The lucky winners who will receive an IPod touch are:

• Simon Mabb: Romeros Insurance Brokers
• Phil Worthington: Lucas Fettes and Partners
• Richard Senior: Heath Lambert Limited
• Stuart Williams: Cowens Insurance Brokers

Congratulations to you all we hope you enjoy the IPod’s and find your marketing consultation’s valuable.

1. The golden rule – Don’t just do social networking for the sake of social networking: To effectively implement your social media activity you first need to think about a set of objectives you wish to achieve. Are you trying to find potential customers? Build loyalty among the ones you already have? Or improve your brand image?

2. Create useful content that adds value to your customers and that others will find interesting: This will not only demonstrate your expertise but also show you understand your customer’s needs. Tweeting about pressing issues affecting your industry will generate more interest than your love of Starbucks.

3. Be on your best behaviour! Think hard about actions that could cause a negative reaction within the social arena. Preventative behaviour can be frustrating but it’s a good thing on the whole, live your life as if your mother is watching.

4. Keep your profile up to date: Users will see straight through your marketing efforts if the last blog you posted was on April 30th…2009!

5. Customize your landing pages: Don’t stick with the generic default layout, the tools are there for a reason – use them.

6. Don’t forget about website and search engine optimisation: This can work not only for your website but also your social media accounts.

7. Use your own content: Don’t overuse links and widgets to other companies content. You want people looking at your content!

8. Expand your network: Connect with peers and Industry Authorities; this can help you raise awareness by jumping on the shoulders of some of the “Big Boys”. Authorities will generally follow you back and in a lot of cases republish your content (for example, retweet) not only endorsing you but also highlighting your company as a valuable resource. Don’t forget this works both ways, treat those as you wish to be tweeted.

9. Provide links to your social media on everything you distribute: Make everyone aware of the various ways they can contact you. People may not always read what you’re saying but they’ll repeatedly see your logo if nothing else. When the time comes, they’ll know who to turn too.

10. Make your social site a necessity: Use social media to announce exclusive deals and offers only available through your social media channels.

11. Be courteous: Follow those that follow you, they need followers as much as you do. You never know what it may lead too.

12. Take advantage of the tools on offer: Hash tags, URL’s, likes and @mentions are a great way to increase the exposure of your communications to a far greater audience.

13. Encourage employees to interact with current and potential customers: Boost worker participation in social media. Build a rapport and get to know your customers, they’ll be more likely to offer feedback this way and recommend you to their peers.

Promoting your site’s address on all your company’s literature is a good start, but you’ll still be missing out on large numbers of potential visitors who don’t know anything about your business. If you are really serious about driving traffic to your site, you need to get to grips with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

The basics of SEO aren’t that difficult to get grasp. Search Engine Optimisation is really just about 3 things:

• Submission – telling the search engines your site exists.
• Increasing visibility – helping them understand what it’s all about
• Building trust: getting them to trust your site over and above your competitors.

Of course, this post doesn’t cover everything to do with SEO, but it should give you a good introduction. Let’s start by looking at submission.

Stage 1: Submission

It’s worth checking first to see that search engines know you exist – do a search for your company and see what happens.

If there’s no sign of your site on Google, you’ll need to submit your site at www.google.com/addurl.html. While it’s definitely worth doing this, it can take Google a few weeks to action these new site submissions.

To speed the process up of being listed, get a link on an established website. Google can then follow this link to your website and then you’ll be up and running much sooner.

If finding your website was a struggle, it’s time to make it more visible.

Stage 2: Increasing visibility

Once Google knows your website exists, it will periodically visit it using its Googlebot to build up a picture of what it’s all about. So what is this mysterious Googlebot?

Understanding Googlebot

In simple terms, Googlebot is an application that automatically scans your site. It follows all the internal links it can find on your site to crawl each page looking for clues on what your website is about. It then stores all this information in its databases ready to spring into action when someone does a search.

Increasing your site’s visibility is all about choosing the best keywords and phrases that potential users will type into Google to find your site. You need to make sure the Googlebot can find them during its crawl.

When it’s crawling through your site, Googlebot is particularly looking for key words and phrases in the following on each page:

• The URL.
• The content
• The code behind the page

Now you understand what the Googlebot it’s up to, you need to start thinking like it, but with one important caveat. If it suspects you’re trying to trick it into thinking your site’s something it’s not, you’ll be labelled as a spammer and be heavily penalised.

