When the World Wide Web opened up the Internet for everybody nearly twenty years ago, one of the phrases that was bandied about at the time was that this new 'Information Superhighway' would be a level playing field where small could shout as loud as large.
This caused an initial flurry of activity by prescient insurance companies and a few savvy brokers, who bit the bullet and jumped into Internet Insurance transactional business, prior to the dot-com boom.
The playing field was not so level and over the years it appeared to Insurance Blogger that the online marketing spend and efforts of powerful Insurance Companies and a few brokers, had skewed the playing field further, and Internet Insurance Marketing had become a mirror of the physical world where he who spends the most gets their brand seen. The situation has become exacerbated by the dominance of price comparison sites and premium aggregators as further barriers to a successful Internet Insurance Marketing campaign by a small insurance broker, for example.
Insurance Brokers have felt particularly left out of the new wealth, as on the whole, they do not have the marketing budgets to fight back against the established big boys.
However recently there has been a massive shift in the Insurance Marketing paradigm which is allowing 'those in the know' to not only compete with the big boys but to retake the marketing initative and establish online market dominance for their chosen niche markets!
So how have they done this?
Well everything has changed in the world of Insurance Marketing with the arrival of Social Media Marketing. It appears it is no longer a question of buying attention for your brand by spending large amounts of cash, moreover a skill in engaging with your customers as communities, and a provider of information that is valuable. As experts with superior knowledge of their Insurance niches, Insurance Brokers are fighting back and winning the Insurance marketing war using the traditional skills of networking and information.
So how do they do this?
We asked the UK's leading consultancy in the use of these 'new tools', Speedie Consultants, just what do you need to do today to establish visibility on the Internet?
What is Twenty First Century Insurance marketing?
Here's what the Speedie Consulting's managing director and world reknowned Insurance Internet Marketing Coach, Jason Hulott, told Insurance Blog......
"Insurance marketing" , "web content" and "affiliate marketing" – these are all phrases that you may or may not be familiar with. However, these – and other marketing solutions – are key to boosting your business, both online and offline.
If you are looking to generate more business via your website, then it’s not a simple case of putting up a few pages and keeping your fingers crossed. No matter whether your finance and insurance business is based all online, or offline, you need to market your website through a number of several tried and tested methods, as well as keep ahead of your competitors as new marketing methods develop (eg social media).
Combined internet marketing and copywriting specialists Speedie Consultants Limited offers five main solutions for your finance and insurance marketing needs:
· web content
· article marketing (including link building)
· blog set up and marketing
· press release syndication
· affiliate marketing
Each of these elements are designed to maximise your exposure to potential clients. Speedie Consultants can tailor their service to meet your needs whether you want the comprehensive package or just one or two elements. A consultancy service is also available.
History
Speedie Consultants was established in 2003 by Jason and Stella Hulott, which sees them offering over 40 years’ combined experience in the internet marketing and copywriting industries. Supported by 15 freelance writers, a web design company and a web development team, they currently provide between 500,000 and 700,000 words of copy each month and can boost your business with finance and insurance marketing; the provision of web content; and affiliate marketing.
Jason’s background is in internet marketing – predominantly finance and insurance marketing - where he worked for the Woolwich before joining the UK’s first personal finance web aggregator in 2001 as a Content and Partnership Manager. In 2003 he set up Speedie Consultants, primarily providing internet marketing (including affiliate marketing), copywriting services and PR distribution services to finance clients such as Budget Insurance and British Insurance as well as non-finance clients such as MakeFriendsonline.com.
Stella is a PR and Copywriting specialist providing unique, quality web content. She has worked for Liverpool Victoria, Pearl Assurance, the Woolwich and the Foresters before co-founding Speedie Consultants Limited. Stella has written for major UK Finance and insurance websites such as TescoCompare.com, GoCompare.com, parts of the Towergate Partnership, British Insurance, Enhanced Wealth, Burgesses and Protection Insurance plus many more.
Speedie Consultants can provide clients with a comprehensive service that allows you to enhance your presence both online and offline. Their consultancy service offers you the know how to do this, as well how to effectively:
· run affiliate marketing programs
Thanks Jason, there's obviously a lot to take on board in this Insurance Marketing Brave New World. Insurance Blogger thinks that Budget Insurance's 'Compare The Meerkat' social media marketing campaign has a set the standard for a whole new wave of customer insurance marketing and interaction. Once again it looks like those who embrace this new media early will be the long term winners!
Insurance Companies are Going Cheap! - Recession Latest!
