Changes to the SEO, Social Media, and Content Departments at Zywave

Zywave is excited to announce that our SEO, social media, and content teams have joined forces in an effort to go inbound! Our new and improved inbound marketing team consists of senior inbound marketing specialists, inbound marketing specialists, and inbound marketing assistants being trained in all areas of non-paid online marketing, from optimizing websites to blogging, to social media posting.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing involves earning the interest of your website visitors and your customers rather than buying their interest. Inbound marketing involves a number of “permission-based” online marketing tactics to gain visitors, customers, and new business, such as SEO, social media, content marketing, PR, and more.

Why We’re Inbound

Transitioning to an inbound marketing department has allowed our team members to become multi-functional, trained in a number of different areas, gaining more expertise in the field. In today’s world of SEO, content marketing, and social media, you have to know how to “do it all.” Successful strategies include some of everything, not segmenting areas and focusing on one tactic over another. Based on this fact, at Zywave, you’ll hear us talking about inbound marketing a lot, rather than focusing on just SEO or just content marketing.

What This Means for Zywave Clients & Insurance Agencies

First, this means a shift in the way our clients (and the online marketing community) think about inbound marketing tactics separately, especially SEO. The activities and elements involved in inbound marketing make an impact on SEO success. Having an SEO-friendly and optimized website is one piece of an overall inbound marketing strategy, not a “silver bullet” or a lead generation machine. Inbound marketing activities such as blogging, social media, and press releases, will work together with your onsite strategy over time to increase the traffic and conversion opportunities on your website. Inbound marketing includes onsite activities – such as keyword research, meta data and content creation, design / coding, and more – and offsite activities – such as social media, press releases, local listings, etc. – in order to be successful.

Making the mental shift from relying solely on efforts like onsite SEO for success can be difficult. We’ve gone from a world where 4-5 years ago, your onsite strategy may have been enough to bring in the organic search traffic you wanted to see and ultimately conversion opportunities. In today’s world of inbound marketing, there has to be a number of different activities working together to bring these results.

Even in the grand scheme of things, inbound marketing as a whole is one piece of the puzzle; you also need to consider your SEM strategy, paid marketing efforts, and offline marketing activities.

This shift also means more well-rounded marketing strategies for our clients! Whereas before your onsite efforts and activities such as social media and blogging were thought of in silos, now they are thought of as one overall inbound strategy. What we do onsite affects what we do in blogging, what we do in social media, what we do in press, etc. These efforts work together to create traffic and conversion opportunities on your website.

For example, if you’re participating in a local charity event this month for breast cancer awareness and you want to not only make your customers and prospects aware, but also gain more volunteers, we would suggest that you approach promoting this from multiple channels. We would suggest that you post about the event on your onsite blog and social media channels, as well as send out an email campaign to your customers and prospects about your agency’s participation and how they can get involved. You can complement these efforts with a press release about the event, your agency’s involvement, and how others in the area can get involved. You can also look at this from a product perspective; integrate your involvement with this cause with your health insurance offerings in blog posts, social media posts, and emails about breast health.

The Zywave inbound marketing team looks forward to taking our strategies onward and upward, helping our clients achieve results with comprehensive marketing solutions that integrate the many moving parts in inbound. Have questions about inbound marketing? For Zywave clients, please take advantage of our SEO 101 certification course in the Zywave University!