Choosing your keywords – research

To decide on the best keywords to use, you need to do some research.

Start by listing all the search phrases you think people would use to find your site. Once you’ve got this list of phrases, you need to expand your list further to include the searches actually being used by Google users.

The best way to do this is to use Google’s own Keywords Tool which you can find at http://tinyurl.com/2cvvx8.

Google’s keyword tool allows you to enter one of your search phrases and see the real-life searches related to it. Enter each of your search terms and see what it brings back. For example, “cheap car insurance” returned related searches including “cheap car insurance quote”.

What’s more, the keyword tool also provides you with the monthly search volumes for each phrase. This is really valuable information to help you select the best keywords to use.

Choosing your keywords – selection

Unfortunately, you can’t include all the keywords on your list as it will dilute your results. You need to be selective and decide from all the potential keywords which are the ten best ones. Also, this isn’t just a matter of picking the terms with the highest volume of searches, because that’s what everyone else is doing. You need to set yourself apart and start thinking strategically.

To get the best results, you need to base your selection on striking the balance between the search demand for your keywords versus the number of sites competing for it. Finding a niche that you can dominate will generate more visitors than being lost down the rankings of a popular term.

It’s now time to put these phrases in all the right places.

Using your keywords: page URLs

Your page’s URL is a good indicator of its content for search engines.

This makes sense – if you wanted to tell the world about “car insurance”, the first thing you’d do is go out and buy a domain like www.carinsurance.com (sorry that’s already gone).

Now the chances are that your site’s domain will be your company’s name. But this shouldn’t stop you picking your most attractive keyword and optimising the full URL of each page like this:

www.someinsurancebroker.co.uk/carinsurance

Always avoid generic names such as “page2.html” in your URLs – it’s just a wasted opportunity.

Using your keywords: page content

So the search engines now have an idea of what your site is all about. Next, they start to look for more clues. And the best place to find these clues is within the content of each page, especially within headings and the body text.

The search engines scan through your content trying to pick out the most important words on the page. They then score each word based on how early and how regularly it appears. With this in mind, work your chosen keywords into the headings and first parts of your body text.

You need to be very careful not to make the search engines think you’re trying to trick them. If you repeat certain phrases again and again all you’re going to do is trigger spam filters and you’ll be penalised.

Using your keywords: Page Code

Behind your site sits the code that tells your browser how to display each page. The final part of making your site more visible is to optimise this code with your keywords.

But don’t worry if all this talk of code sounds too technical. This is where Ignition can help you out.

Page title

Of the 3 elements of code optimisation, page title is definitely the one to concentrate on.

Google gives far more weighting to what appears in the page title than it does to either description or keywords. It’s therefore prime real estate to place your most attractive keywords.

Moreover, Google uses the text in your page title when it lists your site in its search results. This makes it very useful to entice visitors into your site.

Page description and keywords

Page description and keywords have much less value to Google, probably because it’s been the most abused area of Search Engine Optimisation in the past. However, they do still have some relevance for other Search Engines, so it’s worth including them. As with Page titles, make sure they include your most attractive keywords.

Stage 3: Building trust:

The third and final stage of web optimisation is vital to getting high up in the search listings – building Google’s trust in your site.

Even if you’ve done a great job on stages 1 and 2, the best you can hope for is to be in contention to appear in Google’s search results. But, with millions of sites out there, your site could get easily lost.

Remember that Google’s aim is to provide it’s users with the most relevant content for their searches. So when you do a search on Google, it ranks the results by the level of confidence it has in each page’s relevance to your search.

So how does Google come to a decision on how much trust it has in your site?

The simple answer is that it counts the number of external links into your site. The more links it counts, the more confidence it has.

Google uses this link count to give each page a score out of 10 – this is the all important Google Page rank. Popular sites such as the BBC achieve scores like 9/10.

But it’s not just a simple equation of more links = higher page rank. Google goes a step further and looks at the quality and relevance of each link to decide how reliable and appropriate they are. So a link from the BBC page talking about insurance will be given far higher weighting than links from 1/10 page rank sites that have nothing to do with insurance. It’s therefore really important to get good quality links from content that’s relevant to yours.

