Take Time to Reflect on Your Insurance Marketing Strategies
Reflection of your strategy can allow you to see the positives and negatives of your methods. In addition, you can change your results and create more satisfaction amongst your agency and customers. This will help you move towards your desired goals. You should always make time for reflection because it will allow your company to learn and grow for the better.
One way to reflect more effectively is by asking yourself questions. Consider applying the following list to your marketing and social strategy so you can find out what you can improve on:
* What worked? Why?
* What didn’t work? Why?
* How can I use this experience?
* How does this experience relate to other situations and what can I learn?
* Knowing what I know now, what would I do differently next time?
When you think more broadly, your reflection time will become much more beneficial. You can even have your team participate in a brainstorming session. As a leader, learning and reflection provides you with the powerful opportunity to create a more effective, productive, and successful insurance marketing strategy that you and your community can rely on.
How Well Do You Know Your Customers?
You may have a thorough understanding of your customers on a face to face level, but what about your community online? This may be a bit more difficult to tackle, especially if you have a large number of followers. As an insurance agent, you rely on your customer service skills to interact and connect honestly with your clients. Having this experience will allow you to transition easily into the digital sphere, where you can apply what you know in order to engage and learn more about your customers.
Some important goals to keep in mind when it comes to your insurance social media strategy include learning more about your audience so you are able to better direct your products and services. Also, allow your customers to get to know you better, not just as a business, but the people behind your business as well. Did you ever think about whether you not your audience has an idea of who you are and what your values are?
The reason social media should be utilized fully in your agency is so you can really get to know your customers, as if you are reading their minds. Notice that those you follow are always on their social accounts, sharing their every thought, preference, and desires. Use this to your advantage so you can get more in touch with who your audience is.
As for your agency, the more you open up, the better the response will be. What you put into your social efforts is exactly what you will get out of it, so remain dedicated to the community that relies on you the most. If you think about it from a customer’s perspective, you would agree that when you know about the people behind the business, you feel more comfortable and therefore, more likely to buy. Try creating posts about employee spotlights and even have agents post on the business page wall.
All of these suggestions are meant to help you work on engaging your audience more fully. Give your customers what they want in an authentic fashion. This will help you create an online presence that is inviting and friendly, which is exactly what you need to boost your agency upwards on the social ladder
How to Promote Your Agency Using Pinterest
You may be actively using Facebook and Twitter to connect with your insurance customers, but did you ever think about using Pinterest? This tool has recently become extremely popular. It is important for your agency to be up to date on insurance marketing strategies so you can understand and communicate better with your audience. What better way to appeal to them than through pictures!
The way to use Pinterest to your advantage is by finding images that relate to your agency and its values and getting them repinned on other users’ boards. The fascination with this outlet is it can provide a user and their followers with great ideas for content, social posts, and other marketing sparks. If you are interested in using this tool, here are some ways to attract attention to your agency and spread the word about relevant news:
* Invest Time into Your Account
Like any other social network, Pinterest requires an investment of time. The results you will see are based on the dedication you put towards growing your following. One key to building relationships is to find those in your community who are known for quality “pins”. All of the repins and likes shared you receive show a common interest, making it easier for you to take the conversation to Twitter or Facebook, where you can continue to expand your target audience.
* Stay Organized with Simplicity
Since this site is easy to use, you must keep it organized so your viewers understand your intentions. Simplicity is key if you want to attract new customers. It is best to adopt an uncluttered aesthetic, so creates boards that are clean and elegant looking.
* Connect with Your Location
As you know, having the mindset of staying “local” will help you appeal to your insurance customers. The same goes for your Pinterest boards. It is important to show you care about your community by pinning images that pertain to local events or landmarks in your town. This may increase your visibility, and even having a Pinterest button on your website couldn’t hurt.
* Have a Daily Pin Theme
Get creative with your boards by initiating a daily pin theme. This idea can attract comments and likes, as well as a conversation to promote your agency. Come up with a catchy slogan that is memorable enough so that the images get re-pinned. The daily themed pins usually lead to repeat visitors as well.
