This month, BrightFire was invited by IMT Insurance to present a webinar for IMT Insurance agencies who are part of IMT’s GEM program. The webinar focused on how BrightFire’s Social Media Marketing service can benefit agencies and the partnership with IMT Insurance.
Social Media Marketing is an excellent way to increase agency brand awareness, establish your agency as an expert advisor, improve brand loyalty, and increase lead generation.
IMT Insurance’s Erin Wonsmos and Ben Ellefson hosted the webinar and BrightFire’s Bob Whitis and Ashley Paul were presenters.
Watch The Webinar
Additional Questions?
If you have any questions about social media marketing for your insurance agency that you would like answered, please contact us or call us at 888-778-4393.
Webinar Transcript
Erin Wonsmos: Well, hello everyone. My name is Erin Wonsmos and first I want to welcome you all online. It’s great to see so many of you take a few minutes out of your day to join us. I know it’s a sunny afternoon here in Des Moines. Thank you for joining us for a few minutes. We are very excited about a new partnership that we have established with BrightFire. BrightFire is not a stranger to the insurance world, working with several credited companies and agencies like yourselves across the nation. We do want to welcome Bob and Ashley to our call today from BrightFire and for them to share their product with you.
Erin Wonsmos: Before we get to Bob and Ashley though, I do want to introduce a new member of our IMT marketing department. Please help me in welcoming Ben Ellefson to his very first IMT webinar. Ben is a marketing specialist for us and he actually joined our team March 16th, which if that date rings a bell at all, it was the day that IMT transitioned into the kind of work from home status. Ben’s done a great job given the circumstances, kind of digging into the insurance industry and really helping create an immediate impact for all of us at IMT. Without further ado, I’ll turn it over to Ben to share a little bit more about IMT’s partnership with BrightFire.
Ben Ellefson: Hey, thanks Erin. Like Erin said, my name’s Ben Ellefson and I’m the new digital marketing specialist here in the IMT marketing department. I just want to thank everyone again for joining us today for this special social media marketing webinar that we’ve got going on this afternoon. We know that everyone’s time is valuable, so we’ll keep it fairly brief today. But with that being said, we know how important social media marketing can be and what a tremendous value it can add to an agency in helping generate leads, which can lead to good business as well. With that, we’ve decided to partner with BrightFire because we know that social media isn’t always on top of mind for everyone. And we know that resources can be limited at your agency. BrightFire understands this as well and they’ve really got some great tools that can help make all of our lives easier.
Ben Ellefson: During the presentation, if you have any questions on the information that Bob and Ashley are presenting, if you want to use the Q and A section at the bottom of the toolbar there in your Zoom window, go ahead and type your questions in there throughout the talk as you think of them. And at the end of the presentation, we’ll take some time and go over those questions. Answer as many as we can for you. If we miss any questions during the presentation today, we’ll be sure to get in contact with you afterwards as well. And don’t worry, this presentation is being recorded as well and we’ll be sending a link out to everyone. If you wanted to rewatch it or if you had any other additional questions that you think of afterwards, you can take a look at that and then let us know as well.
Ben Ellefson: Again, thank you for joining us this afternoon. And with that, I’m going to turn it over to our presenters for the webinars today, Bob and Ashley from BrightFire. Bob.
Bob Whits: Thanks Ben. This is Bob Whitis from BrightFire. I’m the director of operations at BrightFire. I’m going to kick things off for us today on the BrightFire side. Definitely appreciate this opportunity that IMT Insurance has given us to connect with some of the agency owners at IMT. And so I’m going to be talking a little bit about BrightFire and then we’re going to hand it over to Ashley who’s a social media specialist with BrightFire and she’s going to cover some information that is specific to social media marketing. And then she’ll pass it back to me for some closing slides and a bit of information about how enrollment works and things of that nature. Without any further ado, we’ll go ahead and get started on the presentation here.
Bob Whits: Today we’re going to be talking a little bit about BrightFire, a little bit about IMT’s partnership with BrightFire, social media marketing as far as the social media marketing dashboard that BrightFire provides, a little bit of information about custom campaigns for social media. Then we’ll delve a little bit into the complete line of digital marketing services that BrightFire has to offer. And then we’ll give you guys some details about how to get started and then the Q and A session that Ben spoke about.