Another way to get good links is by contributing to public forums and to write interesting blog posts (like this one) and, hopefully, have the world link to it just because they like it.

Summary

If you’ve followed the simple steps in this blog, you’ll go a long way to improving the promotion of your website. To summaries, here are 5 rules to help you on your way:

• Be Patient. Don’t expect the changes you’ve made to your site to appear on Google straight away – remember that the Googlebot will only visit your site every few weeks, if you’re lucky.
• Build those links to boost your page rank scores – keep them relevant and avoid the paid listings, otherwise  the search engines will think you’re trying to artificially increase your ranking.
• Be consistent – whatever keywords you decide to compete on, use them consistently across all the different elements of your pages.
• Be relevant – You’ll be found out and penalised if you use keywords that aren’t relevant to your site.
• Experiment – The weighting Google gives to different elements of SEO are constantly changing so keep experimenting and tweaking to find out what works best for your site.

 
Hopefully this blog should have helped demystify Search Engine Optimisation. Investing in SEO can definitely pay dividends if done properly. If you think you need help, why not give Ignition a call.

Now take a closer look at all the emails you receive, especially all the ones that end up in deleted items.  You’ll see the majority are really poorly executed. So how do you make sure your email campaign doesn’t become one of them?

Here, in the first of a series of blogs, I’ll talk about the stages you need to go through to make sure your emails are the ones that get read.

Planning
The planning stage is the most critical part of any marketing campaign. It ensures you’ve thought about all the elements you need to make your campaign a success.
In terms of email marketing, before you even start to thinking about what your email looks like, you need to ask yourself five key questions:

• What do you want to say?
• Who is going to read it?
• What will they get from what they read?
• What do they do after they’ve read it?
• What do you do in response?

Having the answers to these questions will allow you to formulate an effective email marketing plan. So let’s think about each one in more detail:

What do you want to say?
Marketing emails aren’t the place to write a novel, so what are the key messages you need to get across? There’s also a killer question to ask: is email the best way to get these messages across?

Who is going to read it?
Knowing who your audience is will help you build the right mailing list and tailor your message to their needs.  This is really important because sending the wrong content to the wrong people will only alienate.

What will they get from what they read?
Let’s be realistic, your audience isn’t waiting with bated breath for your email. You need to find a way of grabbing their attention and maintaining interest through content that they genuinely value. 

What do they do after they’ve read it?
So your audience like what they read; what do you want them to do next and how do you get them to do it? Think carefully about your call to action.

What do you do in response?
You’ve got your message right and people respond to your email. Will you build on the momentum and send them further emails? Maybe you’ll phone them up? Whatever you decide to do, it’s best to have a plan in place before you’ve pressed send and the emails start to land in inboxes.

So that’s the planning stage of your campaign done. In my next blog on email marketing I will look at how you start to put your plan into action by creating targeted and relevant content.

Thanks for reading.
MIKE

Mike McNabb
Client Services Executive

I can’t put my finger on why. Maybe it’s because we’re sharing stand D2 with AXA and catching up with our clients who’ll be attending the event. Or, maybe it’s because our new addition to the team will be with us.

Yes, that’s right; come and see us and you’ll be able to meet Flo, our new frog!

Flo brings with her a wealth of practical marketing experience having spent many years in the marketing pond – we are sure you’ll love to meet her.

Oh, and by the way, Flo’s first contribution to Ignition is to offer you 15% off any Ignition service plus a free ½ day marketing consultancy*, if you book an appointment with one of the Ignition team during the BIBA Conference & Exhibition.

Not only that, but by booking an appointment during the event you will also be entered into a prize draw to WIN one of 4 iPod Touches!

Flo is really looking forward to seeing you on stand D2! See you there.

*please see our website for terms and conditions.

Most businesses, no matter what industry they’re in passively collect data that, when analysed can provide deep insight. More and more businesses are getting smarter about how they collect and manage their data, and quite rightly are giving analyses a prominent place in their decision-making processes.

But becoming a data-driven or even efficient business isn’t easy. There are plenty of pitfalls that can turn data into a liability and even result in decisions being made without the facts being known.

Here are five rules for data-driven businesses looking to avoid those pitfalls.

