Do People "Like" You? How Social Signals Affect Selling Insurance Now By: Jason Hornung – President Jason Hornung Agency, Inc. I spend quite a bit of time perusing sites like Producer's Web to see what topics are trending among my peers so that I can be timely with the information I provide. One of the most prevalent items I see is from guys and gals that want to figure out how to use social media to start selling insurance. The vast majority of chatter centers around different strategies that an agent can use on Facebook, Twitter and Linked In to drive leads for your agency. While success can certainly be had using these mediums and the methods that others have developed, it's been my experience that the road to success in the social media arena is long and hard for insurance agents. They all take a consistent and concerted effort to pull off - an effort that needs to be continuously repeated. As soon as you stop, it's done. Plus, you have to walk the fine line of mindset. There is a fine art to taking someone from the social mindset into the buying mindset, which is the process you have to go through if you want someone to become interested in talking about their insurance from a social media platform. Those are points I don't hear many people talking about because usually the ones starting these conversations are people who sell social media marketing services. My advice is that if you are going to engage in this type of marketing, make sure that you put things in place to directly measure your results. You should be able to tell exactly how many leads you generated from each social media outlet and exactly how much money you made selling insurance to those leads. Otherwise you really don't have any idea how affective your social media campaigns have been or are performing Having said all of that, I want to introduce you to a concept that I don't see anyone else in the insurance space talking about - social signals. If you are not familiar with that term, a social signal is basically the Facebook "Like" button, Google +1 button and any other social media sharing button that you can put on your website. These social signals have become a double whammy for online insurance marketing that can have an enormous, direct impact on your ability to start selling insurance by marketing online. ©2012 Jason Hornung Agency, Inc. – All Rights Reserved http://lifeinsurancemarketing.info For the rest of this article, I'm going to lay out three reasons why these social signals are absolutely huge and how you can leverage them to your benefit pretty quickly (depending on where you are already at with marketing online). Reason #1 To Use Social Signal Now: The first and most powerful reason to use social signals on your website is what we call in the online marketing space "the viral co-efficient". Here's what that is: Each time someone uses a social sharing button on your site - whether that's the Facebook like button or Google +1 button or any other social button for that matter It gets posted to the news feed of the person who clicked it, which means all of their friends see that they just "liked" your website. A fair percentage of that person's friends will click on the post going back to your website because people usually have the same interests. This generates free traffic to your website. Also, many of these people will click a social sharing button on your site - thus posting to their news feed and broadcasting your content out their friends. If you content is interesting, engaging and or helpful enough to people, it can really mushroom and make your content spread virally across the web. Any content that "goes viral" starts this way. And that's the viral co-efficient in a nutshell. It's a way to generate free traffic to your website. If your website is doing a good job of selling people, you can pull leads and appointments from this free traffic. Reason #2 To Use Social Signal Now: This next one is a bit more abstract and is going to take some background explanation before most of you understand it, so bear with me as I lay the framework for this reason It really has to do with psychology. Dr. Robert Cialdini wrote a book called "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion". If you haven't read this book yet, you need to right away as it will have a profound impact on how you market and sell insurance both online and in person. In his book, Cialdini discusses research he conducted over a twenty year period - the majority of it in selling situations where he had infiltrated different organizations like car dealerships. From all of his research, he distilled down what he calls six "weapons of influence" that trigger automatic responses in people's brains. When a sales person or marketer utilizes these weapons properly, he or she can effectively persuade their prospect. ©2012 Jason Hornung Agency, Inc. – All Rights Reserved http://lifeinsurancemarketing.info One of the most powerful weapons he discusses is that of social proof. The most commonly used method of social proof over the last 100 years is the testimonial. However, social signals have become an extremely powerful method of social proof that you can use on your website to start persuading people and selling insurance more frequently. Think about it - if you land on a page that has 75 people that "like" it versus one that has zero, which one are you going to trust? Of course it's the one that already has been confirmed as likable! Reason #3 To Use Social Signal Now: Once you have a website established, your prime objective is getting traffic to that site so you can generate leads and sales off of it. That's really the only reason to have a website, in my opinion The Hold Grail of traffic is organic search - getting free clicks to your site from Google, Bing, Yahoo or any of the other search engines when people type in a keyword phrase you are targeting. In order to obtain organic traffic, you have to go through a process called search engine optimization or SEO for short. This is a combination of doing things on your page and off your page that make the search engines like your website and thus rank it higher. The goal being to get your website onto the first page of the search engine, preferably into the #1 - 3 slots for most traffic. Up until recently, the biggest off page factor in search rankings was links coming back to your website. The sites with the most links, the most relevant links and the most high quality links would rank the highest. However, Google found out that many businesses were manipulating their ranking algorithms with aggressive, paid link building - and they don't like that. So they've been going through round after round of algorithm updates to penalize the businesses that engage in that practice. One of the newly implemented ranking factors that is playing a huge role now is social signals. Sites that are using these social signals and have a fair amount of them on their pages are ranking higher than sites that don't use them. Social signals are basically the new backlink in the SEO arena. If you are looking to increase your organic traffic, then you MUST implement social signals. ©2012 Jason Hornung Agency, Inc. – All Rights Reserved http://lifeinsurancemarketing.info You really need to ask yourself: "Do people like me?" If you aren't giving them the chance to do so on your website, you are missing out on a boat load of chances for selling insurance! Do you want to start increasing your insurance sales by marketing on the web? Are you unsure about what to do or where to start? Would you like a seasoned insurance pro with years of successful experience marketing online to take you by the hand and guide you through the whole process from point A to point Z? Well, then you need my Agent's Lead Machine Internet Marketing Mastery training program! Click here to see the details and proof this works! ©2012 Jason Hornung Agency, Inc. – All Rights Reserved http://lifeinsurancemarketing.info . to figure out how to use social media to start selling insurance. The vast majority of chatter centers around different strategies that an agent can use on Facebook, Twitter and Linked In to. chances for selling insurance! Do you want to start increasing your insurance sales by marketing on the web? Are you unsure about what to do or where to start? Would you like a seasoned insurance. time someone uses a social sharing button on your site - whether that's the Facebook like button or Google +1 button or any other social button for that matter It gets posted to the news