Remember, as you engage your audience on Pinterest, you should always stay true to yourself. Being honest and authentic with your customers is extremely important, especially if you want to build a positive reputation for your insurance agency online. Although there is always the temptation to post only about the products you sell, you should be thinking outside of the box. Try posting interesting news, tips, and happenings in your company. This will help you gain and retain customers, as well as spark new initiatives for your insurance marketing strategy
10 Ways To Get More Done In Less Time
The ability to work faster and get more done in less time isn’t slavery; it’s freedom. You’re going to have the same big pile of stuff to do every day whether you want it or not. If you can be more efficient, you can get it done and still have some time left over for yourself – whether it’s to read the paper, hike, jog, or play the piano.
Here are 10 ideas that can increase your personal productivity so you can get more done in less time:
1. Master your PC. Every engineer or manager who wants to be more productive should use a modern PC with the latest software. Doing so can double, triple, or even quadruple your output.
Install on your PC the same software as your colleagues, other departments within your organization, vendors, and business partners use. The broader the range of your software, the more easily you can open and read files from other sources.
Constantly upgrade your desktop to eliminate too-slow computer processes that waste your time, such as slow downloading of files or Web pages. If you use the Internet a lot, get the fastest access you can. DSL is getting cheaper by the month and is well worth the money at its current price levels.
2. Don’t be a perfectionist. “I’m a non-perfectionist,” said Isaac Asimov, author of 475 books. “I don’t look back in regret or worry at what I have written.” Be a careful worker, but don’t agonize over your work beyond the point where the extra effort no longer produces a proportionately worthwhile improvement in your final product.
Be excellent but not perfect. Customers do not have the time or budget for perfection; for most projects, getting 95 to 98 percent of the way to perfection is good enough. That doesn’t mean you deliberately make errors or give less than your best. It means you stop polishing and fiddling with the job when it looks good to you — and you don’t agonize over the fact you’re not spending another hundred hours on it. Create it, check it, then let it go.
Understand the exponential curve of excellence. Quality improves with effort according to an exponential curve. That means early effort yields the biggest results; subsequent efforts yield smaller and smaller improvements, until eventually the miniscule return is not worth the effort. Productive people stop at the point where the investment in further effort on a task is no longer justified by the tiny incremental improvement it would produce. Aim for 100 percent perfection, and you are unlikely to be productive or profitable. Consistently hit within the 90 to 98 percent range, and you will maximize both customer satisfaction as well as return on your time investment.
“Perfection does not exist,” wrote Alfred De Musset. “To understand this is the triumph of human intelligence; to expect to possess it is the most dangerous kind of madness.”
3. Free yourself from the pressure to be an innovator. As publisher Cameron Foote observes, “Clients are looking for good, not great.” Do the best you can to meet the client’s or your boss’s requirements. They will be happy. Do not feel pressured to reinvent the wheel or create a masterpiece on every project you take on. Don’t be held up by the false notion that you must uncover some great truth or present your boss with revolutionary ideas and concepts. Most successful business solutions are just common sense packaged to meet a specific need.
Eliminate performance pressure. Don’t worry about whether what you are doing is different or better than what others have done before you. Just do the best you can. That will be enough.
4. Switch back and forth between different tasks. Even if you consider yourself a specialist, do projects outside your specialty. Inject variety into your project schedule. Arrange your daily schedule so you switch off from one assignment to another at least once or twice each day. Variety, as the saying goes, is indeed the spice of life.
Approximately 70 to 90 percent of what I am doing at any time is in familiar tasks within my area of expertise. This keeps me highly productive. The other 10 to 30 percent is in new areas, markets, industries, or disciplines outside my area of expertise. This keeps me fresh and allows me to explore things that captivate my imagination but are not in my usual schedule of assignments.
5. Don’t waste time working on projects you don’t have yet. Get letters of agreement, contracts, purchase orders, and budget sign-offs before proceeding. Don’t waste time starting the work for projects that may not come to fruition. An official approval or go-ahead from your boss or customer makes the project real and firm, so you can proceed at full speed, with the confidence and enthusiasm that come from knowing you have been given the green light.
6. Make deadlines firm but adequate. Of 150 executives surveyed by AccounTemps, 37% rated the dependable meeting of deadlines as the most important quality of a team player (cited in Continental magazine, October 1997, page 44).
Productive people set and meet deadlines. Without a deadline, the motivation to do a task is small to nonexistent. Tasks without assigned deadlines automatically go to the bottom of your priority list. After all, if you have two reports to file – and one is due a week from Thursday, and the other due “whenever you can get around to it” – which do you suppose will get written first?
