Your retirement plan might involve sitting on a beach, renovating your house, or spending a lot of time with the grandkids, but does your business have a retirement plan? 

Your small insurance business needs to stay in touch with your clients. What is the best way to do this?

Sometimes, the most boring work is ultimately the most rewarding. According to Forbes, "57% of data scientists state that cleaning and organizing data is the least enjoyable part of their work." 

Are you worried that you're missing something? While errors and omissions insurance will help cover you if you have made a mistake, it's far better for your reputation and financial security to avoid making those omissions in the first place. 

In the fall of 2018, the Camp Fire, the deadliest fire in California's history, devastated a California community, leading to 85 deaths.

If you think that networking is about attending conferences and workshops, you're only partly right. Networking isn't just about attending events.

Your marketing funds are likely not infinite, so you need to be strategic about how you manage those funds. As an insurance agency, how much should you spend on marketing? 

Your insurance company wants to be known as one that cares. This is especially important at a time when social media news travels quickly. 

What insurance should your insurance company provide to your employees? As an insurance company, you know how valuable insurance is for peoples' peace of mind. 

What should you be doing on social media? Since social media became essential for business promotion, this has been the perennial question.

What is insurance drip marketing? A drip doesn't sound very positive; it sounds like what you'd get if your faucet was leaking. 

What will insurance agencies get out of this year's American Agents Alliance conference? 

How do social media marketing and your insurance agency connect to each other? While you may use social media as part of your personal life, using social media marketing for your business requires another level of expertise altogether.

Does your insurance business have E&O insurance? If not, you should. E&O insurance gives you some protection against legal costs if your staff make errors or omissions that cause problems for your clients.

Time, effort, and money: you spend all of these when you head to a conference. 

Should an insurance agent join a professional association? Whether you're just starting out in the job or you've been an insurance agent for years, a professional association can be valuable to your career development.

What is the benefit of insurance marketing? Does it simply drive business to your agency, or is there something more? Marketing is about much more than the immediate return on investment.

How is climate change altering society? This is a question that those in the insurance field must grapple with as storms, fires, and floods become more frequent. 

Insurance agent marketing is a tricky business. You want to be honest and polite, yet you need positive online reviews to ensure that people continue to come to your business. 

As the technology partner of choice for over 20,000 agencies across the country, including 5,000 California agents, we know what it’s like to be an independent agent. 

Independent agents have thrived as generalists. Historically, their bread- and-butter business has been P&C, life, health — the standard, core coverage with economical pricing and a straightforward process.

How much does an insurance agent make? While the insurance field may be a field that you got into out of a desire to help others, as you enter the field, it's important to set your expectations for earnings.

Does your insurance agency work with an insurance agent association? If you're with an association like American Agents Alliance, you may be a member for the many benefits such as discounted E&O insurance, or you might enjoy attending the annual conference to learn about advances in the field and develop your networks. 

What should your marketing department do? More importantly, what should they do on their own, and when do they need the assistance and advice of others at your insurance agency? 

One thing can be said for the world of insurance marketing: it's constantly shifting, which can be both exciting and maddening to insurance agency marketers. 

What is E&O insurance? Is it also known as liability insurance? 

Are people talking about your insurance agency online? If the thought makes you cringe, you may need to manage your online reputation. The online world is a place where people are there to chat about what makes them happy and what makes them furious.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram: insurance marketing on social media isn't new. However, you may be new to advertising through these social media venues.

Is marketing really worth the time and money you spend? That's the perennial question as you delve into your business budget.

Generation Z is the up and coming generation. This generation is just now reaching adulthood, and while many have not yet started families, some are starting to move out, look at apartments, and drive. 

Do you need to belong to an insurance agent association? While it's not mandatory to be part of such a group, the benefits that you can gain from joining an independent insurance agent association are huge, and there is no real downside to participation.

As an insurance agency, you juggle paperwork every day. Insurance agents require a lot of documents to continue running successfully. 

When you're considering E&O insurance, it's easy to focus on the errors that could cause client problems. Even simple issues such as taking down incorrect address information could mean that a client receives mail too late or not at all. 

Millennials are growing up. While the Millennial generation has long had the reputation of being less committed and less settled, many Millennials do have families and homes. 

Google ads: should you invest, or are they a waste of your time and budget? When you're thinking of creating Google insurance ads, you need to know how to develop them to have the strongest impact on your audience. 

How can you create the best insurance jobs in your area of work? 

You sell insurance. However, your agency is much more than that. You have a vision of who you are, and you have a corporate culture, even if you don't always articulate it. 

Hiring a new employee is expensive and time consuming. And when you finally find the perfect fit, you invest even more resources into training the newbie and getting them acclimated to your culture. 

What makes an insurance marketing video accessible, shareable, and even viral? Video is a medium that is being used more and more to highlight a company's uniqueness and expertise. 

When you leave the office, does your agency follow? There was a time when being away from the office meant work left undone. 

As you hire for your insurance jobs, you must hire the people who are right for the position. However, even the best and most knowledgeable employee needs to be trained. 

Are you stepping outside your hiring comfort zone for the first time? As a small insurance business, you may have been lucky enough to hire from your friends and family at first. 

Who needs E&O insurance? If you're a smaller insurance agency, you might wonder whether you should bother getting E&O insurance. 

​What makes your business special to your clients? When you're diving into your insurance marketing, knowing your strengths allows you to play on those strengths as you communicate your value to your clients. 

What support do you have in the process of developing and nurturing your leads? Working with an insurance agent association can help you create better connections with your leads. 

Could your insurance website best be described as a turtle, rather than a cheetah? While slow and steady might win the race in some contexts, when it comes to your website loading time, there's not a lot of success to find in a slow-loading website. 

As an insurance agency, you play many roles in the community. You're a business, but you're also there to help people find the protection that they need against disasters and minor crises of all sorts.

Are you a friendly company? While you might be friendly in person and focus on customer service as you train your employees, you could present a different persona online. 

Insurance marketing is a conversation. As you work on your insurance marketing, what steps are you taking to get to know your clients? 

Keeping your database organized is like dusting your house. It's easy to forget to do it, and after a while, you might not even see the problems anymore.

There are so many variables in the world of online insurance marketing. From the wording you use on your website to the way that you coordinate...

Should you join social networks to help make your business connections stronger? Sometimes, it can seem like social networking is a way to spend a lot of time and not really a networking venue at all.

What does your email insurance marketing system do for you? You might consider your marketing system to be an outstanding tool for wrangling your contacts and communicating with those contacts.

If you want your clients to be thrilled with your business and act as brand ambassadors, where do you begin?

As your clients look toward the future, they might feel uneasy. After last year's fires in California, the fire season that awaits seems intimidating. 

Data management plays a huge role in the betterment of your insurance company. As you work to grow and to better understand your clients, you need to know about...

Growing an insurance agency is about so much more than creating policies for your clients and filing paperwork… It’s about looking out for your customers’ best interests, proving value as an agent, and creating meaningful relationships with your marketplace.

For the most part, employee enthusiasm is determined by work culture. And this can often be fostered or hindered by you…the manager! 

What can you do if a customer has complained about your company - perhaps loudly, all over the internet? 

Does your business have enough insurance? This might seem like a silly question when you sell insurance.