Your brand is a lot more than just your business name, the logoand your website. Brand is really defined by the experience thatconsumers, customers and other stakeholders have when they come incontact with your business in any format, at any time.

When you couple that with the movement to a “mobile first”business strategy, then you can understand how important yourmobile footprint is in building a successful agency.

The experience people have on their phones when encounteringyour business is quickly becoming their primary contact. You needto make sure it's the best experience it can be.

Four-step mobile footprint review

To get a clear picture of your mobile footprint, here is afour-step review that will help you evaluate whether you're in theright place or if your website — and your brand — are soon tobecome irrelevant.

• Open your smartphone's browser and search for terms that astranger might use to find the types of insurance you write. Youwant to be as free from bias as you can. See where your businessname came up in the search results, and make a note of the numberon the list. If you're No. 1, great. But if your name doesn't comeup until the second screen, maybe your number is really 12.
• See what else comes up in your search. Are there articlesyou've appeared in that are found in the search? Does your businessFacebook page link come up? What else will people find?
• Visit your social media business sites as if you were astranger. Log out of your Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram,LinkedIn or whatever other accounts you have for your agency. Whatdoes each site look like? How professional is the profile image?What about the content that's there: Is it valuable, informative,helpful or just memes (images with sayings of the day)? What's thepurpose of your account?
• Finally, visit your website on a smartphone, and experience howeasy or difficult it is to navigate. Do you have to stretch thescreen and scroll sideways? Can you find the agency's phone number,e-mail and address easily? Do the images display properly? Do youhave multimedia content such as a YouTube feed or informativepodcasts?

Now comes the ranking, and you have to be brutally honest. Rateeach step on a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 means “I would move on tosomeplace else immediately” and 10 means “I would spend time hereto learn more about this agency and what they have to offer.” Dothis for each of the social media platforms you reviewed, plus thewebsite. Add up all the numbers and then divide the total by thenumber of the position your search results showed up at.

The larger the number, the better your footprint. But with atotal number of 10 or below, you need to get serious aboutimproving your mobile presence. It's not a surefire calculation,but it's a good exercise to force you to think like a stranger inthe mobile phone landscape.

Mobile-friendly websites and business apps are what Google islooking for, because the company understands where most consumersare spending all their time. Cultivating a positive experience inthat world will better position your agency for the future.

Rick Gilman is executive director of the Personal LinesGrowth Alliance. Contact him at [email protected].

Related: 7 social media tips for independentagents

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