Astonish Results' April e-marketing agency of the month

From Vega to Victory

Digital marketing supports multi-site agency sales

"I like to tell people my dad started the agency in the back of a Vega, back in 1974," Mark Gannon, chief executive officer of Gannon Associates, says with a chuckle. Actually, Dad opened the then-four-person shop in a real office in Towanda, Pennsylvania, which he drove to in a Vega. Today the agency maintains a physical presence—in office buildings, not cars—in more than a dozen communities throughout Pennsylvania and New York.

Growth came as the agency bought and integrated local offices in rural communities throughout central and northeastern Pennsylvania and upstate New York. To support these locations, the agency operates a service center in Athens, which handles much of the processing for local sales-focused offices.

"By employing a service center, we're able to really build a culture of sales and marketing within our branch offices," explains Gannon, who joined the agency in the mid-1990s. "It's important to have a local presence; by taking most of the service and processing functions to a centralized location, we allow our branch office people to sell more. Producers can see a lot more people and create and act on more opportunities to grow their business."

Gannon Associates offers a full range of property and casualty, life and health insurance, with a special focus on agricultural businesses. For that niche, the agency partners with Agri-Services Agency, a Syracuse, New York, specialty agency affiliated with Dairylea Cooperative.

In late 2009, the agency embarked on a digital marketing journey, establishing a partnership with Astonish Results, an e-marketing and training firm serving insurance agencies. "Before that, we really hadn't done any electronic marketing," Gannon recalls. "But it fit very well with our strategy of 'local presence and centralized service.' It feeds the pipeline of our local producers and helps support them in their sales efforts."

Marketing structure

The agency tapped Astonish to help launch an automated electronic drip-marketing program that compliments and strengthens its personal touch. "We analyzed sales cycles for different lines of business," says Lynn Noble, vice president of sales and marketing for Gannon Associates, affiliate AIFS. The agency took what Noble says could be a rather complicated, 35-step process and broke it down into a smaller number of manageable parts.

The first part focuses on turning leads into appointments. "We have an automatic campaign that operates on a predetermined schedule that helps our sales people connect with prospects and clients," Noble explains. Every two or three weeks, e-mails go out to prospects or clients due for renewal, asking for an appointment. Sales people get copies of those e-mails and follow up by phone. "This helps keep our agents on target," Noble comments.

Once a meeting is scheduled, the system drives added communication. "It confirms the meeting date, tells the client or prospect what to expect in the meeting, and outlines what information they'll be asked to provide," he adds. "This makes our reps more efficient at collecting the information needed to quote the risk. That's something our carrier partners appreciate."

Post-meeting, the system generates thank you notes and outlines timing expectations. "It tells when to expect a quote," Noble explains. "We can pretty much gauge that ahead of time because we've carefully analyzed how long it takes each of the 75 companies we represent to turn something around. It's pretty much like clockwork." Again, reps get copies so they can plan follow-ups with the carrier and/or prospect.

Accepted quotes trigger another set of communiqués. "If we get the sale, again, thank you notes go out and we tell the client when and how to expect policy documents," Noble says. Again, reps use this info to manage their schedules.

Once the policy is delivered, the system drives more follow-up and an ongoing drip-marketing program that includes birthday greetings, seasonal communication and more. The agency augments e-mail communication with direct client and prospect interaction on Facebook.

On the Web

Online ventures, including Facebook and blogs, are an important part of the agency's outreach. "We put together a blogging program that provides important information to our Web site visitors and, at the same time, makes our site more relevant to search engines," Noble explains. "Two employees manage the blogs, pulling in subject matter experts to help create content.

"We have two types of blogs," Noble continues. "One, where we talk about insurance issues, allows us to share the line of business knowledge we have, whether it's health care, pollution for agricultural concerns, workers comp, property and casualty, you name it." These focused articles help drive traffic to the site and set the agency apart as a trusted, expert source of information—and insurance.

"Because we're a community-based organization, we also create blog posts about things that are happening in our towns," he adds. "It could be a fund-raiser, a community event, risk-related information and more. This draws a good amount of traffic to our sites, too. We try to tie everything back in to insurance, if we can, which also helps to highlight our knowledge and service."

Agency staff knows what drives traffic because of the expertise it has developed in search engine functionality and analytics. "A number of us here have taken the Google Analytics training modules and have gone through the certification process," Noble explains. Knowledge gained through this allows the agency to regularly review key words—what's working and what's not—and adjust them as needed to generate more leads.

However, the agency isn't selfish with this knowledge. It also shares expertise with clients and prospects. "We actually go out and host offsite digital marketing seminars for groups of clients," Noble explains. "More often than not, businesses will ask us to follow up onsite. So we'll walk them through everything relevant to Google Analytics, keyword searches and such.