Bob Whits: BrightFire started in 2000. We’re a digital marketing agency that focuses solely on insurance agencies. Everything that we do, every solution that we build, is just for insurance agencies. And really what we try to do is take the burden off of agencies. We currently work with about a little over 2,000 independent agencies across 48 of the 50 US states. And one thing about us that typically resonates with agency owners is that we’re an independent company, just like an independent insurance agency. We take a done for you approach. With other services, sometimes it may seem like you’re getting a set of tools, but you may be left to figure it out on your own or you need to invest your own time or hire somebody at the agency to really get out in front or leverage the tools that you’ve purchased to help market your agency. But we have a different approach. Really what we’re trying to do is come alongside your agency and taking the burden off of you so that you can focus more on selling insurance and building your book of business.
Bob Whits: We’re also trusted by a number of industry leaders, such as the Insurance Agency Owner Alliance, PIA, IIABA, things of that nature, as well as some carriers like IMT Insurance. And then something else that we believe in is generating leads from multiple channels. Today we’re going to be focused more on the social media marketing aspect of the services that we provide but when we get into the full line of digital marketing products that we offer, it’ll be pretty evident that we do have kind of a holistic approach to lead generation. Really excited to share some of that information with you guys today. And we just know that your time is valuable so in everything that we do, we always try to put our customer first. And we understand that a lot of times agency owners may not have the time and energy to keep up with what’s going on in the marketing and internet world so we do our best to keep up with all of that stuff for you and provide solutions that evolve as the marketplace evolves.
Bob Whits: With IMT’s partnership with BrightFire, we’ve actually built a portal for IMT agents on our website. If you go to brightfire.com/imt, you can get an indication of the pricing for our services. And then you’ll also see the banner there on the right that shows off our partnership with IMT, as well as the 50% reimbursement offer that IMT’s been so gracious to put forward. And you’ll also notice that there is a link that you can use to submit your documentation to IMT for reimbursement. Just a little bit about that reimbursement. It is specifically for our social media marketing product. This 50% reimbursement would not apply to the other services that we offer. And then this is specifically for GEM agencies at this time.
Bob Whits: One other nice thing that we’ll be including with the social media marketing service is that since you’re an IMT agency, IMT’s going to be providing some content of their own and you can see some examples there below, but about five to eight posts each month covering auto, home or business insurance. In addition to the content that BrightFire provides, there’ll be additional content specifically put together by IMT to really help showcase their value on your social media profiles.
Bob Whits: And with that, I’ll hand it over to Ashley to get into the social media marketing aspect.
Ashley Paul: Thanks Bob. As Bob mentioned, I am the social media specialist for BrightFire. Over the next couple of slides, I’m just going to go into further of exactly what’s included with our social media service. Once an IMT client has enrolled in our social media service, we start with the social profile setup and customization, where we have a kickoff call to get access to, or set up their Facebook, LinkedIn, Google My Business and Twitter pages. And then once we have access to those pages, we start with the customization of their social media graphics. Their profile images and cover images. And then we make sure that all of these sections within each social media profile is updated with their correct and accurate information such as their office address, phone number, website links and then also the products of insurance that they sell.
Ashley Paul: After we have completed the setup of their social media profiles, we launch their program where we send out a broadcast email to a list of clients that the IMT customer would provide us, which would be an email with links to follow them on social media. We also give them access to the social media marketing dashboard, which I’ll go into further detail on the next slide. We opt them into a different content tracks based off of the lines of insurance that they sell. We have a general contact with safety and preparedness as well as national and social media holidays, which includes 13 posts per month. We then have personal, business, life, health and group content tracks with three posts each per month that get published to Facebook, Google My Business and LinkedIn. And then we have our additional custom campaign service, which not only get published at Facebook, Google My Business and LinkedIn, but Twitter as well.
Ashley Paul: We also offer free and premium support with strategies on how to increase engagement, optional Facebook post boosting and the service is $80 per month, but would be $40 with IMT reimbursement. And our custom campaigns are available at $60 each, where you could get the custom campaigns as a onetime charge or as a monthly reoccurring subscription.
