Insurance producer marketing tips: New LinkedIn view & a free research tool
In this month’s insurance producer marketing tips we’re revealing sneak peeks at LinkedIn’s new changes to your profile and also unveiling a new free competitive intelligence tool you can use to look behind the curtains at your competition and your prospective commercial clients. Let’s dive in.
LinkedIn changes to your profile page
1. How your profile view will change. First, your background photo size is changing, so you’ll want to create a new background photo that’s 1536 x 768 pixels. (This is the large banner-size photo.) Next, your profile photo is now round (like in their mobile app) and appears in the center of your intro section. Because the intro section is centered, it commands more attention, so you definitely want to review it to ensure you’re putting your best foot forward. You can edit your name, current position, education, industry, professional headline and summary. Those who view your profile can only see the first two lines of your summary, so make sure those really shine. In the new section, Accomplishments, you can add projects (this could be short case studies), courses attended, publications, certifications and awards.
2. How LinkedIn apps and tools will change. Unfortunately, they’ve removed some advanced search options, trying to push more of us to their premium options. However, you can still filter by the level of connections (first, second, or third), general locations (but not zip codes), companies, industries, profile language, non-profit and schools. From the search page, you can also seek out jobs, companies, groups, and schools. Saved searches and tagging are no longer available for free. Instead, saved or advanced searches and tagging are only available in their premium-level Sales Solutions’ Sales Navigator. LinkedIn is currently offering three months of free access to Sales Navigator if you don’t currently have it. And when you click on the My Network icon, you can only sort by first name, last name, recently added – all other tags and sorting features are gone. Learn more about the new updates here; get more insurance producer marketing tips for LinkedIn from earlier posts, How to Rock Social Selling on LinkedIn and Digital Insurance Marketing Helps.
Check out this new competitive intelligence tool that’s free while in beta-testing
As the second of our insurance producer marketing tips, we uncovered a new tool that can help you gather intel about your competition or those companies you’re trying to get your foot in the door with. It’s free, it’s easy, and is mostly but not completely accurate (after all, it’s in beta testing). The founder wants your feedback in exchange for using the tool.
It’s called GrowthBot – and it’s a new chatbot from the marketing gurus at Hubspot. You can access it by messaging hello to @GrowthBot on Facebook Messenger. Then you can ask it such questions as “Give me an overview of ArrowheadGrp.com” (adding in the company URL you want to preview). Or ask, “What companies are similar to <add your target’s URL here>?”. It will respond with a list of companies, and tell you to that if you want details on any of them, just enter its number in the list. You can also ask what keywords a company ranks for, what PPC keywords a company buys, what ad networks they use…even “What are the top articles this week on insurance?” And a bonus: if you’re not sure of an email address, tell it to “Look up email <and then insert what you think is their correct email address>.” It’ll also provide their LinkedIn and Twitter account links, if they have them. Give it a try.