While everyone wants an insurance company to have a sizable and solid foundation, no one likes to work with a nameless and faceless organization. Brian Berce has been with Farmers Insurance since 1996. He already has a corporate web presence, but he wanted a personal website to help build relationships with people in his community.

His new website provides all the important details clients are looking for regarding their insurance questions while also giving Brian a blog platform to talk about local news and events. And of course he has a personable About page so folks can "meet" him on line.

Sprocket Websites is happy to help Brian introduce himself to new clients. If your business is similar, call us to talk about building a personal website for you.

Twitter and Facebook ads, content marketing, search engine optimization – with so many evolving options to consider, it’s easy to get caught up in the details and lose focus on the bigger picture. Are you sabotaging your business because you aren’t properly prepared to make marketing decisions?

Technology seems to be a living, breathing entity.  As marketers, we are constantly watching as the parameters change, the norms become distant memories, and the things we never thought we'd be marketing with are now front and center.  Take Snapchat for instance. 

We've been talking lately about how hot content marketing is right now.  It's extremely important nowadays to have strong, original content linking back to your brand and your website.  People are looking for information -why not let your company be the one who supplies it?  While the idea of content marketing might be a simple one; actually executing original content is another matter altogether.  My advice is to either hire someone to write your posts for you (we actually offer that service... for the record...) or teach yourself the tips for writing a great blog on your website.

Let’s say you’ve taken my advice by now, you’ve got a successfully running website that is driving traffic to your business. Perfect! Now, let’s talk about taking that next step.  You might be saying to yourself: What’s the point in going mobile? People can still bring me up on their phones if they are searching for me on the internet… To that I would promptly pick you up and shake you. OK, maybe I wouldn’t go that far.  But the appearance of your website is pretty important. Both on AND off the computer. So when a customer visits your site on their phone, if it’s all scattered around, hard to maneuver, or full of information that’s probably not useful to them on the go, they are going to move on.  Their thumbs can only take so much browsing on those tiny screens.  It’s 2013, let’s catch up with the times.  There are hundreds of millions of mobile phone users in the U.S. alone. About 9 out of 10 have access to the internet on their phones. What are you doing to win them over?

How did that sound? “Can I help you?” Did you read it in a polite, helpful way?  Or maybe you read “Can I help you?” and pictured a big burly man spitting into a tin and cracking his knuckles threateningly… (apparently I have a western movie playing in my head).  My point is, first impressions are important.  If someone were physically walking into your store, how would you approach them?  Now let’s look at your online presence; what first impression are you giving?