Strategic evalutation offers solutions to lagging Web site results
By Len Strazewski
John Ashenhurst (left) is president of Sound Internet Strategy and Steven Brightbill is assistant editor of Sounding Line, the Sound Internet Strategy newsletter.
"There is often a lot of inertia in Web operations as agencies struggle to understand how a Web site can support their business operations. Change can be slow in coming and a change in Web designers may just slow the process down further."
--Steven Brightbill
When Jamieson Insurance and Financial Services, Inc., in Hackettstown, New Jersey, launched its first Web site during the Internet boom in the late 1990s, agency President Ron Jamieson planned to build a strong, local presence as a cutting edge, high-tech service operation.
Based about 60 miles from New York City, the agency has a balanced book of business, leaning slightly toward personal lines, and a good reputation for quality customer service. Jamieson hoped to expand homeowners and personal auto insurance business with the Web site.
He purchased a domain name that he believed would provide high recognition and paid a fee to the Yahoo Internet search engine for a premium listing in insurance-related search results.
The agency site (www.insurance-policy.com) was a smash hit--by some standards. The home page generated thousands of hits from around the country and sales leads for many types of coverage. But to Jamieson, the site was a failure.
"We were getting hits from all over, and many referrals from the Newark-New York area. Whenever a consumer searched for insurance and New Jersey using Yahoo, we would come up first in the search results.
"The only problem was that most of the referrals were far out of our service area. When we launched the site, our intention was to target consumers within 30 miles of our office. Service is important to us and we believe that our strength is in servicing local customers," he says.
John Ashenhurst, an insurance industry technology consultant and president of Sound Internet Strategy in Concord, Massachusetts, says that Jamieson's problem is typical among insurance agencies that plunged into Internet marketing without a sound business plan. "Agency Web sites often don't reflect any particular business strategy. As they made their commitment to develop a Web site, many agencies never went through any strategic process to match their agency business strategy with their Internet strategy.
"As a result, there's a disconnect between what the agency wants to do in terms of its business operations and what the Web site produces. Now that the Web site has been online for a while, the agencies are dissatisfied."
Ashenhurst conducted a strategic evaluation of the Jamieson Web site, a new service offered by his consulting company. Steven Brightbill, assistant editor of Sounding Line, the Sound Internet Strategy newsletter, and past editor of TAARReport, an industry publication focused on agency automation, collaborates on the evaluations. Brightbill is also co-owner of Betagraph Integrated Information Solutions, a Denver, Colorado, company that provides creative and technical services for marketing communication and publishing.
The evaluation process begins with a series of interview questions that the agency must prepare prior to the actual review. This initial list of questions provides a backbone for the evaluation process by identifying aspects of the Web publishing process, the consultants say, but also serves as a way to focus agents on the strategic goals of their Web site.
"A Web site's intent cannot be accurately determined merely by looking at it, but only guessed at. With that in mind, we place great importance in the interview portion of the evaluation which enables us to learn what the agency had in mind when deciding to build a Web site," Brightbill says.
The final evaluation is divided into three parts. First, the consultants examine the general Web publishing process, according to the answers to the initial questions. This section reviews Web site management, planning and follow-up; site implementation, including Web design and ISPs; Web site promotion and site location online.
"When agencies create a Web site, they should design that site with a business process in mind, and that process needs to be embedded in the life of the agency."
--John Ashenhurst
The evaluation process, according to Ashenhurst, serves as a way to focus agents on the strategic goals of their Web site.
In the second section, the evaluation focuses on agency and insurance-specific content and functionality, including agency marketing, sales elements and service elements. The evaluation also includes a discussion of service possibilities and future issues looking toward a redesign.
In the third section, the evaluation reviews the technical issues of page, content and site design, including the first impressions generated by the agency home page, page design issues, content design and overall site conception.
The evaluation can be completed in about 10 days and yields a 50 - 60 page report. Charges range from $250 to $500 based on the size of the Web site undergoing review.
The Jamieson review identified several problems. The agency's high-recognition domain name was actually working against the site objectives, Ashenhurst notes. The domain was too general, attracting customers from far outside the service area. He recommended purchasing a domain that identified the agency more specifically.
The consultants also recommended dropping the expensive Yahoo premium listing and replacing the search engine registration with links on local business and community Web sites.
"The agency was actually spending too much money for too little results," Ashenhurst says. "Instead of suggesting the agency spend more money on Web design, we recommended spending less money on technology and devoting more attention to local marketing--getting attention for the site with the service area."
Earlier this year, Sound Internet Strategy also prepared a Web site evaluation for T.R. Jones & Co. in Homestead, Florida. T.R. Jones specializes in commercial lines and has 48 employees in Homestead, Key Largo, Weston and Winter Park, Florida.
The T.R. Jones Web site (www.trjones.com) has been through three incarnations over several years, the consultants note, with each version developed by a different Web designer and Internet Service Provider. Though the agency was committed to building a strong Internet presence, the site grew less functional with each redesign.
The consultants noted graphics that were unrelated to agency operations, excess pages and functions that were no longer supported by the ISP. Also, the ISP has become less responsive to the agency as cutbacks reduced its ability to provide customer service.
Ashenhurst says that like Jamieson, T.R. Jones had invested substantial time and money in its Web site, but the agency had not developed a focused objective for its Internet strategy and could not really evaluate on its own whether or not the present design had true value.
"When agencies create a Web site, they should design that site with a business process in mind, and that process needs to be embedded in the life of the agency," Ashenhurst says. "If not, the Web site may be superfluous and an added expense."
Brightbill agrees, but adds that many agencies fail to focus their efforts, even when they begin to realize that their present Web site is not successful. "There is often a lot of inertia in Web operations as agencies struggle to understand how a Web site can support their business operations. Change can be slow in coming and a change in Web designers may just slow the process down further."
Few Web designers and site builders understand the insurance industry and, as a result, are unable to offer advice on appropriate design. They can build attractive, but not practical, Web sites, Brightbill says.
T.R. Jones needed to review its strategic needs before conducting a full Web site evaluation, the consultants say.
"We were sent a detailed list of questions that made us evaluate our Web site in many ways we had not thought of before," notes Laurie M. Lane, a sales executive and Web committee chair at T.R. Jones. "In discussing these questions and answers with Steve Brightbill, we were able to see a much clearer picture of what we wanted."
The 60-page report evaluated the agency Web site according to the agency expectations identified by the interview questions. The report noted that while the agency Web site was attractive, the design raised customer expectations that were never realized with content, services or transactional processes. The site lacked important customer educational content that would support purchasing decisions.
"The final evaluation provided us detailed information that took into account not only those items that we had to examine, but also included specific Web site content design that should be reviewed and applied," Lane says.
Lane says the evaluation was a bargain, considering the amount of information the agency received, but the greatest value was the discipline of the initial interview questions. "We feel that the most valuable part of this evaluation was that the right questions made us evaluate ourselves and our goals for our Internet presence for now as well as in the future," she says.
The agency is currently preparing to commission a redesign of its site that will reflect its new understanding of the agency Internet goals, she says. *
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