Insurance agents face immense challenges in Internet marketing.They must devise exceedingly smart strategies to avoid any wastedonline marketing expenditure. The following five mistakes occur toooften:

1. Wasting time and money on bad SEOcampaigns

“Black hat” SEO agencies dangle juicy traffic and lead carrotsin front of insurance agents, luring them into ill-conceived,cookie-cutter SEO campaigns.

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.

2. Dabbling in social media

People don't want to talk about insurance on social media, andthey don't want to be sold to. Social media can be effective forbuilding relationships with existing clients and establishingcredibility, but building an engaged social media community takes alot of time and effort that can be spent more productively in othermarketing activities.

3. Poor website strategies

If an agent is part of a corporate website structure, setting upa second, personal website will not pay off. It will confuseprospects and search engines as to which website is the correct oneto use for inquiries, and even a little seed of doubt will produceprecipitous declines in website visits and leads. Winning agencywebsites have unique, valuable content, structured to enablevisitors to find what they need quickly. Also critically important:having a mobile-friendly website.

4. Under investing in or mishandling e-mailmarketing

E-mail is a terrific option for insurance agencies, if it isdone properly. Specific problems to avoid include:

Using purchased lists. This is never effective.Build a house list as relevant and up-to-date as possible. It willpay off in the long run.

Starting and stopping. Consistency is the keyto effective e-mail marketing. It can take subscribers months tocatch on and engage.

Coming on too strong. E-mails providing usefulinformation put prospects and clients at ease, and generatemeaningful inquiries in the end.

Coming on too weak. Selling is part of theequation. An e-mail providing subscribers with no way to interactor inquire is only doing half the job.

Not using an e-mail management platform. Thisis ineffective and amateurish. Many solid,reasonably priced online platforms are available to givee-mails a professional look, and make distribution and analysiseasy.

5. Failing to track and measure

Agencies perpetuate bad online marketing campaigns when theyfail to capture the right data, or fail to review it regularly. Interms of data capture, agencies must be able to tell whichmarketing campaigns are generating leads, and how many leads arebeing generated.

Phone leads are often ignored in online marketing campaigntracking. Make sure you can trace any phone inquiry back to thesource. This is done through assigning unique phone numbers to eachcampaign—e.g., a unique phone number for the website, a uniquenumber for e-mails.

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.