"About a dozen or so of our business partners have set up internship programs with local high schools," he adds. "We work with them and coach them, and the business pays the small fee to get students certified in Google Analytics." From there, the students help the businesses redevelop their Web sites, often setting up link-sharing arrangements with the agency, something that helps drive traffic and increase search engine relevancy for both parties.

The agency has also tapped YouTube to engage community members. It recently ran a contest for high school students. "Insurance is kind of boring to some people," Gannon notes. "And kids are doing some pretty talented things these days with video cameras. So we put those two ideas together and ran a 'Can You Make Insurance Funny?' video contest."

The agency plans to use one or more of the submissions as online commercials. The agency is awarding scholarship money to schools with winning entries. Mark Gannon actually 'took one for the team' in a sample video (http://bit.ly/hoeH0t) that appeared on the agency Web site announcing the competition. "The goal of the contest was to increase interest, draw traffic, and show people that insurance doesn't have to be dull," he says.

Another online traffic-generation tool Gannon Associates uses successfully is a "Refer a Friend" button on the agency Web site. "This works surprisingly well in terms of increasing traffic and leads coming through the site," Gannon explains, "We're seeing a number of referrals. Interestingly, people seem to be more inclined to click a 'refer a friend' button than they might be to tell us the name of someone. It's working very well."

Digital Ag-Marketing

Also working well is the technology integration with Gannon Associates' farming and agri-business partner, Agri-Services Agency (ASA). Trina Hall, ASA director of operations, says, "We are working with Gannon Associates in a much more seamless environment because they market so much business for us." ASA recently signed on with Astonish, which helps drive that seamless interface.

Distribution has long been a challenge in agri-business insurance, she adds. "We are very spread out," she explains, "so this technology and digital marketing actually allow us to bring all of our membership together and to market pertinent products to them locally, regionally and nationally."

According to Hall, "The Web and digital marketing has become a requirement in our marketplace. Our membership told us, 'Stop the mail.' Digital tools allow us to not only target market, but to interact with customers how they want."

That notion may run counter to public preconceptions. "The stereotype of a farmer is they are just on their farms, working the land and not really focused on technology. That is so far from what we have seen with our own membership. They use technology internally as much as any other business owner does—from keeping their books, to determining how much and when to feed their animals, to when to breed them, for veterinarian interaction, and much more."

They also have technology on their equipment. "They run GPS in the field to know where to plant, fertilize, and harvest crops." she explains. "It's amazing how farmers are actually investing in technology. Digital marketing fits quite well."

The efforts are paying off. "We are selling more," Hall says. "We're also finding that digital marketing and communication are helping to strengthen our business relationships and increase retention."

Welcome resource

As much as electronic marketing can help agencies increase traffic, generate leads, and manage a stream of client or prospect communications, agency staff support is what really makes such initiatives work, according to Gannon.

"Our people have been very receptive to the leads we've brought in through our various digital marketing initiatives," he explains. "Part of that goes to how we're organized. As we've brought on offices over the years, we've focused on building a sales culture in the branch locations." Digital marketing supports that.

According to Gannon, leads generated by the system early on helped cement producer buy-in. "They realized very quickly that this was generating phone calls," he recalls. "It was a good way to augment the work they were already doing to indentify prospects and get appointments. They embraced the system very quickly."

The challenge comes, Gannon notes, in trying to maximize the system's benefits. "Just like with our agency management system, it's quite powerful, but if you don't have good processes and procedures to input data consistently and follow up, you're missing out. Digital marketing takes discipline.

"It's easy to turn on digital marketing, create a Facebook page, and drive some traffic," Gannon says. "We're looking at the bigger picture and working hard to make sure our customer database is robust and that we're doing everything we can to maximize our return. We're making good progress, but we're not there yet."

Even without being 'there,' Gannon says, they're seeing success. "We're seeing year-over-year increases in both revenues and closes." Adds Noble, "Close ratios are really up over the past several months since we really geared up."

Early closing success is just the tip of the iceberg, Gannon notes. "Even with good closing ratios, the real benefit will come down the road. What producers really like is, even if they didn't make the sale the first time around, the data is in the system and the lead will get ongoing attention. They have a built-in pipeline of good leads for next year and beyond.

"The use of digital marketing has brought added structure to our sales process," he adds. "It has improved the process, not only in terms of leads, but also in terms of sales management."

Noble concurs. "The digital marketing system keeps clients and prospects engaged and it keeps producers on target, as well."

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Gannon Associates
www.gannonassociates.com/

Astonish Results
www.astonishresults.com