Insurance Marketing in 2017 > Creating a Strong Custom Insurance Website
Today, people all over the world have been looking to the internet to tell them more about products and companies. As more and more people have turned to the digital world to fulfill their needs, the potential that web-based marketing techniques have for boosting your business have skyrocketed. Here are just a few fast facts about the impact of a website on your marketing efforts:
- 75% of people judge the credibility of a business based on how well its website is designed,
- Credibility has a direct correlation with how likely people are to make a purchase or look deeper into your business,
- Only 33% of small-to-mid-sized business have fully optimized sites,
- 61% of customers are more likely to buy from a mobile-optimized site,
- B2B customers are, on average, only 57% likely to buy before performing an action on your site.
These are just a few statistics to show how much of an impact your website can have on your potential. However, as you’ve seen, it’s not enough to just make a website. You need to make sure that your website addresses every potential client and all of their possible needs: and in 2017, there are more requirements than ever.
Make it easy to navigate — this can maintain up to 61% of your visitor’s interest
This may sound crazy, but you’re likely losing a majority of your potential leads to bad design. It happens to every website, and the metric to think about is something called a bounce rate — AKA the percentage of visitors who immediately leave after your site loads. From our experience, we know that means about 60-70% leave on arrival for your average insurance website. That’s not good.
More than anything, the site should be easy to use. 61% of browsers are unlikely to go back to a site that they felt was difficult to use, and 40% of those browsers have admitted that they would rather visit a competitor’s site. In essence, a bad or “average” site, or one that utilizes slow one-size-fits-all templates over-packed with useless features can mean you are hemorrhaging opportunity.
But you can fix that.
- Keep in mind when you design your site that regardless of their level of technological proficiency, everyone should be able to find what they’re looking for on your site with minimal difficulty.
- The site should be readable: Separate content under effective headers and bulleted lists, create a visually appealing layout, and make sure that the colors are complementary and render everything readable so they stay on your website.
- Don’t just look at the site on your desktop computer: with smartphones and tablets, a high percentage of your visitors are likely to be mobile users, and you need to make sure that your site is just as easy to use on mobile devices, which we will cover in greater detail in a separate post.
So let’s review.
Quick & mobile-friendly layouts, bulleted lists, effective headers, and photos can all help to improve your rankings in search engines in more ways than one. The better laid out and easy to use a site is, the longer people stay, and the more actions they take. Google then notices that you’ve earned something called a long click. That long click tells the search engine that someone who clicked on your website from a result was a good enough answer to keep that person from bouncing out, and so the site awards your site according.
Seeing as 93% of online sessions start with search engines and 75% of search engine browsers don’t look past the first page, it is important to optimize your site in this way at least to maximize your effectiveness on search engines.
Make sure it runs well. Quality control can be the difference between 2 leads and 20.
Obviously, no one wants to visit a website that is constantly lagging or malfunctioning. In addition to maintaining your website and checking for bugs, keep an eye on your load times to ensure that it loads quickly on desktop and mobile. The general public consensus is that any page that takes longer than 2-3 seconds to load is too slow, and any longer will likely make your visitors exit in search of a faster site. Improving this aspect of your site will lower your abandon rate and increase the time spent on the site as well as referrals and conversion rates. We recommend using Pingdom or GTMetrix for testing these out.
Our secret sauce for growing site traffic by 200%: Have a wide array of quality content
Keep an eye out for our next post, where we will go into close detail about the type of content you should be creating in 2017. Obviously, your site’s content – where you give the reader information about your business – should be well-written and easy to read, but in this age of social media it is important to create content that will keep your readers coming back for more and will be likely to be shared on social media channels. Blogs, videos, and infographics are always successful pieces of content: they are easily shareable, and they help to explain some of your business’s operations to the everyday reader. In 2017 in particular, there has been a large increase in live video and interactive content as well. It is up to you to determine which type of content is best for your business, but whatever you do should be informative, high quality, and shareable.
Regardless of the type of content you choose to create for your site, it is crucial that you be consistent. 85% of the most successful businesses are consistently delivering content, and marketers who provide consistent, quality blogging content are thirteen times more likely to see a positive ROI. Consistently creating content will keep your current customers returning for more, and will improve your search engine rankings to better help you attract new customers.
You need data: Be able to measure your progress.
After you’ve done everything you can to design a fully-optimized, user-friendly, content-rich website, this is where the true work begins: tracking just how effective it is. If you’re planning on using a website as part of your marketing efforts (as all of you should), it is crucial that you have mechanisms in place to help you measure how well your site is doing. How many hits are you getting? How long are they staying on the site? What about your engagement? Are you getting comments, likes, or shares? Can you correlate purchases to visits to your website? Understanding how your content performs goes far beyond simple traffic metrics: you need to understand how users are engaging with your site.
Getting a good understanding and installing Google analytics onto your new, shiny insurance website would be a great start, but make sure to also really track web and phone leads. Some vendors, like Neilson Marketing Services, provide all those bundled in a simple dashboard; but with some finagling you can get a limited tracking system on your own as well.
About Neilson Marketing Services
Since 1988, Neilson Marketing Services has been implementing innovative marketing solutions and strategies for our clients in all areas of marketing. Contact us today at (800) 736-9741, to put our talent, expertise, and vast resources to work for you. Let’s make things happen, together!
