With more than 50 local business listings your insurance agency should be present on, it can be overwhelming trying to effectively manage each one, including responding to any messages consumers send to your agency from the different platforms.
In our latest 20 Minute Marketing Webinar, Content Coordinator Molly Leonard shared how BrightFire’s latest feature within our Local Listings Management service, our unified Messaging Inbox, can help agencies respond to every consumer inquiry in a more convenient and efficient manner.
Streamline Your Local Listings Messaging Process
Watch the webinar, read through the full transcript, or jump ahead to the section you’re most interested in to discover how BrightFire’s unified Messaging Inbox can help your agency streamline your processes.
- Impact of Local Listings Management on SEO
- How BrightFire Helps Agents Get Found Online
- How BrightFire’s Unified Messaging Inbox Works
- Local Listings & Your Overall SEO Strategy
- How to Get Started with BrightFire
Watch the Webinar
Additional Questions?
If you have any questions about what we discussed in the webinar, BrightFire’s Local Listings Management Service, or our Ultimate SEO Bundle, please schedule a call with sales.
Webinar Transcript
Welcome everyone! My name is Molly Leonard, and I’m the Content Coordinator here at BrightFire, as well as your host for today’s webinar. Thank you all for joining us.
In May, we covered Revealing The Power In BrightFire Website Customers’ Hands. If you missed it, or any of our previous webinars in the 20 Minute Marketing Webinar series, you can access the whole series on-demand by visiting brightfire.com/webinars.
Our goal with these webinars is to provide you with digital marketing advice and discuss current digital marketing topics in a brief 20-minute format, followed by a Q&A period to answer any questions you may have. If you have questions during the webinar, please use the Q&A feature. We’ll do our best to answer all of the questions that come through; otherwise, we will personally reach out to you afterward.
Today’s webinar topic is Local Listings Messaging Made Easy with BrightFire’s Messaging Inbox. With more than 50 local business listings your insurance agency should be present on, it can be overwhelming to manage each one effectively, including responding to any messages consumers send to your agency from the different platforms.
In this webinar, we’ll show you how one of BrightFire’s most valuable features within our Local Listings Management service, our unified Messaging Inbox, can help your agency streamline its processes and respond more conveniently and efficiently to every consumer inquiry.
Today’s webinar is being recorded, so everything we discuss will be saved and emailed to you in the next business day or two so you can watch it later on demand.
Lastly, we do have a couple of polls for today’s webinar. When launched, the poll will pop up on your screen with the question and response options. Every poll is anonymous, and we’ll give you roughly 30 seconds to share your response. Then, we’ll discuss the results with the group.
About BrightFire
Before we dive into today’s webinar, I’d like to share a brief background on BrightFire since we have a mix of current customers and agents who are new to BrightFire in attendance today.
BrightFire began by providing insurance agency websites in 2000. Over the years, as the needs of insurance agents grew, we expanded our digital marketing services beyond agency websites to also include:
- Search Engine Optimization
- Social Media Marketing
- Local Listings Management
- Pay-Per-Click Advertising
- Social Media Marketing
- Reviews & Reputation Management
Over 2,500 independent agencies nationwide use at least one of BrightFire’s digital marketing services.
So, with that background on BrightFire, let’s get started.
What’s Ahead
As most independent agents know, your digital presence plays a major role in generating and winning new business, whether you have a brick-and-mortar location or not. That’s why it’s important to approach your local SEO strategy from a holistic perspective, starting with your local listings management.
To start, we’ll discuss the impact local listing management can have on your SEO. Then, I’ll walk you through BrightFire’s all-encompassing Local Listings Management service and explain how it can help your agency get found across multiple online platforms. Once we’ve covered the benefits of BrightFire’s Local Listings Management service, we’ll look closer at one of our most valuable tools for managing local listings: our unified messaging inbox. I’ll show you how it integrates within BrightFire’s Local Listings Management service and the many ways this new feature can help you streamline your day-to-day process of responding to consumer inquiries more efficiently and conveniently.
