Insurance and Finance Marketing

We have just launched our first free 52 week course to help Insurance brokers use the Internet to drive more revenue and traffic to their website.

The course includes:

• How to use free article strategies to get highly ranked in Google

• Learn the best techniques to double the conversions from your Pay Per Click Marketing

• Use basic optimisation strategies to get the major search engines to rank your website highly

• Discover the 3 different types of sitemaps to drive traffic, help users, and the search engines navigate your website

Visit the site here: Insurance Marketing and sign up. It is totally free!

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Global Reviews, the customer experience benchmarking company, asked thousands of consumers what they are looking for online, from a variety of Finance and Insurance providers.

Their study found that 53% of consumers say that they currently research their home insurance online, with 47% saying that they are extremely likely to purchase through the Internet in the future.

Global Reviews also looked at the leading websites across the industry to create a benchmark of best practice against which they assessed under various categories including ease of use, information available to prospective customers, customer support, application processes, overall content and the quality of the online tools.

This research shows that consumers are very comfortable quoting and buying online when it comes to their finance and insurance purchases. Providing these types of facilities on your own company website is a very good way to tap into this growing market.

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Half of UK consumers fear for their finances
Where there’s muck there’s … A £57 million bill
64% of Britons are considering carrying on working after retirement
Middle Britain house prices to drop £40,000 by Christmas
home insurance leaves Britons £9billion out of pocket

They have all featured in the national press in the last few weeks and they are all relating to results obtained by running surveys.

So what does this have to do with me?

Using this technique, you can build press releases around surveys that you can carry out with your client base, or by running queries on your databases.  Journalists love stats and the more unique and original the stats the better.   You can even use these to produce a monthly report that gets sent out to local and national press.

For example, we used to produce a monthly survey for loan applications for a secured lending client and it got picked up and used for 6 months in 2 national print magazines with links back to the client site each month.

There is a hidden goldmine of stats that you can use in your customer database to create useful press releases:

Demographics – Where are your clients?

Product based – What products are they applying for?  How much for? What %age of clients who buy X go onto buy Y as well?

Remember, if using customer data to keep it generic and don’t mention customers on an individual basis.  Do be prepared to be asked for a case study, so it is always useful to have a case study available.  Having a case study in our experience gives you:

• More column inches
• More likelihood of use
• Greater future exposure – If you are easy to deal with, present info in a ready to use way and have case studies – you are a journalists dream!

Opinion based – use an actual online survey to garner results and scale up to a national level. Most surveys use a small number of responses and scale it up to create a national response.

So how do I build a survey that makes it easy to get quantifiable results?

The best way to build a survey is on a multiple choice basis. In this way it is easy to create statistics.  Online you can use free tools such as Surveymonkey to create an online survey or poll which then allows you to login in and collect the results to use.  You can use a free survey at surveymonkey.com which allows you to collect 100 responses which is a good number to work with.

How do I get people to fill it in?

You can email your existing customer base and offer them entry to a free prize draw for completing the survey.  You can use it as a competition and submit it to competition sites such as loquax.co.uk, competitionsuk.net, and ukcompetitions.com.

For the cost of an Ipod Nano or something of similar value you can build a good amount of information.

Keep the survey short, to say five questions, and if used correctly, you can create a press release around each question.  So that’s a press release every month for 5 months.

Okay so I have the release now what?

There are various methods for publishing press release but we will use two methods.

Firstly, you can email to the finance and insurance journalists.  Go out and buy all of the weekend nationals and local papers and note who is writing the stories in the money sections.  You can build a quick list of around 20 or 30 in this way.

Secondly, you can submit your release online.  You can use a paid for service such as PRWeb or you can spend an hour or so submitting to a few main press release directory sites such as: dbusinessnews.com, seenation.com, google.com/base, pr-usa.net, openpr.com, i-newswire.com, prlog.com, przoom.com, and pressbox.co.uk.

Some of these sites are US based but it doesn’t matter, journalists can look at these resources to get ideas for stories. They also get featured in Google News which is another great source for research for journalists.

