So now you are ready to actually begin using Facebook for business purposes, and you are wondering, "What exactly do I do?" To follow will be a number of specific suggestions on how to get “fans” of your page. Of course, the importance of getting people to be fans of your page is so that you can easily and effectively communicate with them at a later time.
For starters, you will need to create your agency’s Facebook page. This is a really simple process. Instead of taking up space in this blog, suffice it to say that millions of people have figured it out, and you can too. If you need a slight nudge and a point in the right direction, then do a simple Google search for “how to build my business a Facebook page”, or go to any other organization’s Facebook page, and all the way down on the bottom left of the screen, there will be a link titled "Create a Page for my Business". Click there and you will be off and running.
When building your page, you'll want to include photos and information about your agency. Most of this information can be pulled off of your agency’s existing web site, so this part will not be much work at all. You may even want to add a statement about your agency’s service standards and mission statement. Do a Facebook search for “insurance agency” and you'll see a number of good examples. My agent's Facebook page is linked below.
Once you have your page built, you'll want to start promoting it within your community. Your first strategy should be to get as much "organic" growth as possible. Get your employees and family members to become "fans" of your new page. Ask them to promote it to their friends, especially those that are clients of the agency. You'll also want to include messages on your emails and other correspondences that leave your office that state something to the effect that "You can now follow us on Facebook". Putting a direct link on your website so that your visitors can easily follow you on Facebook is also a good idea. By taking these simple steps, you will quickly have a nice number of fans and a steady flow of new fans as well.
Doing an ad buy on Facebook is also very easy, and is perhaps the best money you can spend given your ability to target a specific type of prospect and set your own budget. For example, let’s say you have an agency in Athens, Georgia. You may only want to advertise to people that are logging into their Facebook account that are within 25 miles of Athens. Because the Facebook server knows the IP address of the computers logging into its site, it is able to discern the location of each person on the site and target advertising to a specific location. Pretty cool, huh?
But wait, there’s more. Let’s say that you don’t think that advertising to UGA students is effective marketing, because you feel that the majority of them are not yet insurance purchasers, but instead rely on mom and dad to buy the insurance. It would be very easy to filter out the majority of those students by choosing to only advertise to people within 25 miles of Athens that are age 25 or over and either engaged or married. There are a number of other criteria that you could use to either further limit or expand those persons whom your ad will target. Now, that’s not exactly something you can do with the phone book or newspaper advertising.
While the ability to target very specific demographics with Facebook advertising is awesome, it may take a back seat to the financial flexibility. Once you have set up the perimeters of your ad, Facebook will give you two suggested bid prices. One price will be for “impressions”, or how many times your ad is shown; and the other price will be for “clicks”, or how many times your ad is clicked on by a Facebook user. While the price per click will be higher, I suggest that you take that approach, as my experience is the click through rate for insurance agencies is quite low (about once per 1000 impressions).
I am not going to pretend to understand how Facebook sets the price for its ads. Let’s just say that it’s on some type of formula. An agency that I helped to set up an ad for last week was given the suggested price of $0.52 for each click. They had committed $100/month to Facebook advertising. We set the daily budget at $3.12, thinking that would allow us 6 clicks per day. If the agency maxed out each and every day, then they would hit close to their monthly budget. So, isn’t this beautiful? Their ad is going to show up only to the people that are in their geographic area, that meet the demographic profile they have set up, and once they have exhausted their daily budget, the ad shuts itself off and the agency does not have to pay for it any longer. Wow!
It has been less than one week since we placed the ad, and the agency has had 46,596 impressions and 39 clicks. All of this for grand total of $15.13. Turns out that $0.52 is the MOST the agency will ever pay for a click, and the average click price has been considerably less. Where else could $15 generate that number of impressions with your most desirable (however you define that) demographic?
Okay, so now you’ve got your page, and your getting some fans. The next and final article in this series will take a look at the content you chould place on your page. Stay tuned.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Friday, February 12, 2010
Why Social Media Makes Sense for Independent Insurance Agents - Part II of a Series
On one hand the wide spread use of various social media sites like Facebook, is quite revolutionary. While I certainly agree that all of the tools that are emerging in this space are indeed revolutionary, I think it is very important to understand that what these tools are designed to accomplish are not at all new ideas.
