While BrightFire prides itself on providing an easy, done-for-you approach to our Insurance Agency Website service, we also know there are independent agents who enjoy being more hands-on and want to leverage all of the website features, sales tools, and support tools that BrightFire has to offer.
In our latest 20 Minute Marketing Webinar, Content Coordinator Molly Leonard shared several sales and support tools BrightFire customers can utilize in order to customize their agency websites and take them to the next level.
Sales & Support Tools BrightFire Website Customers Can Utilize
Watch the webinar, read through the full transcript, or jump ahead to the section you’re most interested in to discover sales and support tools that BrightFire’s website customers can utilize to level up their agency websites.
- Update Employees, Carriers, Reviews, & Content
- Write & Publish Additional Blog Posts
- Utilize My Agent Personalization
- Create & Send Video Proposals
- Activate BrightFire’s New Webchat
Watch the Webinar
Additional Questions?
If you have any questions about what we discussed in the webinar, BrightFire’s Insurance Agency Website 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 March, we covered The 6 P’s of Insurance Social Media Success. 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.
Today’s webinar topic is Revealing The Power in BrightFire Website Customers’ Hands. While BrightFire prides itself on providing an easy, done-for-you approach to our Insurance Agency Website service, we also know there are independent agents who enjoy being more hands-on and want to leverage all of the website features, sales tools, and support tools that BrightFire has to offer.
In this webinar, we’ll reveal the true power that BrightFire customers have pertaining to customizing their websites and walk you through the various ways you can take your agency website to the next level.
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, you’ll see the poll pop up on your screen with the question and response options. Every poll is anonymous, and I’ll give you roughly 30 seconds to share your response, and then we’ll discuss the results with the group.
About BrightFire
Before we dive into how you can take your agency website to the next level, I’d like to share a brief background on BrightFire, since we have a mix of current customers and agents that are new to BrightFire attending 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
Currently, there are over 2,500 independent agencies across the nation using at least one of BrightFire’s digital marketing services.
What’s Ahead
As an independent agent, you know how important it is to maximize your time and increase productivity, so you can remain focused on growing your business. Your website should be a significant asset in helping your agency attract, convert, and support your prospects and policyholders.
So today, we’re going to show you ways to put your BrightFire website to work for your agency and walk through the various tools and features that our website customers can leverage on their own to take their amazing, custom-designed websites to the next level.
We’ll discuss how you can update your employees, carriers, reviews, and content, as well as write your own blogs in addition to the posts BrightFire provides. We’ll also talk about how you can utilize My Agent Personalization, create and send Video Proposals, and talk to website visitors in real-time with BrightFire’s new Webchat.
Finally, we’ll briefly cover everything that’s included in our Insurance Agency Website service and how our team of digital marketing, web design, and web development experts can ensure your BrightFire website has everything you need to sell insurance, empower your sales team, and enhance your policyholder experience.
Update Employees, Carriers, Reviews, & Content
So the first feature you should leverage on a BrightFire website is making important updates as they occur in your agency. When your staff changes, you can log into the backend of your website and add or remove employees. At any time, you can upload new photos of your staff and edit their bios as well.
Another update you can make is adding or removing your carriers displayed on your BrightFire website.
When you receive new positive reviews from Google, Yelp, or other business listings, you can add them to your customer reviews page and select your most powerful reviews to be leveraged as featured reviews throughout your website.
Finally, you can update the content and images on any insurance product page or persona page that BrightFire creates for your agency. For example, you may choose to customize your Auto Insurance product page or a persona page about insurance for married couples with children to personalize how you consult your policyholders when they’re navigating coverage options.
Write & Publish Additional Blog Posts
In addition to the informative blog posts BrightFire provides each month, agents can also create and publish their own blog posts. By writing your own content for your blog, you can add even more of your personal touch to your website and better humanize your brand for your website visitors.
For example, you could write about office happenings, upcoming events in the community that your agency is participating in or sponsoring, as well as relevant news related to your service area. By including content about local events in your town, city, or county, your website’s local search engine optimization, or local SEO, rankings in the search engines will improve. It will also help your website visitors better connect with your agency and your website as they have more confirmation that you’re a local agent who is actively engaged in the community.
You can also write your own thought leadership content on the types of insurance your agency sells above and beyond the educational content BrightFire publishes on your blog to provide even more value to your visitors and improve your agency’s credibility as an expert in the industry.