Ashley Paul: As I mentioned, the client will have access to the social media marketing dashboard, where they can engage, monitor and manage all of their social media profiles in one place. They’ll have access to the social media content calendar, where they’ll be able to view all of the posts that we have scheduled out for them each month. They’ll be able to monitor and respond to any direct messages or comments from their various social media platforms. They’ll have the ability to also access the content scheduler, where they can create their own posts on top of the posts that we have created for them. They’ll have access to the content and image library, which will house any posts that we create.
Ashley Paul: We also set up notifications for Facebook and Google My Business reviews and those notifications will be an email notification that will then take them to their dashboard, where they can monitor their reviews results and actually respond to their reviews within their dashboard as well. We also send out monthly reports based off of the metrics related to their service. Those metrics incurred demographics, top performing posts and other metrics related to the success of their social media service with us.
Ashley Paul: If the client does decide to opt into any one of our custom campaigns, we work with them directly to brainstorm, write, design and publish those custom campaigns. Typically we have a phone call where we discuss any ideas that they might have. Some common ideas though, are saving a customer money, which would include a photo of the customer and the amount of money they’ve saved, any community or charity events that they’re involved in. It could be a new staff hire, which would help anyone that does go into their office, recognize a familiar face. Milestones, which would include an anniversary or a grand opening or even a giveaway campaign.
Ashley Paul: For example, we had a client recently run a giveaway campaign for National Nurses’ Day, where they gave away a $100 gift card to any nurse nominated. Our design team also creates custom graphics for each campaign, which could be personalized photos or built from scratch from our design team. We then work to strategize on publishing these campaigns for peak time engagement and can also boost these campaigns using Facebook post boosting to reach a wider audience.
Ashley Paul: And now I’m going to pass it back over to Bob to explain some other digital marketing services BrightFire offers.
Bob Whitis: Thanks, Ashley. Now we’re going to talk a little bit about the line of digital marketing services in addition to social media that BrightFire provides. Starting off, we have our Ultimate SEO Bundle and SEO or Search Engine Optimization is something that we get asked about a lot because insurance agencies typically do business locally. And as time has gone on, SEO has evolved a lot. And the way things are today, we really see SEO as being a combination of three large components. One of those being your agency website, the second being your online reputation, which includes online reviews at places like Google, Facebook and Yelp. And then that third component is local listings management, which would be the listings about your business and directories that Google cross-references as being a reliable source of data.
Bob Whitis: These three products if purchased by themself would have a total cost of about $220 per month, but we bundled those up and discounted by $30 per month. If you decide to take us up on the offer for the Ultimate SEO Bundle, there is some savings there and it gives you a holistic approach to SEO, which is more of a long term marketing strategy, but definitely one that no brick and mortar insurance agency should ignore.
Bob Whitis: And then the other products we offer individually are our insurance agency websites. That is at $100 per month. There are no setup fees, no contracts with any of the services that we provide. If you’ve ever gone out and spent hundreds or thousands of dollars in the past on having a website built and kind of gone through that process, we’ve streamlined it for you. Typically to build a website only takes a couple of hours of time from our customer, spread out over a few weeks to get the website up and running. And there’s no setup cost involved.
Bob Whitis: Additionally, the website comes with a lot of insurance-specific sales tools, which there’ll be more information on our website about that. But definitely, if you feel like your website is maybe outdated, or if you’ve not had a website before, obviously with everything going on, being able to represent yourself well digitally has become more important than ever. Always encourage people to take a look at that offering because many times it can be a game-changer for an agency if they’ve had a website built a few years ago that hasn’t gotten maybe the attention that it deserved or if you’ve never had a website built by a provider that specifically works with insurance agencies, some of the sales tools that we provide could definitely help you leverage your time more effectively.