Facebook has turned into this giant community, with over 300,000,000 users. You and I are a part of this community; your family and friends are part of this new community; so are your customers, prospects, employees and competitors. And those facts make Facebook the perfect media for independent agents. Independent agents have always been integral parts of their communities. Where ever you live, I will guarantee you that you would not have to look very long or hard to find an independent insurance agent that is absolutely plugged in to his/her community. They lead various civic and charitable organizations. They are leaders for Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, involved in their churches, coach youth sports, and on and on and on. I can not think of a single valid argument as to why insurance agents would not equally embrace and become involved in this new community as well. This new community gives agents an excellent opportunity to expand their circle of influence. With great ease, agents can position themselves to give advice, make recommendations, share experiences, and interact with various groups. Exactly the same things you hope to accomplish when you go to your Rotary luncheon.
By nature, many insurance agents are "people people". Ever since I started in this business in 1991, I've always heard that the insurance business is about "relationships". Facebook gives you the opportunity to strengthen and build relationships. By doing so, you will generate leads, provide greater customer service, and allow your customers to feel like they know you! If you are indeed a people person, doesn't that require that you go where the people are? If this is a relationship business, shouldn't you be focusing on building relationships?
Some agents and agencies will claim that Facebook is a fad, or that it has no pratical business applications, or that it creates too much E&O exposure, or that it will waste too much of their employee's time. While some of these issues will need to be appropriately addressed, none of these truly raises a valid enough concern to ignore this revolutionary opportunity. I feel so old by saying this, but I've been in this business long enough to remember many of those same objections being raised because of fax machines, internet access, email and cell phones. Can you imagine doing business today without those tools? I think a few years from now we'll all be looking back on Facebook and the other forms of social media in the same light.
In the next article in this series, I'll share with you some specific ideas on using Facebook to increase your agency's standing within this new, huge, wonderful community!
Facebook has turned into this giant community, with over 300,000,000 users. You and I are a part of this community; your family and friends are part of this new community; so are your customers, prospects, employees and competitors. And those facts make Facebook the perfect media for independent agents. Independent agents have always been integral parts of their communities. Where ever you live, I will guarantee you that you would not have to look very long or hard to find an independent insurance agent that is absolutely plugged in to his/her community. They lead various civic and charitable organizations. They are leaders for Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, involved in their churches, coach youth sports, and on and on and on. I can not think of a single valid argument as to why insurance agents would not equally embrace and become involved in this new community as well. This new community gives agents an excellent opportunity to expand their circle of influence. With great ease, agents can position themselves to give advice, make recommendations, share experiences, and interact with various groups. Exactly the same things you hope to accomplish when you go to your Rotary luncheon.
By nature, many insurance agents are "people people". Ever since I started in this business in 1991, I've always heard that the insurance business is about "relationships". Facebook gives you the opportunity to strengthen and build relationships. By doing so, you will generate leads, provide greater customer service, and allow your customers to feel like they know you! If you are indeed a people person, doesn't that require that you go where the people are? If this is a relationship business, shouldn't you be focusing on building relationships?
Some agents and agencies will claim that Facebook is a fad, or that it has no pratical business applications, or that it creates too much E&O exposure, or that it will waste too much of their employee's time. While some of these issues will need to be appropriately addressed, none of these truly raises a valid enough concern to ignore this revolutionary opportunity. I feel so old by saying this, but I've been in this business long enough to remember many of those same objections being raised because of fax machines, internet access, email and cell phones. Can you imagine doing business today without those tools? I think a few years from now we'll all be looking back on Facebook and the other forms of social media in the same light.
In the next article in this series, I'll share with you some specific ideas on using Facebook to increase your agency's standing within this new, huge, wonderful community!