At the end of the day, publishing additional content on your blog can help your agency. In fact, a study by HubSpot found that companies that blog often see 55% more website traffic than those that don’t. Another study by DemandMetric found that, on average, companies with active blogs receive 67% more leads each month than those that don’t.
So no matter if your agency can only write one additional blog post per week or per month, that additional effort and content can help your agency rank higher in the search results, gain more traffic to your website, increase the amount of leads you receive each month, and ultimately help your agency win more business.
Utilize My Agent Personalization
The next feature your agency should leverage if and when you have a BrightFire website is My Agent Personalization. This tool enables agency owners to create personalized website links that feature a specific agent’s photo and contact information that can be seen by consumers browsing any page of your website.
For example, if your producer John Smith adds @john-smith to any website link he sends his prospects or policyholders, anyone who clicks that link will see John’s name and contact info on every page as they browse your site. With My Agent Personalization, consumers won’t need to scan through your different website pages to figure out how to contact you; that information will always remain in plain sight.
In addition to enhancing the customer experience on your website by making it easy to contact your agents, My Agent Personalization also helps empower your team to build stronger relationships with consumers at any stage of the sales cycle by keeping your agents top of mind while they browse your website and really humanizing your agency with that personal touch on each webpage.
Create & Send Video Proposals with BrightFire
Another tool your agency should take advantage of with a BrightFire website is Video Proposals. Video has proven to be a great marketing medium for businesses that want to better engage and convert their prospects.
In fact, Campaign Monitor found that when video content is included in an email, businesses often see a 200-300% increase in click-through rates. The same study found that 64% of consumers are more likely to purchase a product online after watching a video. What’s more, Insivia reports that users typically retain 95% of the information presented in a video, compared to only retaining 10% of the information when they read it in text-based content.
Video Proposals allow you to reap all of these benefits while avoiding the hassle of trying to schedule a call with busy prospects when you’re ready to walk through their insurance proposal. Once your proposal is ready, you can log into the backend of your BrightFire website and head over to the Video Proposals tab.
There, you can record a personalized video of your computer screen and/or webcam and walk prospects through their proposal. We recommend using your webcam in the video so you can create a more authentic and thoughtful experience as you show prospects your face, introduce yourself, greet them by name, and start to build trust and credibility with them during their decision-making process.
Once you’ve finished recording the video, you can share a unique, password-protected private link just for the prospect via email to watch the video on your website. When logged into your BrightFire website, you’ll also be able to view the dashboard to see how many times the video has been watched.
Another huge perk to Video Proposals is that they can work in combination with the My Agent Personalization feature. When you upload your Video Proposal, you simply select which employee created the proposal. Then, your recipient will see that employee’s photo and contact information while they watch their video proposal.
Finally, if you integrated a BrightFire-compatible calendar service such as Calendly, Acuity, or Doodle into your website and that employee has a calendar link, it will also be displayed next to your video to make it simple for prospects to schedule a follow-up call with you as needed.
Activate BrightFire’s New Webchat
The last BrightFire website feature you should take advantage of is one of our newest features that was recently released to our Insurance Agency Websites service.
BrightFire’s Webchat allows your team to engage with website visitors in real time as they browse your website. A chat bubble will appear in the lower right-hand corner of any webpage with a customizable message of your choosing.
For example, when a prospect on your website has a question about your agency or they are interested in getting a quote, they can click the chat bubble and fill out their name, phone number, and inquiry. Once submitted, agents will receive an email notification alerting them of the new message and will have three minutes to respond live.
Offering website visitors the ability to speak to someone live on your website is essential since many consumers prefer messaging in the early stages of the buying journey, and roughly 60% of customers are more likely to return to a website that offers webchat (Software Advice).
By responding to website visitors at the exact moment they are browsing your website and have a question for your team, you can develop trust with them more easily and help move that hot lead down the sales funnel faster.
Another great feature of BrightFire’s Webchat is that you don’t have to be available to chat with your website visitors 24/7. If you aren’t able to answer the chat within three minutes, or if a visitor submits an inquiry after business hours, they will receive a customizable auto-response text message letting them know that you will contact them as soon as possible.
