Sound Strategy
Ten Features of an Ideal, Automated Self-service Agency Site Builder
Agents need good effective Web sites - but trying to do a site from scratch
yourself is a lot of work and likely won't yield the right result. Outsourcing
to a professional service is expensive, you lose control, and you still have
to provide much or all of the content anyway. What could make sense for many
agencies is a self-service, automated site building service hosted on the
Internet and already filled with the inventory you need to create and then
maintain just the right site for your agency. A handful of available services
head in this direction today, but require considerable manual intervention
by the supplier and/or create inadequate sites. A couple of suppliers actually
go further and provide a good starting point for what could be a richer and
more valuable service. Here are some ideas for what these services really
should include:
- Insurance specific content: Lot's of it - text, graphics, images,
forms, links - for marketing, sales, service, and educational purposes should
be offered. You shouldn't have to write, create, or search for all this
stuff. You should be presented with a large inventory to choose among.
- Good design: Highly usable, professional insurance look, styles
to suit an agency's personality, culture, and business strategy - and with
a great number of choices - should be available.
- Search placement: Meta tags and search engine registration that
optimizes the likelihood that plenty of the right kinds of prospects will
come to your site.
- Feedback: The service should include easily accessible, meaningful
site statistics to help you understand and adjust to the needs, desires,
and interest of your site visitors.
- Samples, prototypes: The service should feature easy ways to look
at good sample sites created with the site builder service as well as a
facility to build a number of your own sites and then choose the one that
looks like it will work the best.
- Change: You should be able to add to or change your automatically
manufactured site without much effort and without requiring the help of
the service provider or a Web wonder.
- Strategy: The service should help you understand how to develop
the appropriate Web strategy for your agency and then how to realize it
through the automated, online self-service software.
- Support: The service should provide help, administrative services,
billing/payment information, as well as others that should be readily available,
self-service, and online.
- Consulting: Though the service should make it possible for you
to be Web site self-sufficient, you may want and be willing to pay for some
personalized consulting help from time to time, so the service should provide
special attention options.
- Connectivity: The online service should let you create a Web site
that has significant connectivity to your agency management system, carrier
Web sites, and third parties services, so you can provide rich and highly
usable out-facing services to your customers.
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