The good news is that marketing is still marketing in the Digital Age, because people are still people. Let's look at that marketing process from the perspective of both the buyer and the seller, and then look at how technology plays into it in the Digital Age.

I see the process of marketing as a continuum that runs from Perception where we build awareness and recognition of what we do through Persuasion when people are interested or have a need that we can fill, and which results in a sale, and finally through Permanence where we keep people for a period of time and increase the amount of business we do with them.

The first stage of this is the Perception stage. In the beginning, buyers simply don't know about you. In the Perception stage, we want to move them from that state of ignorance through a state where the little bell goes off in their heads when they hear your name, and finally to the level where they, not only, recognize your name, but have some idea of what you do. In some situations, this is referred to as "branding.%

In the Perception stage, the buyer is acted upon by your advertising and publicity activities. This is mostly a numbers game at this stage. We know that it requires about four contacts every six months or so to keep awareness and recognition up. We know that the more name hits we can get, the faster recognition and awareness show up. We know that the better crafted that our message is, the more likely it is that people will understand what's special about us. During this stage, the buyer isn't doing much other than receiving our messages. At some point, though, he or she gets interested in buying something we have to sell.

That's when we enter the Persuasion part of this continuum. Here the roles get very different between buyer and seller.

As the seller, you're interested in three things happening. First, you want to identify prospects as soon in the process as you can. Once that's done, you clarify what your offerings are, establish value, and tell your story as well as possible. Finally, you close the deal.

From the seller's perspective, it's a bit different. In the beginning of this phase, the seller is looking around for different businesses that might handle his or her need. Once that's narrowed down, the seller spends some time qualifying, clarifying, and comparing offers. This is the point where you're both qualifying the prospect and establishing value. The buyer then moves on to buying. As always, people like to buy, but they don't necessarily like to be "sold.%

In the third stage, we have folks who are new customers. What happens next depends a bit on their situation and what particular product they've signed up for. If they're already really comfortable with the product they've bought, then there isn't a lot of need on their part for follow-up at this stage. On the other hand, if this is something new, or something they're uncomfortable about, strong follow-up is a good idea. Once we're through that "newä phase, your challenge is to stay in touch with folks so that when it comes time for them to renew or to think about another kind of insurance, they think about you rather than about a lot of comparison shopping.

When you start thinking about how you act in each of these three areas, consider a mix of your other marketing and Web and e-mail. In the Perception phase, the things you're doing in other areas are probably some of the most effective. Youâll use direct mail and perhaps seminars and other methods to get your name out there. Youâll spend time advertising, and going to mixers, and spreading business cards around. Youâll leave behind brochures and flyers -- all of the stuff that you're used to.

Youâll also be doing some stuff with the Web site and with e-mail. Youâll want to promote your Web site aggressively in all of your collateral material. Every time you have a piece of print material, promote the Web site.

Be very specific about this. If you've got a brochure that's talking about your auto coverage, make sure that the links that people find in the material take them directly to information about auto policies. Don't send them to the main home page where they've got to hunt for information. If you're selling a homeowners policy, send them to a homeownersâ information page. This is a variation on the multiple front doors strategy that we talked about earlier.

Promote your Web site aggressively, as well. Do the work to get it registered with the appropriate search engines and re-register frequently. Make sure your metatags are hard at work for you.

Do a lot of log analysis on your Web site. This is true for all three parts of your marketing effort. Log analysis lets you know what people are doing on the site, and you can use that to determine what they're interested in and learn some things about how they buy. Youâll also learn some things about how you may want to modify your site in order to be more effective.

E-mail doesn't have a lot of strong uses in the Perception stage. There is one exception to this. Those are some of those e-mail ongoing contact things we talked about just a little bit ago.

A newsletter that someone can sign up for by visiting your Web site or by calling your office is a way that you can stay in touch and keep your name and brand fresh. If you segment your newsletter by individual topics, those topics, in effect, are ways that people tell you what they're interested in. You can include interest hooks in the newsletter that may result in them calling or e-mailing you for further information.

Now let's move on to the Persuasion part of the matrix. In this part, the biggest "otherä activity that you're going to be undertaking is whatever you do when you answer the phones or do your routine kinds of prospecting and pick up on a good lead.

