astonish results' july e-marketing agency of the month

DIG IN YOUR OWN BACK

Florida agency enjoys big results from cross selling efforts & digital marketing

His business card may say he's president and commercial lines manager at Patrons Insurance Agency, but in reality, Tim McGuire is a numbers guy—who happens to like marketing. Or maybe he's a marketing guy who likes numbers. Either way, he's pretty happy these days.

McGuire, who with his wife Dawn co-leads the 20-year old family-owned independent agency, has seen dramatic improvement since they partnered with Astonish Results, a digital marketing and training organization focused on insurance agencies.

The decision to team up with Astonish and create a digital marketing focus followed some careful internal assessment, Tim explains. "We were stagnant," he says. "We were actually going backwards." The state's economy was hurting, which affected agency commercial insureds, including contractors, which had made up a large portion of the business. Personal lines were hyper-competitive, and direct writers and online marketers were making inroads.

According to Tim, the eight-person agency, headquartered in Largo, a community of around 75,000 just north of St. Petersburg, had to do something. "I did a lot of research and it seemed that what was most successful in terms of marketing was the Internet," he explains. "I knew we had to get a better online presence and build our future around that."

This represented a dramatic shift, adds Dawn, who is vice president and personal lines manager at the agency. "Before that, we had been doing phone book advertising," she recalls. "Kids don't even know how to use those!" The agency also was advertising in weekly publications in the area, doing some direct mail, and buying pay-per-click ads through its Yellow Pages provider. Unfortunately, Dawn says, pay-per-click results were less than stellar. "The department the phone company had doing that just didn't get it."

Taking action

Tim talked with an Astonish Results rep at his state agent association convention and then invited someone from the firm to conduct a full product demonstration. "We decided to buy in," he recalls. "What they offered was right along the lines of what we believed we needed to do."

The agency went live with Astonish in late 2009. "Our virtual insurance office—our Web site—was launched in October, but it took several months before everything started to click," Tim recalls. "This is not a light switch you turn on and tomorrow, all of a sudden, you're inundated with leads.

"It takes time to get the search engine optimization and search engine marketing working," he adds. "It takes a while for you to grow on Google, especially organically. You have to keep hitting it from different angles—from Facebook, blogs, YouTube, Twitter. That all makes your visibility grow."

As important as getting technology running on all cylinders early on—more so, actually—is achieving an organization-wide culture shift, Tim adds. "One of the first things we did was sit down with our employees and talk about where we were going with this," he explains. "We needed 100% buy-in."

Naturally, some people struggled with change. "Our people needed to be willing to use the new digital marketing tools and they had to be able to change from a 'service, seed and wait for results' mentality to a clear, aggressive sales focus," Dawn explains. "They needed to realize that business owners were tech-enabled and that digital marketing would work for commercial markets."

Increasing sales

Today, employees cite the agency's focus shift among its greatest digital marketing successes. "They tell me the sales orientation is very positive," Dawn explains. "Everyone has bought in, and they recognize that everything is a sales opportunity." They're actually doing more than recognize; they're selling. New business applications were up 300% over the corresponding month a year earlier.

A number of other factors are helping fuel growth, too. "We looked at what gifts people had," Dawn says. "Before we began working with Astonish, we had been trying to put square pegs into round holes." Today, some employees focus just on sales, others on service. One—a next generation McGuire—works just on renewals. "Before this, we thought we were too small to segment ourselves," Dawn adds. "We learned we were wrong. When we unleashed our sales people, good things really started to happen."

Early on, the agency worked with Astonish to launch a digital marketing campaign around cross selling. "We had a lot of monoline clients and we wanted to build on that," Dawn explains. "It didn't make sense to buy leads if we had opportunities right in our own client base." The campaign generated a significant amount of new business. One woman, Dawn recalls, e-mailed and asked if Dawn could review some papers. ""She brought in documentation for every insurance policy she had, and asked me to look at all of them," she notes. ""It was awesome."

