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Even small agencies can split up the online marketing activities in a way that takes upressure off one person.

Internet Marketing

Put time back on your side

Get the entire staff involved in your agency's online marketing plan

By Dennis H. Pillsbury

When you're trying to reach more insurance consumers in the digital age, getting your brand to where it needs to be to attract more people is key. But that takes time and as a local agency owner, your time is a precious commodity!

However, regularly blogging on your Web site and posting on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, (and every other new social network that comes out of the woodwork) have become essential in your efforts to keep your brand in front of customers. Equally important in your digital marketing efforts are e-mail campaigns and lead nurturing.

When it comes to digital marketing, the to-do list can seem endless! What you need is a strategy—a way to get the entire staff involved in the agency's online marketing efforts and technology that can help you automate as much as possible!

Understand the basics

First, as a leader, you should know the best practices for posting content online and e-mailing. The number one rule for all marketing content is to make sure it's relevant, useful, or entertaining to your readers. You're not posting or e-mailing content just for the sake of it. Here are some basic guidelines:

Blogging: You definitely need to blog weekly and find topics of interest to the audience you want to attract. There are a lot of sources of information on what to blog about, even some blogs dedicated to helping you find topics and strategies.

Facebook: There's more to Facebook than just posting relevant content. You also want to make sure you're engaging users by responding to comments and other community building activities. You don't want to post too much or too little. You really need to find out what balance works best for your followers.

Twitter: The same goes for Twitter. You want to post regularly, but you also want to make sure you're responding to direct messages and reTweeting relevant Tweets. And you need to find the right balance in how often you post.

Google+ and LinkedIn: Remember these are best used for building your credibility as a thought leader. And if you're selling commercial lines, LinkedIn can be an amazing tool. Consider joining relevant groups on LinkedIn. And remember to post content relevant to the audience you want to attract.

E-mail: Less is more with e-mail. And so is making the e-mail as targeted as possible. So instead of sending weekly e-mail blasts, the focus should be on getting the right e-mail to the right subscriber.

Get a strategy

Your number one strategy should be to motivate every agency staff member to get on board with marketing your agency online. After all, you're just one person! Agency owners can't carry the load by themselves. Even small agencies can split up the online marketing activities in a way that takes the pressure off one person.

Here's how:

The meeting: You have a weekly or monthly meeting with everyone, right? Just to keep everyone informed of what's going on in the agency, what the goals are, etc. If not, you should! And these meetings are the perfect time to introduce new ideas like how everyone can get involved in marketing your agency. This is where you plant the seed.

The guidelines: Your staff will need some guidelines on how this is supposed to work and it's your job to provide them. There are a few things you could do depending on the size of your staff.

1. Set everyone up with access to your social channels so they can post content and communicate with followers and connections. Make sure you set some parameters of what's acceptable to post and what is not.

2. Put one person in charge of managing social posts. Put one person in charge of managing blog posts. Put one person in charge of managing e-mails. This way you'll have a point person for each activity and that person can coordinate with everyone in the agency to follow best practices and drive more results. Make sure each person knows what day they are responsible for contributing.

3. Ask everyone to contribute ideas on what to post on social networks, what to write about for blog posts, and what e-mail campaigns to focus on. Create an e-mail address they can send the ideas to or share a document that everyone can access and add ideas to.

The execution: Follow up with the activities to make sure they're on schedule and hold staff accountable. Consider implementing staff contests to motivate participation. Or add online marketing activities to job descriptions. Set goals for your staff. For instance, each person is responsible for posting a certain number of updates on social channels per month or each person is responsible for writing and posting a certain number of blog posts per month. Review e-mails and blog posts before they are sent or posted, just to ensure everything represents your agency in the best possible way.

The technology behind it

Time can be on your side, when you have technology to help automate your digital marketing efforts. You need a system that allows you to gather e-mails and segment subscribers and target e-mail campaigns to them. You also need a system that will let you schedule automated e-mails for certain situations. This allows you to set up everything in advance and let the technology do the work for you.

You can also find software that allows you to schedule posts to your agency's social channels. There are lots of options out there. And your Web site should be set up so you can schedule your blog posts in advance. This will make it easier to stick to goals and work in advance so no one is scrambling at the last minute to get relevant content onto your site.

If every person in your agency is responsible for one blog post per month, for example, you could give them deadlines for uploading the blog post before it is scheduled to post. That way you can review it before it is published on the site. Staff members can see what colleagues are writing about so no topics are duplicated.

These are just a few ways to get time back on your side. Agencies with successful digital marketing efforts have discovered they need a tool that can do all of these things at once—schedule posts, collect e-mail addresses, and segment and send e-mails to prospects and clients. If you combine whole-agency effort with that kind of technology and a solid plan for execution, you really can't go wrong!

The author

Adam DeGraide is the founder and CEO of Astonish, which helps the insurance industry grow by using the Internet. In 2012 Astonish was ranked 267th on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. Currently serving over 800 retail brokers in America, Astonish is encouraging the insurance industry to "join the Internet marketing revolution, or get left behind!"

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