 1) Too much data is harmful

More and more businesses have recognised the importance of collecting data and analysing it to drive important decisions. That’s a good thing. But many can make the mistake of collecting every bit of data they can find. This is not only distracting; it can reduce the quality of data-driven decisions because those decisions are only as sound as the analysis they’re based on. When too much data is collected, there’s a greater likelihood that the wrong analysis will be performed.

 2) KPI metrics derived from data should be tied to goals

Sure, knowing, for instance, what your company spends, on average, acquiring each new customer is a good thing to know. But how much should you be spending acquiring each new customer? Chances are that’s a lot more important, which is why, in many if not most cases, metrics should be associated with goals.

 3) Context helps

Context is your friend, so use it when setting goals. Using the customer acquisition example: what is the average cost of customer acquisition in your market? Are you above or below that? Are you getting what you want from your activity? What reduction in customer acquisition costs would boost income by 10%?

By adding context to your equation, you can make sure that the goals you’ve tied to KPI metrics are meaningful to your business.

 4) What happened then, will not necessarily happen now

Data is inherently limited to yesterday and today – therefore applying predictive analytics which applied yesterday to today’s data – does not necessarily mean the future will follow the same historical performance. No matter how sophisticated your data is or how you have performed previously, predictions are simply educated guess work.

Data-driven business that use data to make educated decisions; should not naively believe that data is a crystal ball.

 5) Don’t dismiss the qualitative

Hard data is wonderful, but if you’re only paying attention to the hard data, you’re missing out on a huge part of the big picture. How do your customers relate to your products and services? What is most important to your stakeholders? These are questions that can help guide a business down the right path, but the most important aspects of the answers to these kinds of questions won’t always be provided by numbers that can be crunched.

You will be able to find out more about us by coming to visiting us – on stand 27.

Even if you don’t want to come and talk about marketing, at least come and see the latest addition to our team.

Good PR recognises that the best ‘PR plan’, needs to be representative of good products/services or else it will only harm your reputation.

Good PR is not just about the over-glorified launch.

Good PR helps build and sustain a groundswell of brand support – changing consumer behaviors via a steady stream of relevant and candid communication to ‘industry’, ‘media’ and ‘consumers’.

Good PR celebrates the client’s customers in an inclusive, non-exploitive way.

Good PR welcomes the input of neutrals and critics, and adapts strategy accordingly.

Good PR is proactive in idea generation and responsive in a crisis. 

Good PR is measurable.  (And yet also hard to measure, since most clients want to measure different things.)

Good PR leverages pre-existing relationships with influential people – relationships built on trust and credibility earned over years of service.

Good PR doesn’t need to know the editors of particular media.  Even though such relationships can come in handy, good PR almost always ‘gets ink’ or ‘digitalised’ because a good story has been well-told to the right people.

Each category of this year’s the UK Broker Awards wards was highly contested, the quality of the entrants across the board was testament to the resilience the industry has shown in the face of the challenging circumstances of the past year.

Thomas, Carroll walked away with Intermediary of the Year and Chairman John Moore walked away with the Achievement Award at this year’s UK Broker Awards.

Highlights included: our very own Ken Wright, Regional Development Director announcing RIAS as the winner of the Marketing Campaign of the Year. And Caravan Guard scooping two awards: Customer Service Provider and Personal Lines Intermediary. The judges were impressed with the broker’s ability to grow in a difficult sector of the market.

This year’s event saw the addition of two new categories. Former young broker of the year, Matthew Pyke became the first of Business Owner of the Year while RG Ford (Broker Network) won Network Member of the Year.

And the winners are:

The E-business Award: Matchmaker – Blyth Valley

The Technology Award: Morrison Insurance Brokers

Claims Service of the Year: Knowlden Titlow Insurance Brokers

Marketing Campaign of the Year – Sponsored by yours truly: RIAS

Customer Service Provider of the Year: Caravan Guard

Investment in People Award: The Green Insurance Company

Network Member of the Year: R G Ford (Broker Network)

Private Clients Intermediary of the Year: Coversure, Fleet

Personal Lines Intermediary of the Year: Caravanguard

Commercial Lines Intermediary of the Year: Insurance Risk & Claims Management

Schemes Intermediary of the Year: Schools Advisory Service

Intermediary of the Year: Thomas, Carroll

Young Broker of the Year: Charlotte Hannah – Kwik Fit Financial Services

Business Owner of the Year: Matthew Pyke – Lloyd & Whyte

Achievement Award: John Moore, Chairman of Thomas, Carroll

Congratulations goes to all the winners of this year’s UK Broker Awards!