The recession has hit the insurance industry particularly hard and no sector has to date escaped. Aggregation has been a prominent feature of the market for a long time. Before the recession Insurance Brokers were the main target with the number of independent providers reduced by more than half as aggressive agglomerators swooped on books of business up and down the country. The recesssion has brought with it major troubles for large bank owned brands such as Churchill and Direct Line and it looks like RBS will finally be forced to sell it's crown jewels Recent activity has also seen many large re-insurance companies going for a song! However you really know the recession has hit home when you can pick up forward thinking Insurance Websites for peanuts....
The wires are hot out there this morning and the keyboards buzzing as it appears that Google has slapped, that is, removed from it's search results all mentions of GoCompare.com. The UK insurance comparison website had featured widely across the top of Googles search results for all sorts of insurance related terms, before yesterday! Word on the street has it that GoCompare was indulging in very dubious link building practices. Ior those of you who aren't familiar with search engine rankings, the positions that you appear in the results are largely determined by the number of one way links you can build pointing into your website. These links should however, be on theme! If you carry out a backlink search on Yahoo for Gocompare.com you'll see links from some very strange and dubious blogs, which tends to support this theory.
Google is quite clear in it's webmaster guidlines and elsewhere about purchasing or acquiring links through nefarious practices. The same thing happened to GoCompare last year but because of the number of links from authority sites the penalty only lasted a short while.
Interestingly, as a response GoCompare.com appears to have upped it's spend with Google adwords in a bid to retain traffic and please the gods.
Perhaps Google should do the same thing and SLAP all the other insurance comparison sites that occupy the first page of Google for car insurance and other keyword terms - they are all at it as well, some of them getting links in much worse ways than poor old gocompare. Just go and compare backlinks from the top five results for car insurance - these companies employ huge teams of people whose job it is simply to build links and buy links.
Unless you've been living in the Kalahari Desert since Xmas you could not have missed the Meerkat madness started over at Budget Insurance Services Ltd with their Compare the Meerkat TV Ad and marketing campaign.
While you've certainly got to admire the synchronicity of the Ad presentation and the trouble they went to set up the Meerkat site, what was once a rather endearing furry little creature from the plains of Namibia, that stood communally up to alert one another of danger - has been turned into a Gaylord, Narnian, Russian Mafia / Aristocratic rat in a dinner jacket selling car insurance.
To make matters worse, our three year old daughter 'Insurance Bloggette' has named the new kitten Meerkat, and I'm constantly bombarded with 'Daddy, Have you seen Meerkat?'
Yes I've seen the bloody Meerkat .... at least that pointy nosed Russian thing.... And that horrible thing that leaves me presents in the corner...
Anyway congratulations to Bex over at Bisl for a succesful campaign. We know its been successful because of the Alexa traffic ranking and the Google trends scores it has received. Oh yeah and we love Channel 4's 'Shameless' which it sponsors. Keep up the good work!
But take a look at this......
These are the Google Adwords served up for the query 'Meerkat'
It seeems those plagarising pariahs over at the other agglomerates and comparison sites, and the main rivals of Compare the Market, just couldn't keep their bidding hands off the keyword 'Meerkat'
Just how ridiculous has the world got when car insurance companies are spending millions on marketing to such keywords as MeerKat!
Insurance Marketing on the Internet for Professionals
A new website The System has been created to show you exactly how easy it is to generate your own financial and insurance leads on the Internet. The authors have over ten years experience in the financial services and Insurance lead generation and marketing sector and are giving away the secrets of their Search Engine success for Free.
The System people have dominated the search engines for years for insurance terms such as car insurance and mortgage protection. Now your marketing team can copy how they did it.
Visit The System for all the latest Search Engine Marketing hot tips. you'll be amazed what you learn whether you are new to Internet Marketing or a self confessed guru!
Insurance Marketing on the Internet for Professionals
A new website The System has been created to show you exactly how easy it is to generate your own financial and insurance leads on the Internet. The authors have over ten years experience in the financial services and Insurance lead generation sector and are giving away the secrets of Search Engine success for Free.
The authors have dominated the search engines for years for insurance terms such as car insurance and mortgage protection. Now your Insurance marketing team can copy exactly how they did it.
Here at Insurance Blog we love to speculate and predict outcomes, usually based on probability, for our own personal chest beating and so we can turn around after the event and say 'told you so!' After all isn't that how Insurance operates! But we're not averse to a bit of rumour or gossip as well especially when it could involve a lateral shift in the way Insurance is sold on the Internet, which soon will in one form or another BE for most products the only way insurance is transacted and sold!
Word has reached one of our intrepid contributors that an Insurance / Investment Company with a very large warchest has been making approaches to some of the best Internet Insurance marketing companies who run the major independent insurance directories out there in Cyberspace, with the intention of aquisition. One company is believed to be in advanced talks with a Broker Network to the purported sum of five million UK pounds
Now this is hardly surprising stuff, but it's made very interesting for two reasons.