Finally, we’ll unpack the different features you can leverage with BrightFire’s Local Listings Management service and Ultimate SEO Bundle to improve your overall SEO strategy and I’ll explain how to connect with our team to get started.
Impact of Local Listings Management on SEO
An often overlooked but very important component of your SEO strategy is implementing an effective local listings management process. When executed properly, a strong local listings management strategy can help your agency increase search engine rankings, attract more customers, and improve visibility in local search results. In fact, one case study conducted by WebServ found that using local listing management to improve their client’s online presence resulted in a 74% increase in website visits and an 83% increase in phone calls in just two months!
Another notable data point from Yext states that a business with a complete and fully managed Google Business Profile is 70% more likely to be visited by consumers who are 50% more likely to make a purchase with that business.
When you consider these metrics, it’s easy to see how much of an impact your local listings management can have on your SEO rankings.
How BrightFire Helps Agents Get Found Online
So, we’ve established how important it is to implement a strong local listings management strategy. But it’s no secret that many agencies don’t have the bandwidth to run a business and manage all these components alone. At BrightFire, we know how challenging and time-consuming it can be to keep track of your local listings and monitor them regularly for new messages, duplicate listings, necessary updates, or new reviews.
Fortunately, our Local Listings Management service takes the burden off of you and helps your agency give search engines and consumers the accurate and consistent information they’re looking for.
Our team of digital marketing experts will handle all of the setup, maintenance, monitoring, and updates of your listings so you don’t have to.
Our Local Listings Management service consists of several features to boost your local SEO efforts, including:
- Fully managing over 50 local listings networks,
- Incorporating your agency’s branding,
- Updating your existing local listings to ensure each has accurate and consistent business information,
- Removing duplicate listings that can negatively impact your SEO,
- Claiming your unclaimed listings,
- Updating your listings at no additional cost when your business information changes,
- The unified Messaging Inbox that we’ll discuss in detail today and
- Providing a user-friendly dashboard so you can view all of your listings in one place.
Finally, our trusted guidance doesn’t end at onboarding. Our friendly support team is readily available to answer any questions you may have about your listings, so you can rest assured knowing your listings are accurate, updated, and compliant with each network’s guidelines.
BrightFire’s Messaging Inbox
One of the most valuable features of BrightFire’s Local Listings Management service is our unified Messaging Inbox. Designed to help agencies connect with current policyholders and prospects more efficiently, the unified Messaging Inbox works with other BrightFire services to enhance our holistic approach to managing local listings. You can integrate BrightFire’s Messaging Inbox with messaging channels to connect from other listings, including Apple messages through your Apple business profile, email, text messaging, and social channels like Facebook, Instagram, and X.
With BrightFire’s Messaging Inbox, instead of facing the very time-consuming task of monitoring and responding to consumers on every individual listing across multiple different platforms, you can view and respond to all inquiries in one place. Not only does our Messaging Inbox save you valuable time, but it also helps ensure that you don’t miss any opportunities to connect with prospects who are interested in making a purchase, allowing you to increase your opportunity to build new relationships with prospects at multiple stages of the sales funnel and gain more business. Additionally, the unified Messaging Inbox allows you to respond directly to current policyholders, which can help increase trust and loyalty with the clients you already serve.
One of the best parts is that it’s included with our Local Listings Management service and combines with other BrightFire services to improve your overall local SEO rankings. Any agency who utilizes BrightFire’s Local Listings Management service can add this feature to their daily workflow to streamline the process of communicating with current policyholders and prospects and respond to consumer inquiries more efficiently in one place.
So, if you want to strengthen your current policyholder relationships while making sure you don’t miss out on valuable opportunities to connect with prospects at various stages of the sales funnel, we definitely recommend taking advantage of BrightFire’s unified Messaging Inbox as a part of your Local Listings Management.
Local Listings & Your Overall SEO Strategy
Local listings management is important when implementing an overall SEO strategy, but it’s only one piece of a much larger puzzle. That’s why BrightFire offers our Ultimate SEO Bundle, which includes everything you need to rank in Google, strengthen relationships with current policyholders, and connect with new prospects.