Campaign success helped boost employee comfort levels. "We built on that, and today, our people are much more conscious of rounding accounts," Tim notes. "We're doing a much better job of asking about extra lines of business. For personal lines customers, we're finding out if they own a business and asking to quote that."

Other campaigns have driven interest—and sales. One was purely educational in nature, explaining available wind mitigation credits for property owners who made certain structural changes. "We got a lot of calls and e-mails on that," Dawn notes.

The agency's virtual insurance office is generating a lot of personal and commercial lines leads, too. "We just launched a new Web site with Astonish that is compliant with iPhones, Droids, iPads and other tablet devices," Tim adds. "When we did that, our search results improved dramatically. Now, we're popping up on the first page of Google and are seeing inquiries from businesses all over the state."

Agency social media work is contributing to search engine success, too. The agency's Facebook page, for instance, serves as a virtual extension of the community focus Patrons has had for years. "We have strong roots in our communities, and we interact with clients and others online just like we do in person," Dawn notes. Recent posts covered agency community service projects—part of Patrons' heritage, as well as safety tips, local events, client recommendations and even reminders of Free Cookie Friday, another Patrons staple.

Bolstering relationships

"We make cookies every Friday and tell people to just come in and take one," Dawn explains. The practice is so popular, the McGuires can't go to the bank on Fridays without cookies, company marketing reps have shifted visits to the last day of the week, and people on the street—clients and non-clients, alike—know Patrons staff as "the cookie people." Recently, a local business reminded its own Facebook fans to head to Patrons for a free cookie and a free insurance quote.

The business is actually one that is featured on the agency's Partners page, a section of the Web site where commercial insureds can offer coupons and other promotions to PatronsInsurance.com visitors. "That's proved quite popular with restaurants and other businesses we target," Dawn notes. "One store has actually told its customers they don't need to print out the paper coupon. They just have to mention Patrons to get the discount."

The agency has redoubled its Partners page efforts recently. "With the rise in visibility and popularity of coupons—the Groupon deals that come out every day, for instance—we're really getting peoples' attention," Tim explains. "It's become a real draw. Our daughter, who literally grew up in the agency from the time she was in a playpen in the back of the office, is heading up this work. She's young, she recognizes the popularity of coupons, and she's doing a great job building out our Partners program."

The agency's work to promote partners has actually caught the attention of an organization made up of restaurant owners. "In a presentation, I showed them our Partners page," Tim explains. "They were blown away by it. They had never had anyone who was selling insurance offer to promote their business, and at no cost." Tim's response: "If you're more successful, we're going to be more successful."

The agency's virtual office includes another feature—one that's even better than a coupon—and it's a feature that Tim says has really caught on. "Another thing that's working real well is our referral program," he explains. "We offer people a $5 Chick-fil-A gift card if they refer somebody to us. That's been tremendous. People really like Chick-fil-A. You'd think we're giving away $50."

Dawn concurs. "The perceived value is incredible," she says. And it's not just personal lines customers taking the agency up on the offer. "Our commercial clients love it, as well," she adds.

Reaping rewards

As Patrons Insurance winds up its second full year of digital marketing work, the McGuires believe that any challenges they've encountered along the way are far outweighed by the benefits they've enjoyed. "I was talking with our personal lines producer the other day," Dawn says, "and he said his biggest challenge is keeping up with the new business. He's swamped. He just can't get to everybody." Tim, the numbers guy, adds, "That's a great problem to have. I'd certainly rather have too many leads than not enough."

They're even more pleased with overall results. "You know we saw a 300% jump in new business the first year," Tim says. "Well, this year was even better." Barely. May 2011 saw an increase in new business applications of 302% over the prior year. "In fact," he adds, "through the end of the month we were two applications shy of our total new business apps for all of 2010. We'll probably end up doing more than 700 new business applications this year."

That's not all. "Our close ratio is considerably better," Dawn adds. "And by focusing on accounts and not policies, our retention is way up, as well." And that's something that would make any insurance person—marketing-focused and/or numbers-oriented—quite happy.

See it now

Patrons Insurance Agency, Inc.

www.patronsinsurance.com

Astonish Results

www.astonishresults.com