What does your Web site do here? First of all, your Web site can be an excellent place to capture leads at this point. You do that through your autoresponders, through forms, and through features, such as calculators, comparators, and configurators. Here's a quick review of what those features are.

Calculators are what the name implies. They're devices on the Web site that help people calculate something, like what their premium will be for a certain kind of coverage. If you're going to have calculators on your site, you probably will want to make them available only to people who register in some way. Certainly, some people will register and give you bad information, but they're probably not good prospects anyway.

Comparators are devices, which lay out information side-by-side, based on a limited number of choices. Comparators are excellent ways to show differences between certain kinds of coverage.

Finally there are configurators. There's very little use of these in insurance right now, but there's a lot of use in other financial services areas. Visit the Charles Schwab or Fidelity Web sites, for example, and youâll find features, which help people choose whether or not a mutual fund is an investment vehicle for them and then help them choose the appropriate fund. Those are called configurators. You can expect to see these developing in the insurance arena very quickly.

Require registration for use of some features on your site. Use forms for people to request information, and use autoresponders to respond. Because they're using forms or registrations, you are capturing e-mail addresses. That, in turn, requires you to have a system in place where you can respond by following up on leads.

In one banking institution that I worked with, for example, lending officers followed up on Monday morning by sending an e-mail to everyone who had worked the calculators on mortgage or auto loans over the weekend. The follow-up was very simple. They were thanked for visiting the site and being interested in the institution, and the e-mail then laid out some other kinds of information.

Usually in an e-mail follow-up, you don't want to lay out lots of information in detail. Instead, just like with direct response mail pieces, you want to get people to take some action. I've found it's best to do that with specific links in the e-mail to special Web pages. This allows you to put a lot more information out there than you possibly could put in an effective e-mail and to put the features that you can do on a Web site that are not a good idea in e-mail.

If you send people to specific pages as follow-up, youâll also be able to track whether or not they pursue more information there; and, thereby, tell you that they're more interested. What we're talking about here is developing the kinds of follow-up systems that we routinely have developed to inquiries for paper literature. There's an initial response and then timed response over the next few weeks. In the meantime, we've also captured the e-mail and can make other offers for information that let us stay in touch.

Will you be actually closing the sale on the Web site? For the present, I think the answer will be "no.% I don't know if it will ever be "yes," but I think if "yesä is possible, it will require some deep thinking and planning about issues like underwriting, when coverage is binding, how to balance the need for simple forms on the Web with the need to gather appropriate information, and the appropriate role of the agency in Web-based or Web-influenced sales.

I simply don't think we're there yet. Since the insurance industry is a bit behind the overall e-commerce curve, I think that youâll see some very new and well-thought-out business models incorporating the Web in the insurance business within the next year or two. We're already seeing those new models, characteristic of the third stage of a Technological Revolution, in other industries.

In this Persuasion stage, e-mail can be the way that you stay in touch. Increasingly, this is an excellent tool for staying in touch with upscale prospects. E-mail is a dynamic tool that lets people communicate at their leisure and have written records of the information that you send them, as well as the questions they ask you. Remember, though, that you need to keep your response rates up in the quick zone in order to be effective here.

The Persuasion stage is also where you'll pay attention to cross-sells. If you've got form, for example, where a visitor tells you that they own their home, you can have a pop-up window ask if they're interested in homeowners insurance. If a person indicates that they're a business owner, you can offer business insurance. If their zip code shows that they live in a high income area, you can ask if they have coverage on jewelry, art or wines.

Okay, they bought a policy. Now what? Just like in our other areas, you've got lots of activities you've always undertaken and they probably won't go away in the Digital Age. This is the Permanence stage, where you work on keeping them as policyholders for life.

Once you have a policyholder, they should have a private area on the Web site where they can make adjustments to their policies, get more information, etc. One of the most powerful things you can do to build and keep relationships with people on the Web is to give them a way to handle routine things routinely, without having to play a lot of "phone tagä and do a lot of extraneous form filling.

All the e-mail things we've talked about, such as newsletters, greetings, etc., are the ways that you stay in touch with current and recent customers.

That's the end of the program, but it's not the end of learning about the Digital Age or how you can be more productive and profitable. To help you, I've developed an extensive Resource Page.

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