at the top of your sales funnel. By the time you find out they are a prospect for your services they may have already gone through multiple marketing steps. They did the research on their own.

So, if the sales and marketing funnel is obsolete, what analogy works for the sales process today? Is it:

  • A neural network?
    A connection of neurons that work together to form the nervous system.
  • The Web?
    Massively hyperlinked pieces of information. (This is a reason your website is so important in today’s sales environment.)
  • The same funnel but a different progression?
    Customers now dictate how fast they descend to the final purchase decision. They often do so without assistance from your agency, making inbound marketing key.

The sales game has changed a lot. What do you think? Has the sales process fundamentally changed?

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Is Risky the New Safe?

Sometimes you have to break things. Shake it up. Bust it up. ‘Cause that’s where the breakthroughs live.
–Randy Gage, author, Risky is the New Safe

Risky is the New Safe Randy Gage

Over the past few years it has been intriguing to watch the decline of well-known brands and companies: Blockbuster, Nokia, BlackBerry, Best Buy, Borders, and Kodak. These are just a few names of companies that are filing for bankruptcy or experiencing significant declines in revenue and/or market share.

One lesson that can be drawn from how these companies handled change is that there is a significant danger faced by dominant firms that refuse to cannibalize themselves—to give up existing sales in order to position themselves with the next generation of products and services. Kodak invented the digital camera yet was unable to cannibalize the profits from its film business to invest in new digital technology. Management reluctance ultimately led to Kodak’s demise.

Giving up what’s making you money sounds much easier in theory than it is to execute. To paraphrase author Steven Pearlstein, “The key to success in such a fast-changing environment…[is] keeping a mind open to numerous possibilities, having the discipline to experiment with several conflicting strategies and moving quickly to embrace one of them when the direction of the market becomes clear.”

Perhaps the best way to handle this dilemma is to devote a certain percentage of your time to developing what’s new, be it mobile delivery, a new product, or new audience.

Randy Gage, in Risky is the New Safe, provides five marketing lessons for entrepreneurs who may not want to play it safe. They also apply to the insurance industry:

  1. Action beats perfection: A well thought-out plan executed today is better than the perfect plan executed whenever you figure out it’s perfect. (Which is usually never.)
  2. Boring kills: A book, video, sales letter, brochure, opera, story, song, dance, or any creative work can never be too long—it can only be too boring. Insurance is already thought of as boring. Do something to spice it up.
  3. Say what you want: When you want someone to do something, don’t speak in codes. Whether you’re talking with your kids, raising money for a charity, crafting a marketing message, or persuading a business owner to let you work on their insurance program—tell them what you want them to do. They’re big kids and they can decide if they agree with you or not, and if they want to take that action—but only if they know what the message is.
  4. Be bold: The best promoter of you, your agency, service, or cause is you. You know it best, and no one is going to make a more passionate case than you. If you believe you provide the best value, stand up for it.
  5. Take risks: The insurance industry is by its very nature risk adverse. But to move forward you may have to take risks and experiment. You won’t always succeed, but you will learn and you will move forward. A Facebook ad may not work. That new marketing piece is going to be bold, different, and unconventional—and that’s why it will work.

Gage titles one chapter in his book, “Move Fast and Break Things.” That was the mantra of Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook family, he says. The insurance industry tends to not want to break anything! This is a new skill many of us might have to learn.

A more realistic mantra might be to “Move Fast and Try Not to Break Everything.” And: “Keep an Open Mind.”

The reason these businesses don’t change fast enough is because what they do is still working.
–Alan Wurtzel, former CEO of Circuit City, and author of Good to Great to Gone.