Often you will collaborate with your supervisor or customer in determining deadlines. Set deadlines for a specific date and time, not a time period. For example, “due June 23 by 3 pm or sooner,” not “in about two weeks.” Having a specific date and time for completion eliminates confusion and gives you motivation to get the work done on time.
At the same time, don’t make deadlines too tight. Try to build in a few extra days for the unexpected, such as a missing piece of information, a delay from a subcontractor, a last-minute change, or a crisis on another project.
7. Protect and value your time. Productive people guard their time more heavily than the gold in Fort Knox. They don’t waste time. They get right to the point. They may come off as abrupt or dismissive to some people. But they realize they cannot give everyone who contacts them all the time each person wants. They choose who they spend time on and with. They make decisions. They say what needs to be said, do what needs to be done – and then move on.
Assign a dollar value to your time. If you work 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, that comes to 2,000 hours a year. To calculate your hourly rate, divide your salary by 2,000. Example: #75,000 annual salary divided by 2,000 hours comes to #37.50 an hour.
A productive person can tell you in an instant the worth of his or her time, because he’s already done this calculation and committed the answer to memory. Productive people weigh the effort required for specific activities – and the return it will produce – against the cost of the time based on the dollar value of their hour.
For instance, if my time is worth $37.50, and I spend an hour driving to a discount store to save $10 on supplies, I have not used my time wisely — I am $27.50 in the hole. On the other hand, if I saved $1,000 on a new computer for the same trip, it obviously was worth the time.
8. Stay focused. As Robert Ringer observed in his best-selling book Looking Out for Number One, successful people apply themselves to the task at hand. They work until the work gets done. They concentrate on one or two things at a time. They don’t go in a hundred different directions. My experience is that people who are big talkers – constantly spouting ideas or proposing deals and ventures – are spread out in too many different directions to be effective. Efficient people have a vision and focus their activities to achieve that vision.
9. Set a production goal. Stephen King writes 1,500 words every day except his birthday, Christmas, and the Fourth of July. Steinway makes 800 pianos in its German plant every year.
Workers and organizations that want to meet deadlines and be successful set a production goal and make it. An individual who truly wants to be productive sets a production goal, meets it, and then keeps going until he or she can do no more — or runs out of time.
Joe Lansdale, author of Bad Chili and many other novels, says he never misses his productivity goal of writing three pages a day, five days a week. “I’m not in the mood, I don’t feel like it, what kind of an excuse is that?” Lansdale said in an interview with Publisher’s Weekly (September 29, 1997). “If I’m not in the mood, do I not go to the chicken plant if I’ve got a job in the chicken plant?”
10. Do work you enjoy. In advising people on choosing their life’s work, David Ogilvy, founder of the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather, quotes a Scottish proverb that says, “Be happy while you’re living; for you’re a long time dead.” The Tao Te Ching says, “In work, do what you enjoy.”
When you enjoy your work, it really isn’t work. To me, success is being able to make a good living while spending the workday in pleasurable tasks. You won’t love every project equally, of course. But try to balance “must-do” mandatory tasks with things that are more fun for you. Seek assignments that are exciting, interesting, and fulfilling.
Can you train yourself to like work better and enjoy it more? Motivational experts say we do have the ability to change our attitudes and behavior. “Attitude is a trap or it is freedom. Create your own,” writes Judy Crookes in Inner Realm magazine.
“Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans,” advised Max Ehrmann in his 1927 essay “Desiderata.” “Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.”
This article appears courtesy of Bob Bly’s Direct Response Letter
Your 2011 Insurance Lead Generation Solution
Publishing articles online is a fast growing marketing trend. No matter what industry you work in, it’s a great way to establish yourself as an expert and gain publicity for your company. It’s also an effective way to build many links back to your website, generating more online traffic. Best of all, publishing online articles is fast, simple, and if you sign up for a free basic EzineArticles.com membership account, will cost you nothing but your time.
Online article publishing allows insurance buyers to find you while researching topics of interest. For example, when they Google a topic such as “Do I need to have an umbrella?” your related article appears in the search results. When insurance buyers read your article and discover valuable, helpful advice, they click through to your website to learn more about you.
Thus, you’ve created a warm lead and positioned yourself as a top insurance industry expert, without any face to face selling.
