Don’t fall victim to one of these marketing faux pas

The folks at Insurance Technologies Corporation (ITC) have seen their fair share of insurance websites, and after years of creating thousands of websites for insurance agencies large and small, they have developed a few pet peeves. Below, they share a few of them.

Website pet peeves

Kirsten Thornton, front end web developer at ITC, mentions lack of website customization as her pet peeve: “Not taking the time to set colors or fonts for the website’s headers or links. This reveals a certain lack of attention to detail. Headers and links in particular are special and should draw attention. To do this, they need to be shown some attention. Pick some colors and fonts that will create a proper hierarchy.”

Typos, stock content and grainy or pixelated photos are the three top peeves for Matt Farrell, website coordinator. He also points out how stock content is not only a poor choice when trying to diversify a website, it also hurts search engine optimization (SEO), making it more difficult for an agency to standout.

SEO pet peeves

“Business owners think there’s someone sitting at a desk at Google updating rankings,” says Dylan Brooks, SEO consultant. “That’s not the case. Google uses algorithms to provide the most relevant results for each search. This happens billions of times each day, worldwide. Google is not focusing on rewarding or punishing websites. That’s a side effect of their main objective.”

Email marketing pet peeves

Two peeves Heather Cherry, AgencyBuzz product manager, mentions when it comes to agency email marketing: clickbait and frequently sending the same exact email to the same contacts. “If your message didn’t work the first time, it won’t work the second time. Readjust your messaging in future sends,” she says.

Marketing pet peeves

Finally, the “all-my-leads-are-referrals-I-don’t-need-to-market mindset,” tops Becky Schroeder’s list of peeves. The vice president of marketing at ITC emphasizes the importance of marketing for insurance agencies.

“Whenever I hear an agent say all their new business comes from referrals, I know one of two things are happening,” she explains. “Either they’re not tracking lead source and don’t know for sure where the leads come from. Or, they’re not growing.”

“Referred leads are the best leads as they are more likely to close. But, rare is the business that can sustain growth on referrals alone. Marketing is critical to getting your agency out there. It’s vital to attracting traffic, interest and, ultimately, leads.”

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