Press releases are a great way to get exposure for your business both locally and nationally, online and offline so you should build in marketing time to add in this promotional tool to your arsenal.  Press releases used and picked up online also provide your website with a boost in authority too.  Having your story picked up and used by the BBC with a link back to your site, for example, can lift your website out of obscurity and improve it web rankings in the major search engines.

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One thing that most web aggregator sites do, is generate huge amount of web traffic.  Mainly, this is down to search engine optimisation techniques and paid for web advertising such as Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing.

However, there is a third way, which tends to sit under the radar yet drives a huge amount of traffic to the aggregator sites. Most of the major players will offer a white labelled version of their online facilities and a revenue share opportunity.  Just looking around some of the bigger sites out there, you will find an comparison site of some description powering the money or finance sections.

So how does this help me?

While you may not have a facility such as an online quote and buy engine, you could still provide a white labelled money / insurance or investment sections to a large number of sites.

Sites such as:

• Local interest sites or local information directories.
• Clubs and Associations
• Local charities and groups.
• Other local companies – Accountants, Lawyers, Business Services and the like

You could very well have relationships with these organisations already but using the web to do it, means that it is easier to track and shows you very quickly what is working and what isn’t.

The advantages

Most referral business is done on trust between two partners and it has always been a difficult thing to manage as far as a paper trail goes.  Now with using the Internet, you can have an online tracking system, and depending how big it grows there are tools that will allow partners to login and check stats and commission due, all without your involvement.

If you haven’t done so already, provide your current partners with their own landing pages so they can promote these pages to their members.  After all it is in their best interest as they will earn more revenues.  You can even make the landing page look like a page on their website.

A Win-Win

Their site gets more content, as well as, additional revenue streams and you get more business with an easy to manage solution.

Provide marketing materials such email shots, web copy or even issue a joint press release promoting the new service or partnership (You could have a template of something built in advance.).

Make sure you mention these partnership opportunities at your networking events, so not only are you promoting your business but also offering a business opportunity. Even add it to your business card.  Have a page on your site with more information about your partnership programme.

This is a great way to dominate a local marketplace.  Just like the aggregators have tied up most of the major online portals, you could be doing the same at a local level.

Summary

There is still large number of untapped groups and sites out there that will benefit from a relationship with an IFA, insurance or mortgage broker.  Promoting and running an online partnership programme is a good way to drive more business and build new revenue streams.  The beauty is that the work you do once in building the system (the content, the advice for promotional and the marketing materials) can then be rolled out to any new partnership arrangement quickly. You can even have this in a password protected area on your website so it can be automated entirely.

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One thing we are doing in the next few weeks is to create and run several free teleseminars aimed at helping finance and insurance brokers promote their businesses online.  Now in doing this, it got us thinking that telesemniars themselves are a great marketing tool to attract clients that not many, if any, insurance or mortgage brokers are doing.

Have you thought about running a free teleseminar but not sure why or how.  Well to get going you would need to contact a service provider that allowed you to run your teleseminar on the phone, that would have a bridge line that could allow a 100 or so people to come on the call at any one time. We use a company called Conference Genie as it is reliable and low cost, and based in the UK.

The other beauty with Conference Genie is that you are able to record your call. This means you have another freebie that you can then offer to existing or new prospects.  They will be able to download an MP3 version of the call. You can also post it to your site as web content

How great is that!

The other beauty is that all you need to do is dial into a special number, type in a pin number as the call host and away you go.  You can do this from home or even from the office.

Some Tips…

Time of Seminar - As this is going to be done on the phone, it can be done outside working hours so pick a time say 7pm or 8pm and run it for an hour.

Subject - Pick a subject of interest to your clients.  Save £400 on your life insurance premiums or something…  Also include some time for a Q&A session at the end

Other noise - Remember this is being recoreded form the moment the first caller rings so make sure you have no background noise that make sure yo uare not disturbed.  Make sure your mobile phone is on silent.

No or very little selling -  make sure the call is giving great information away and not focused on you trying to sell. You can pitch your services in a follow-up email after the call with their copy of the recording.

They are really low cost options and a great underused tool for Insurance and Mortgage brokers.

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• July 25, 2008 -- Where can I find good affiliate programmes?
• July 10, 2008 -- Can A Broker Really Benefit From Using An Aggregator Service?