The message will be sent to your messaging inbox within your BrightFire dashboard, where you can conveniently access all of your conversations from Webchat, as well as from other connected social and review platforms such as Facebook, Google Business Profile, and Instagram.
How BrightFire Helps with Insurance Agency Websites
So, if you love everything we’ve discussed today, but don’t have a custom-designed website by BrightFire yet, our Insurance Agency Website service is available to you.
Our expert website developers and designers provide everything you need in an agency website to attract and convert insurance buyers online, including:
- Custom Designs
- Lead Conversion Optimizations
- Mobile Responsiveness
- Ready-To-Go Insurance Pages
- Search Engine Optimizations
- A Content Management System
- Sales Tool Suite
- Support Tool Suite
- Featured Reviews
- Monthly Reporting
- Weekly Blog Posts
- Managed Security
You’ll also have the help of our friendly team of digital marketing experts who is here to provide support and answer any questions about your BrightFire website. Most customer-requested changes to the website are included at no cost.
Insurance Agency Websites & Your Overall SEO Strategy
But our support doesn’t stop there. We mentioned earlier that maintaining an active blog and updating your webpage content can improve your website’s SEO and strengthen your agency’s rankings in the search results.
But improving your local SEO efforts with website updates is really just scraping the tip of the iceberg. To really make an impact and take advantage of everything your agency needs to rank in Google, BrightFire’s Ultimate SEO Bundle is available.
In addition to getting the benefits we mentioned on the last slide pertaining to our Insurance Agency Website service, you’ll also be enrolled in our Reviews & Reputation Management service, since search engine rankings thrive on positive reviews. This service helps your agency consistently generate new reviews, collect client feedback, and protect your online reputation.
And because consistent and accurate information on key search engines is the foundation of local search success, the Ultimate SEO Bundle also includes our Local Listings Management service. This service helps your agency get found across the web on more than 50 of the most important listings so consumers can reach you, with or without visiting your website.
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
If you’re new to BrightFire and would like to take advantage of our services, you can sign up for BrightFire’s Insurance Agency Website service for only $140 per month.
If you’re interested in taking advantage of BrightFire’s Ultimate SEO Bundle to cover all of your SEO bases and help your agency attract new insurance buyers, you can do so for just $250 per month. As a reminder, that includes our Insurance Agency Websites, Reviews & Reputation Management, and Local Listings Management services, and saves you $40 per month off the standalone prices.
Our digital marketing services don’t have any setup fees, contracts, or user fees, and we also include a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Onboarding typically consists of two 45-minute phone calls and about an hour of your own time to review your website. We’ll work with you until you’re totally happy with your new website.
As a thank you for attending today, we’re offering a $50 promo to webinar attendees. You can receive a $50 account credit for signing up for our Insurance Agency Website or Ultimate SEO Bundle services. This promo ends next Wednesday, June 5th, 2024.
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 Websites
That concludes our presentation on Revealing The Power In BrightFire Website Customers’ Hands. 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 that come through. If we aren’t able to address your question during the webinar, someone from BrightFire will follow up with you via email to answer your question.
Can I use My Agent Personalization on my BrightFire website at any time? Or do I need to have it activated?
Great question! While My Agent Personalization may have been automatically activated on your website when it’s launched, it’s best to open a ticket with our support team. This will ensure My Agent Personalization is configured exactly the way you want.
How much can I customize my Webchat feature?
Within your BrightFire dashboard, you can update several aspects of the Webchat, including the color and icon on the chat bubble that appears on your website. You can also change the bubble from displaying a messaging icon to featuring your agency’s favicon, or the symbol that represents your agency’s logo that you may also have displaying as your website’s browser icon.
Other elements of the Webchat you can customize include the settings of when the first message appears on the chat bubble, as well as the various messages you want website visitors to see when they first visit your website, submit a query, and when your agency is not available to chat with them online.
Well, I think that is all the time we have for questions today. Thank you to everyone who submitted a question, and again, we will reach out to anyone whose question was not answered.
We do have additional webinars coming up later this year. You will receive emails notifying you of those webinars as they draw near, but you can also always view any of our webinar in the 20 Minute Marketing Webinar series and reserve your spot by visiting the webinars page on our website at brightfire.com/webinars.
And that concludes our presentation for today! From me and the rest of the BrightFire team, we’d like to thank all of you for attending.