Alternatively you could take a different view.  I’m proud of our industry’s heritage and tradition but it also feels ripe for challenge and change.  As competition increases, as the economic outlook improves, is now actually a great time to develop ideas that make us more efficient, drive sales or improve customer service?  We also want marketing activity to deliver strong returns yet many intermediaries struggle to articulate unique selling points.  In the future will “we are local, experienced and give good service” be enough to be successful?    

Many innovative organizations display particular qualities and behaviors.  They are also usually good at tapping into the ideas and creativity of their own people.  Most often I have observed these qualities in small brokers who have just started out.  They have energy, an ability to collaborate, try things out quickly and there is an absence of red tape and processes getting in the way.   Maintaining that culture as your business grows is a real challenge. So what practical steps can you take to make innovation live in your business?  Here are ten tips to consider:

• Strong Leadership: be clear about the role of innovation in your business, the reasons for it and your level of ambition. Without this endorsement and clarity there is a risk that innovation will take a back seat

• Decide how you will manage innovation?  This isn’t a huge governance framework but it is being able to describe how you will approach simple things like how ideas will be assessed and prioritized.  Without this colleagues can become disillusioned.  Take inspiration from brands you have heard about or admire and create a process that is going to work for your business.   

In Google for example they have a well-known 70 / 20 / 10 rule.  It simply means that employees spend 70% of their time on their core search business, 20% on projects related to their core business and 10% of their time on completely unrelated business.  Google believe that giving people time to explore ideas outside of their day-to-day jobs is essential for innovation.  It’s a completely inclusive model where every employee has a role to play in innovation and generating ideas.  Contrast that with Apple where the real idea generation happens within a very small team close to Steve Jobs.

• Give your team what they need. This might be time, resources, the right environment, skills or just the opportunity to get really close to customers and obtain new insight. 

• Effective Communication.  If innovation is important to your business then let this be reflected in the amount of activity spent in this area.  Leaders of creative companies often do this well by talking a great deal about successes and failures in equal measures.     

• Recognise and reward innovation.  Make innovation relevant to individuals through clear roles and targets.  Celebrate and reward innovation when it delivers and even when it doesn’t!  Trying new things requires bravery and how you react to and learn from a failed project sends a powerful message about the culture of your business. Being able to demonstrate how you recognise and reward innovation also makes your business more attractive to creative talent in the market.      

• Search for telling insight. Innovation is often described as insight x ideas x implementation.  Creative businesses therefore invest time and energy in intimately understanding their customer’s issues and tend to be less reliant on sources of secondary information or research that is available to everyone.     

• Encourage the right attitude.  We live in a world where cynicism is respected, often seen as clever and even rewarded.  It can however destroy the belief that innovation is important and deter people from sharing ideas.  Make clear what behaviors are acceptable in your business and integrate that into how you manage performance.     

• Allow young ideas to grow.  It’s relatively easy to find reasons why an idea may be impractical or difficult to implement.  Discounting ideas quickly can save time but we also run a greater risk of never seeing ideas develop into their full potential.  Let ideas mature before making your judgment and never let an opportunity slip away.

• Create momentum.  Making new things happen is difficult and along the way you can expect obstacles and setbacks.  Creating momentum amongst your team can help you get through these times.  It’s not about working even harder but understanding the value of the application of focus and energy.  Ultimately it’s about prioritization and since time is not free, it’s about finding it from elsewhere.  

• Bring your ideas to life quickly.  We write an awful lot in our industry……… Presentations, emails, business cases etc. The trouble is that too much detail can actually hinder innovation and the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” really is true when it comes to ideas.  The secret is to do this quickly and don’t seek perfection.  If it’s a new product or service mock up an advert, slip it inside a copy of Insurance Age and pass it round the office. You will get more feedback more quickly than a presentation ever will!   

Mike Butler. Ignition.

General Manager and Innovation Practitioner.