In addition to getting the benefits we mentioned on the last slide about local listings, you’ll also get an amazing custom-designed agency website optimized to rank in search engines and attract and convert more insurance buyers online.
And because search engine rankings thrive on positive reviews, the Ultimate SEO Bundle also includes our Reviews & Reputation Management service, which helps your agency consistently generate new reviews, collect client feedback, generate referrals, and protect your online reputation.
The best part is that when you sign up for the Ultimate SEO Bundle, you’ll save on the standalone prices of each of those three services.
How to Get Started with BrightFire
You can sign up for our Local Listings Management service for only $50 per month.
If you’re interested in more leads from search engines, you can take advantage of the Ultimate SEO Bundle for $250 per month. As a reminder, that includes our Local Listings Management, Insurance Agency Websites, and Reviews & Reputation Management services, and saves you $40 per month off the standalone prices.
Our digital marketing services never have any setup fees, contracts, or user fees, and we also include a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Onboarding for Local Listings Management typically consists of one 30-minute phone call, and we’ll handle the rest for you.
As a thank you for attending today’s webinar, we’re offering a $50 promo to webinar attendees. Sign up for our Local Listings Management or Ultimate SEO Bundle services to receive a $50 account credit. This promo ends next Wednesday, July 31st.
To get started with BrightFire, please contact sales. On our website, you can submit your purchase, start a live chat with us, or schedule a call with a BrightFire expert.
Q&A Session on BrightFire’s Unified Messaging Inbox
That concludes our presentation on Local Listings Messaging Made Easy with BrightFire’s Messaging Inbox. Now, we’ll head into our Q&A session if anyone has any questions!
As a reminder to our attendees, we’ll do our best to answer any questions. If we can’t address your question during the webinar, someone from BrightFire will email you to answer it.
How does the response process through BrightFire’s messaging inbox work?
That’s a really great question! So, our unified Messaging Inbox provides you with your own number for text messaging, and you can optionally connect Facebook, Instagram, X, BrightFire Webchat, and BrightFire website forms to the inbox. All messages from these channels can be found in the unified Messaging Inbox. You can also create filtered views for each connected channel. There’s also a templating system for text messages and email that you can set up with personalization tokens to include contact details in your responses. Some examples might be opening a response with “Thank you for choosing [Business Name],” or you can include your business phone number or other details at the end of the response. It also allows you to use AI Assistance to generate different types of texts and tones, depending on which type of conversation you’re engaging in. The AI Assistance helps you save time without cutting corners to provide that personal touch to your responses. It’s all designed to help you improve your ability to respond more immediately to messages with that personalized tone, but you won’t spend as much time managing inquiries.
Is there a limit to how many users can access the Messaging Inbox to respond to inquiries that come in?
This is another good question that we get asked a lot! One of the best features of BrightFire’s Messaging Inbox is that there is no per-user fee. We don’t charge anything for additional users, so you can have as many team members as you would like on the account to help respond to inquiries. You can even bundle up different staff members into teams, which can really help you establish a more organized process for managing the responses. So, for example, you could set it up to include a sales team, support team, personal lines team, commercial lines team, renewals team, claims team, or any grouping that would be relevant to your specific agency. If you organize your Messaging Inbox in teams, each team can have as many members as you would like, with no additional charge. And, if you’re the business owner, you can be a part of every team as an individual user. You can also assign inquiries to specific users or teams to help you keep track of unanswered messages.
Well, I think that is all the time we have for questions today. Thank you to everyone who submitted a question.
The topic of our next webinar in September is still being finalized. Watch your inbox and our social media profiles for emails and social media announcements.
Our next webinar will be held on Thursday, September 26th, at 2 PM Eastern or 11 AM Pacific.
You can reserve your spot at these webinars by visiting the webinars page on our website at brightfire.com/webinars.
So that is it for today! From me and the rest of the BrightFire team, we’d like to thank all of you for attending.
