When building out an agency marketing strategy, you have to ask: Is a consumer who is shopping around going to stumble upon your site and fill out a form? Do you have people who are trained to call that consumer, engage the prospect and convince them to buy insurance from you? Does that happen 10 to 20 times a day? If it does, stop reading because you are one of the few that's making it work.

As an agency owner, ask yourself if part of your marketing investment should be invested in vendors that have more experience in search, search engine optimization, search engine marketing and navigating lead generation than you do. Traditionalist producers say they want customers that are referred to their agency — and for them to appreciate the value you provide. However, today's business owner knows that they need to capture prospects online that we used to find through traditional means. They believe that it's their job to build a relationship, identify needs for the client and solve their pain points.

Ideally, your strategy contains several forms of marketing, including: Building a local presence, lead buying, referral sources, e-mail marketing, event marketing and any other way you can get prospects into your sales funnel. Remember, we need to run our agencies like sales and marketing organizations that happen to sell insurance products. If you think like a marketer, you'll transform your agency.