There are currently around 10 to 20 very large agglomerates of insurance brokers and underwriters and investment companies out there in the UK who have reached their current size in the UK Insurance market today through aquisition of companies and Insurance Brokers and accounts and books of Insurance business and physical businesses and buildings.
So does this mean that there are no more available smaller real-world businesses to buy and they've finally turned their attention to what is available in other distribution channels?
OR
They've looked enviously at the way that Moneysupermarket.com etc. and all the other comparison / aggregator websites dominate the Search Engines for all the major keywords in their market, and have realised that these types of cyber insurance networks could give them a platform on which to compete and maybe take advantage over the single comparison site big Google payers, for just about every niche insurance market.
If the latter is true, which I doubt their business foresight or acumen, then we would see a serious shift in the way Insurance is sold on the Internet.
A large cyber insurance network would fit many a large insurance (broker or company)network with little or no painful business integration and could be assimilated in the existing business corporate Internet structure on a transitional basis with little or no disruption to current processes. The cyber network would create hundreds of links during any assimilation which by its very process would create and pass enough page rank to compete with all those comparison sites that buy links. Very powerful stuff. It would also give a rapid ROI as many of these cybernetworks dominate the niche insurance products cyber markets and search engines.
There are currently equally, about 20 of these insurance cyber networks out there. You can easily come across their websites everywhere in all Insurance Internet niches. In many places they are managing the complete online lead generation for individual insurance companies and brokers. They are easily recognisable from their generic or keyword domain names and are often managed by small teams of so called Webmasters.
So got any ideas whose after who?
We believe we can narrow it down to possibly three candidates for the honeypot simply by looking at who dominates the google query for 'insurance directories' and niche products keyword searches.....as for the wolf...hmm we'll keep you posted if we hear anything but there are some very predatory broker networks and companies out there at the moment... so expect some big announcements soon!
Realising that Moneysupermarket and the other Insurance comparison websites that dominate the search engines front pages for keyword searches like 'Car Insurance' each spend over £5 million each week in Adwords and other PPC advertising perhaps £5 million for one of these internet website networks is small beer in the bigger scheme of things.
Even more worrying, especially for the niche players and the public is if the likes of MoneySupermarket.com or one of the other insurance comparison sites who retain their search engine postitions by buying lnks, see £5m as a very cheap investment indeed.
Isn't agglomeration a wonderful thing. Did you use to collect football cards when you were a kid?
Hi all you SEO experts out there - I hear you're all making millions. Today I thought I'd share a secret or two with you about SEO for Insurance as a little thank you for helping to get this site to the top of Yah and Gog in a couple of months - without trying!.
1. It most definitely is about the domain name - you are what you say you are which is what people want and search for!
2. Out of the 200+ variables that google assigns to and then translates into a canonical value for a given node (webpage) and then runs its multivariate algos over to determine SERPS automatically - domain name can carry as much weight as title tag especially if it is natural language!
3. Domain name + great original content + natural linkage + refreshing content = Sucess which is deemed to be White Hat
4. Time - aged domain names over 5 years old and unused are immediately trusted by the SE's - and rightly so as the investment has been long term!
5. Insurance domain names are white hot property at this current moment as canny investors adjust their long term investment plans, and they are changing hands rapidly as the smaller investors cash in to the aggregators and long term big boys. Expect 7 figures plus for exceptional collections and even a modest long established site in the financial sector will fetch £50K+. Buying a green or brownfield website/domain name gives instant SE ranking with short term ROI and long term ambitions!
It might not be to everybody's taste but viral marketing has been one of the major success stories on the Internet. Insurance companies with their massive marketing budgets have been slow to catch on and rely on multi-million pound campaigns featuring nodding dogs and flying pigs to get their brand across. Hurrah for youtube.com and step forward mortgage protection company Personal Accident for grabbing the initiative with the following silly - but very watchable, if not PC ad for hazardous sports accident insurance.
Whether you think its crap or not, it demonstrates the viral capabilities of video, accessible to everyone from their mobile phones and more importantly, while all the big budget insurance players are wasting their money on TV ads and trying to get to the top of search engines, they've missed the point that more people visit myspace.com and youtube.com than visit Google these days.
Social marketing is becoming more important daily and those pioneers will grab a large share of the personal recommendation market.
Insurance Blog is dedicated to all things happening in the Insurance World. From tips on where to get the best insurance deals to news from the Insurance Industry, you'll find answers at Insurance Blog
About Me
Name: Insurance Blogger
Location: United Kingdom
Insurance Internet Guru
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