Bob Whitis: The Reviews and Reputation Management service is $80 per month. With that service, we basically help you manage your online reputation. You have a dashboard that allows you to see your reviews across 18 different important networks. You can also respond to Google and Facebook reviews right from the dashboard. And then also you can run Net Promoter Score surveys or what’s referred to as NPS. If you’ve ever gotten an email asking you to rate a business on a scale of zero to 10, as far as whether you would refer a friend to that business, that’s what an NPS survey is. The reviews and reputation management service can help you get kind of a pulse on your current policyholders. It can definitely help identify people that are really happy with what you’re doing for them. It can also help identify people that maybe aren’t having the best experience so that you can reach out to them and hopefully retain them versus them seeking insurance somewhere else when a renewal comes up.
Bob Whitis: And then anybody that you survey with the Net Promoter Score surveys are also given the opportunity to leave a review on Google, Facebook or Yelp. It’s really a great way to generate reviews if that’s something that your agency has struggled with doing in the past. And again, with this service, it’s more of a holistic approach to your reputation. A lot of times in the past, we’ve seen the agencies do a big campaign maybe once or twice and then give up on it. And so this service is designed to be more cyclical where every six months we help you run one of these NPS campaigns, get an influx of reviews, gather NPS feedback from your policyholders so that hopefully you can grow your online reputation on a regular basis and definitely stay in front of retention issues with policyholders.
Bob Whitis: Then for the Local Listings Management service. That’s another one of the pieces of the SEO bundle. This really helps you in the “local pack” in Google. If you’ve ever done a search for something like auto insurance and you’ve seen a list of results with a map and the ABC map markers, the local listings management service is what really gives you an edge in ranking well in what they call the “local map pack”. We make sure that your information is consistent, accurate, and present on a lot of the really important business directories that Google looks at. And it’s really eyeopening a lot of times to some agency owners because you may have listings floating around from one or two office locations ago or an old phone number or an old website address. Sometimes insurance carriers can create these for you and you may not have access to them or even know they exist.
Bob Whitis: One part of that service is looking for duplicate listings or outdated listings. It really gives you an overview of what information is out there on the internet, as far as contact information to get in touch with your agency. And the great thing about it is that when we identify these issues, we’re able to correct them. If you don’t have a listing on one of the important directories, we’ll create it. If you’ve got duplicate issues, we’ll close down those duplicates and make sure that you just have one complete, accurate listening. And so that’s the goal with that service is for each of those important directories to have a complete and accurate listing with your current contact information.
Bob Whitis: And then we also offer Pay Per Click Advertising or PPC Advertising. That’s a $100 per month per campaign. We can do advertising on Google or Facebook. And that service, everything that we do is custom for your campaign. You would talk to a consultant to talk about what you’re looking to accomplish. They would make some recommendations as far as what types of campaigns they think would be effective. And then from there, we build out the campaign as far as the ad verbiage, any graphic banners that are needed, as well as a custom landing page for each ad. We really want someone when they click on your ad to have a good experience as far as feeling like they’re in the right place, feeling like that landing page is really speaking to the issue that led them to click on that ad. And then at the end of three months, we do an ROI analysis. Each month you’d speak with a digital marketing PPC consultant just as kind of a status check-in, Q and A session, kind of catch up the one where your numbers are.
Bob Whitis: But then at the end of three months, we can actually do an ROI analysis where we can get into the actual nuts and bolts of the leads that degenerated and whether or not those people purchased a policy and what type of commission you expect to make on that policy and how long you expect to retain them. The great thing about this line of digital marketing services, again, is there’s no contract or set up fees and you can mix and match. And also all of these services carry a 30-day money-back guarantee so you can mix and match services as it best fits your agency today. And then as your needs change, you can change which services you’re enrolled with for us.
Bob Whitis: If you were interested in getting started, it’s actually really quick and easy. You can visit our website at brightfire.com/imt to enroll. And again, as I just mentioned, no setup fees or contracts and we have the 30-day money-back guarantee. The calls for the social media service that we’re focusing on today is $80 per month. If you do decide to pay annually, you can save 10% by doing so. And then you can also sign up for the custom campaigns at $60 per month if you’d like to go ahead and enroll in the recurring subscription for that if it’s something you plan on doing each month. Or you can just purchase the custom campaign available on demand when you need it.
