Gavin Lobo

Happily Single from Aviva Canada on Vimeo.

Amanda is a 27-year old single mother. An optimist at heart, Amanda questions how her divorce could have affected her car insurance rates.

For more videos, visit ChangeInsurance.ca/InYourShoes/

In Your Shoes

We have launched the very first insurance industry customer centric online video site and that to in record time! Check out the video’s on In Your Shoes and feel free to leave your comments. If you do enter the In Your Shoes contest and win please feel free to let them know you were refered to the site by Gavin Lobo - Brand Marketing.

My first seven days at work were focused on learning everything about the Aviva Canada Change Insurance sites (EN/FR). The English site can be found here - www.changeinsurance.ca. Feel free to leave me comments, feedback, and usability regarding the site as I would love to hear from you. If you are more interested in interacting with the site you can get involved through the Blog. A cool tool on the site is the premium impact calculator that calculates changes to your premium based on certain driving criteria.

With approx. 87% of Canada’s online population on or using social networking sites it is becoming rather imperative that your company has an online social networking strategy. This strategy should include but is not limited to:

- Social Network (SN) groups/communities

- SN advertising

- SN & Blog integration

- SN search strategies

- SN research and evaluation

- SN co-branded promotions

- A SN resource dedicated to managing all of the above

- Company blog content and link management

Your brand is being discussed in groups and social communities online and you need a marketing/brand advocate to manage and monitor these interactions while providing senior management with weekly or monthly reports. With such a large online population using social networks you will have (or will soon have!) geographic and psychographic data to target new or existing segments online to grow or retain customers. Your advertising can be a lot more targeted and in doing so drive better results. I also believe SN is an integral part of online customer service and soon if not already you will find a more of your customer interaction occurring within social networks.

Stay ahead of the curve and start integrating social networking marketers into your organization or expect to be left behind.

If you are looking for SEO/PPC bench mark data to make a case for a SEO budget this guide from MarketingSherpa(this guide has to be bought) will be a useful tool.

Also available (but a little old!) is the guide on Search Engine Optimization as told by 3000+ marketers (the link opens a PDF file) The guide/report was done in 2006 but still has a lot of relevant information for companies just starting out in the SEO space.