Insurance agents face immense challenges in Internetmarketing.

First, many compete against national and global companies withsophisticated strategies and the deepest-of-deep pockets.

Second, those working for one of these companies are hamstrungby the corporate website and marketing structures.

Third, prospects, even with an immediate need, are reflexivelysuspicious of insurance pitches, so generating online leads becomesall the more difficult.

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Insurance agents must therefore devise exceedingly smartstrategies and avoid any wasted online marketing expenditure.

Here are five mistakes seen all too often. Avoiding them putsagents on a path to online marketing return on investment.

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1. Wasting time and money on badSEO campaigns

"Black hat" SEO agencies dangle juicy traffic and lead carrotsin front of insurance agents, luring them into ill-conceived,cookie-cutter SEO campaigns. They never work.

SEO can be a very productive option for agents, provided theyhave a solid strategy. Generally, a successful lead generation SEOcampaign for insurance agencies will have a strong local SEOcomponent, focus on "long-tail" keywords in strategic niches with avery high potential for conversion, and use an aggressive off-sitestrategy involving the creation of content to acquire high-qualitybacklinks.

Related: Now is the time to make your business plan for2016

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2. Dabbling in social media

Using social media to generate sales leads is a dubiousproposition for most businesses, and in insurance, because of theskepticism mentioned earlier, is particularly challenging foragents.

Basically, people don't want to talk about insurance on socialmedia, and don't want to be sold to. Social media can be effectivefor building relationships with existing clients and establishingcredibility, but building an engaged social media community takes alot of time and effort — time and effort that can be spent moreproductively in other marketing activities.

Related: Why independent agents will alwaysmatter

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3. Poor website strategies

If an agent is part of a corporate website structure, setting upa second, personal website will not pay off.

First, it will confuse prospects and search engines as to whichwebsite is the correct one to use for inquiries. Even a little seedof doubt will produce precipitous declines in website visits andleads.

Independent agents must make their websites solid, in terms ofSEO, usability and conversion optimization (i.e.,structuring the website to induce visitors to inquire further andmake it easy for them to do so).

Winning agency websites have unique, valuable content,structured to enable visitors to find what they need quickly. Alsocritically important: having a mobile-friendly website. More peoplenow use mobile devices than desktops to access the Internet. Amobile-unfriendly site says, "shop elsewhere" to the majority ofprospects.

Related: Straight talk about sellinginsurance

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4. Under investing in/mishandling e-mail marketing

E-mail is a terrific option for insurance agencies, if it isdone properly. E-mail can kill several marketing birds with onestone, including lead generation, credibility building andrelationship building. Specific problems to avoid, include:

• Using purchased lists. This is nevereffective. Build a house list as relevant and up to date aspossible. It will pay off in the long run, no matter how long ittakes.
• Starting and stopping. Consistency is the keyto effective e-mail marketing. It can take subscribers months tocatch on and engage.
• Coming on too strong. Remember thatskepticism! E-mails providing useful information put prospects andclients at ease, and generate meaningful inquiries in the end.
• Coming on too weak. Selling is part of theequation. An e-mail providing subscribers with no way at all tointeract or inquire is only doing half the job.
• Not using an e-mail management platform. Thisis ineffective and amateurish. Many solid, reasonably priced online platforms areavailable to give emails a professional look, and make distributionand analysis easy.

Related: The power of 'why' for your insuranceagency

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5. Failing to track and measure

Agencies perpetuate bad online marketing campaigns when theyfail to capture the right data and/or fail to review itregularly.

In terms of data capture, agencies must be able to tell whichmarketing campaigns are generating leads, and how many leads arebeing generated. Here are a few extremely important gaps tofill:

• Phone leads are often ignored in online marketing campaigntracking. Make sure you can trace any phone inquiry back to thesource; basically this is done through assigning unique phonenumbers to each campaign — e.g., a unique phone number for thewebsite, a unique number for emails.
• Phone and form leads (i.e., forms submitted through thewebsite, advertising landing page) must be separated fromnon-leads. Standard tracking systems usually count conversions —which include leads, spam, personal calls, etc. Failing to separateactual leads from conversions can make agencies overestimate theresults of their campaigns.

In terms of review, online marketing is always an exercise incontinuous improvement. Without analyzing which online sources aregenerating the most leads, it is impossible to strengthen weakcampaigns (or eliminate them), and invest more in ROI-producingcampaigns. With proper data capture and review, your onlinemarketing will get stronger every quarter.

Brad Shorr is Chicago-based Internet marketingagency Straight North's director of contentstrategy.

Related: 11 signs that it's time for a new agency managementsystem

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