Stop and think – could your insurance business use a lead generation strategy like this? Would you enjoy generating hundreds of link backs to your site for minimum to no investment?
Here’s how to get started:
1. Go to EzineArticles.com and set up a free online account. When you set up the author byline, make sure to include a couple of sentences about your insurance business and a link back to your website.
2. Write and publish your first article – if you need help with writing, editing or ezine article account set up, let us know.
3. Publish at least one article every month – more if possible. Remember – every article provides a path back to your website.
To learn more about publishing articles online, visit www.InsuranceCopywriting.com.
You may have a thorough understanding of your customers on a face to face level, but what about your community online? This may be a bit more difficult to tackle, especially if you have a large number of followers. As an insurance agent, you rely on your customer service skills to interact and connect honestly with your clients. Having this experience will allow you to transition easily into the digital sphere, where you can apply what you know in order to engage and learn more about your customers.
Some important goals to keep in mind when it comes to your insurance social media strategy include learning more about your audience so you are able to better direct your products and services. Also, allow your customers to get to know you better, not just as a business, but the people behind your business as well. Did you ever think about whether you not your audience has an idea of who you are and what your values are?
The reason social media should be utilized fully in your agency is so you can really get to know your customers, as if you are reading their minds. Notice that those you follow are always on their social accounts, sharing their every thought, preference, and desires. Use this to your advantage so you can get more in touch with who your audience is.
As for your agency, the more you open up, the better the response will be. What you put into your social efforts is exactly what you will get out of it, so remain dedicated to the community that relies on you the most. If you think about it from a customer’s perspective, you would agree that when you know about the people behind the business, you feel more comfortable and therefore, more likely to buy. Try creating posts about employee spotlights and even have agents post on the business page wall.
All of these suggestions are meant to help you work on engaging your audience more fully. Give your customers what they want in an authentic fashion. This will help you create an online presence that is inviting and friendly, which is exactly what you need to boost your agency upwards on the social ladder!
I work with many types of insurance marketers - from agencies and wholesalers to carriers and vendors. Over the years, I've noticed that companies tend to fall into two categories:
* They're "kick butt, get-it-done, achieve results" marketers
* They're "drag on, indecisive, never-get-finished" marketers
Of course, we all want to achieve results. So, I thought it might be helpful to take a closer look at what it really takes to be a successful insurance marketer. Here's what I've noticed...
Six common traits of effective insurance marketers:
1. They're not afraid to take action. When it comes to marketing, taking any action is better than taking no action at all. By not making a decision, or not taking action, you're choosing to not have any marketing. It's better to make a decision and have some form of marketing working for you (even if it's not perfect) than to not make a decision and have no forward momentum.
2. They reach decisions quickly. Effective insurance marketers look at the information, make a decision, and move on - right or wrong. And here's something important: they don't allow too many people to get involved in the decision making process. When there are too many cooks in the kitchen, recipes go awry and marketing strategies get very watered down.
3. They make marketing a top priority. I have one client who is the president of a sizeable insurance organization. He manages many employees and has no personal assistant. Yet he routinely reviews and replies to marketing-related emails and decisions within 24 hours. Nothing sits! And why should it? In most cases, it only takes 15 minutes to move a marketing project forward.
4. They understand that you have to spend money to make money. Over the years, I've seen many people start businesses and cut corners with essentials, such as their websites. In my opinion, your website is your most pivotal piece in your insurance marketing arsenal. If you're going to do a bargain-basement job, then get ready for bargain-basement results. If you spend money where it matters, you'll achieve your goals much faster.
5. They understand that there's no such thing as a one-hit wonder. Effective marketing requires a consistent, integrated effort - month in and month out. Like your own personal health and fitness, growing a company requires a disciplined process. If anyone tells you they have a magic no-work formula, RUN.
6. They have the ability to track and measure. If you have the ability to track and measure, then you can be much more sophisticated in your marketing approach. This is usually linked to having a good IT resource. By having internal IT talent or someone who you can access quickly, you're more likely to track and measure your marketing results, and quickly hone your strategies.
So now that you've read the list, ask yourself, "Am I doing the six things needed to maximize my marketing results?" If you're failing in any of these areas, strive for improvement. If the problem involves your company's decision-making structure, share this article with those in charge and challenge them to change the status quo. Change won't happen overnight, but awareness is a posi
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com
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