I want to tell you a story. It's the story of an insurance agent attracting more customers after failing miserably (and expensively).
The protagonist of our story we'll call Mark. (That's not his real name.) Mark worked as a loan processor for 20 years, working with car dealerships in Philadelphia. The money was decent, though the work wasn't fulfilling. Best of all, he could do most of this from home.
Then 2008 hit, and the market crashed, and new car sales plummeted.
Mark got a call at 8 am on a Friday morning, and it was his boss, and the CEO (his boss's boss's boss), along with the HR person.
"This is the end, isn't it?" asked Mark.
"Yep, I'm afraid it is."
"When is my last day?" he asked?
"As soon as we hang up."
Mark was devastated. After 20 years in an industry he was good at, he had to start all over again.
Having had years of experience in the automotive sales arena, and having worked with numerous insurance companies, and having a neighbor who was a broker, all culminated with him opting to start his own insurance brokerage.
The company Mark began marketing for gave him a small advertising budget, about $1500, to help him get established in his community. That didn't go very far. Some business cards and half of his yellow pages listing (merely bolded for a year).
The next year, Mark wound up spending on average $1800 every single month trying different advertising strategies. He advertised in the yellow pages with a half-page listing with a special number to show him how effective the ad was . . . or wasn't, as it turned out. That ad alone set him back $600/month. He had his face plastered on billboards, shopping carts, prescription bags and more, gave out magnets and flashlights with his name and number, hired a guy to dance in a chicken suit and wave a sign, placed ads in the newspaper, ran radio ads and local TV ads, sponsored a little league team, etc. He tried figuring out how to run a "pay per click" advertisement on Google, which got a lot of "clicks" (some costing $20 each) but not one single customer. He had a website and tried to blog about various topics related to the insurance field as an attempt at content marketing, but he didn't have time to research and write 5 posts a week.
By the end of his 2nd year, he had a book of business of about 500 customers, which wasn't bad, but most of them were "transient" folks (that is, folks who had moved to the city for jobs, and were often likely to move away). He had some referrals from current clients, which was his best source of new prospective clients, but that was still a trickle.
Mark came to us and asked us if we could help him. I told him that we probably could, and we sat down and did a marketing audit, and showed him a number of ways he could apply his advertising dollars more effectively.
Then I showed him this chart that we prepared as a case study on one of our clients, an attorney in Los Angeles.
There were thousands of people in LA looking for him and nobody was finding him because he wasn't even on page 20 for many of the terms those potential customers were using to find him. I mark how, over the course of 12 months, we got our LA client to page one on almost all of his keyword selections - some times the top spot on page one, getting hundreds of clicks for free on words that other attorneys were paying over $126 per click for comparable placement.
Then I drew up a chart showing Mark just how many people were searching in his area, and what other insurance agents and brokers were paying per click.
For less than half of what he'd been spending, we could get him found at the top of the search engine listings - found by people who wanted to find him, using Google+ Local's business listings.
Then we showed him how we could make him stand out from everyone else in the same search results, by leveraging his reputation.
Mark was impressed, and said for the first time in his life he "got it." And more than that, Mark understood that this was the "opportune time," because just like him, none of his competition hand any idea about this... yet. He's now on his way to being at the top of page one, and says he gets a surprising number of leads from the internet now.
If you're ready to take your business to the next level, fill out the form requesting a marketing audit like Mark did (it's FREE, and NOT a sales call). And let's see what we can do to put you on the top of your game, and help you start attracting more customers!