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Is "Social Media" the future of personal lines insurance? - Part I of a Series
Within the independent insurance agency system, there is certainly some cause for concern when contemplating the future of personal lines insurance. Over the past several years, personal lines market share for independent agents has been declining at about 1% per year. Recent data shows this as a decline from 36.4% in 2004 to 32.3 in 2007. While this may not seem overly significant to some, it is important to realize that each 1% decline in market share equates to roughly $200,000,000 in lost REVENUE.
The majority of this lost market share seems to be moving toward internet based direct writers of insurance. Certainly GEICO has been a major player in that space. There seem to be two major factors at play. Clearly one of the major factors is the fact that GEICO is spending a staggering amount of money on marketing and advertising. In 2009, its spending in this area topped $750,000,000! Included in that amount is over $200,000 per day in "click-through" ads. The other factor, and perhaps the one that is cause for the most concern, is the fact that so many of us are getting more and more comfortable each day with what activities we perform on-line. From banking, to retail purchases, to travel, to music, to dating (for cry it out loud) we are quickly becoming a society that is "okay" with doing it on-line. And that is not a trend that anyone expects to reverse itself anytime soon. With the huge number of "Gen Y's" and "Millennials" getting ready to enter the market place and become an even more significant portion or our economy, the internet will probably play a much more important role in many business segments, including insurance.
The real sore point for losing market share however, is the fact that in most cases, independent agents still bring excellent value to the insurance transaction. When I speak to agencies in Georgia, most of them are very confident that they can compete AND beat GEICO in personal auto 7 or 8 out of every 10 opportunities. While that's pretty impressive, it really makes the loss in market share that much more of a bitter pill to swallow. It appears that independent agents are simply being out marketed. There is no doubt that independent agents can compete on price and provide far greater expertise, local service and the added ability to handle all of an insured's needs.
What's the solution? I will suggest that the independent agency system must increase its marketing efforts, and it must be more "web friendly". Social media sites, such as Facebook and YouTube have proven that they can be great tools to boost and agency's web presence. Most consumers now research nearly every purchase on-line before making a purchasing decision. There is recent data that shows the vast majority of people will research their insurance purchase on the internet, but when it comes time to buy, they want to talk with a real live person and get advice on how to more forward. Stay tuned to this blog for more insights and information on this important topic.
The majority of this lost market share seems to be moving toward internet based direct writers of insurance. Certainly GEICO has been a major player in that space. There seem to be two major factors at play. Clearly one of the major factors is the fact that GEICO is spending a staggering amount of money on marketing and advertising. In 2009, its spending in this area topped $750,000,000! Included in that amount is over $200,000 per day in "click-through" ads. The other factor, and perhaps the one that is cause for the most concern, is the fact that so many of us are getting more and more comfortable each day with what activities we perform on-line. From banking, to retail purchases, to travel, to music, to dating (for cry it out loud) we are quickly becoming a society that is "okay" with doing it on-line. And that is not a trend that anyone expects to reverse itself anytime soon. With the huge number of "Gen Y's" and "Millennials" getting ready to enter the market place and become an even more significant portion or our economy, the internet will probably play a much more important role in many business segments, including insurance.
The real sore point for losing market share however, is the fact that in most cases, independent agents still bring excellent value to the insurance transaction. When I speak to agencies in Georgia, most of them are very confident that they can compete AND beat GEICO in personal auto 7 or 8 out of every 10 opportunities. While that's pretty impressive, it really makes the loss in market share that much more of a bitter pill to swallow. It appears that independent agents are simply being out marketed. There is no doubt that independent agents can compete on price and provide far greater expertise, local service and the added ability to handle all of an insured's needs.
What's the solution? I will suggest that the independent agency system must increase its marketing efforts, and it must be more "web friendly". Social media sites, such as Facebook and YouTube have proven that they can be great tools to boost and agency's web presence. Most consumers now research nearly every purchase on-line before making a purchasing decision. There is recent data that shows the vast majority of people will research their insurance purchase on the internet, but when it comes time to buy, they want to talk with a real live person and get advice on how to more forward. Stay tuned to this blog for more insights and information on this important topic.
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