Bob Whitis: And then after you purchase, we’ll send you an email to welcome you to the service and help you schedule your onboarding call and onboarding typically takes about a week. Generally from the time that you sign up until we begin hosting content for your social media profiles is about a week. And then if you are interested in some of the other services that we provide on our website, you can get an instant quote. Basically you would answer five quick questions about your agency and then you would get a recommendation of which digital marketing services we provide think would be a good fit for you and why. As well as any need that we don’t think would be a good fit for you and why. And then obviously if you’d like to speak with somebody at BrightFire, you can do a live chat on our website or you can schedule a call with sales or you can just pick up the phone and give us a call.
Bob Whitis: And with that, I will hand it back over to Ben for some closing remarks and then we’ll get into the Q and A with Ashley.
Ben Ellefson: All right, thanks Bob and Ashley for the presentation. As I mentioned before, we’ll be answering some questions now that’s anything that you may have on the presentation that was given from BrightFire’s services this afternoon. If you have a question, I see that there’s already a few in our Q and A section, but please use that Q and A tab at the bottom of the Zoom screen to submit them. And we’ll get to as many as we can. I believe Ashley, I think you’re going to start answering some of those.
Ashley Paul: Yeah. The first question that we received is, is the initial design on top of the monthly fees shown? Or is that rolled into the cost? If for some reason we changed direction further down the road, would we own the content or would BrightFire? The design is included in the social media total cost. And if you do decide to leave BrightFire, those images are yours and you can take them to whichever other marketing company you go to.
Ashley Paul: The next question is, are the website ADA compliant? Hearing more rumblings regarding this subject from E and O carriers. Bob, do you want to answer that question?
Bob Whitis: Sure. Thanks, Ashley. And that’s a great question, Quentin. In a nutshell, the answer to that question is no, but we’re very close. And what you will find is that ADA compliance has become sort of a nebulous topic. The laws about it aren’t really very clear. There’s definitely some lawsuits and things like that that are going on. And so the steps that we’ve taken at BrightFire are what we would consider to be the most sensible steps to take. We do use accessibility testing tools on our website platform. And when all of this ADA news started to come out, we did a complete audit of our platform, made a number of improvements. Our websites are not 100% ADA compliant, but what I can tell you is that even the websites of places that offer the service of making your website ADA compliant, typically their websites are not even 100% ADA compliant.
Bob Whitis: We take things I guess, the best way to describe it as we take it as far as we think is rational to go at this point, without starting to sacrifice the user experience for people without disabilities. Just to kind of go above and beyond for the folks that do. But our websites are compatible with popular technologies that people with accessibility issues use like screen readers and things of that nature. I can provide some additional details to Erin and Ben to send you Quentin, but we actually have a blog post and a knowledge base article about this topic that have some more details. But again, great question. Thanks, Quentin.
Ashley Paul: Thanks, Bob. The next question is, can we see samples of BrightFire’s social media content. And the answer to that is yes. When you are speaking with our sales team on our social media service, we can send you multiple samples of the different content that we offer, whether that’s based off of the insurance products that you sell or our custom campaigns. We do have multiple samples that we can provide you.
Ashley Paul: That looks like all the questions for right now. Maybe we’ll have a few more trickle in.
Bob Whitis: All right. And if anybody has a question that maybe comes up after the webinar is over today, definitely don’t hesitate to reach out to us. I’m sure that Erin and Ben at IMT if you’d prefer to start a conversation with them. They can loop us in to answer any questions that you have. And then if you’re on our website and you want to start a chat or pick up the phone, definitely feel free to get in touch with us. We’re always happy to answer any questions that you may have.
Ben Ellefson: Yeah, that’s exactly right, Bob. I was just going to say, yep. If people didn’t have any more questions right now, or if you think of some further down the line once we’re off of this, please feel free to reach out to Erin or myself. And if we don’t know the questions, we can definitely reach out to Bob and Ashley, get anything answered that you may need.
Ben Ellefson: Well, I don’t see any more coming in. I think with that, we’ll wrap it up for this afternoon. Thanks again, Bob and Ashley for the presentation. Yeah, and like I said before, we’ll have this recording available to everyone that will be sent out and if you have any questions, just let us know. Thank you.
