For the people who sell and service policies, an acquisition is a milestone. For NavSav Insurance’s marketing team, it’s a to-do list that lands all at once: another Google Business Profile, a website with its own domain, customers who need to hear what’s changing, a set of social accounts, and sometimes an office that’s about to close, move or merge.
Thaíza Peotta has spent more than four years at NavSav and leads the marketing team’s relationships with its vendors and partners. Synup is where her team runs the local side of each acquisition, from listings and location updates to reviews, local posts and location reports. It has also helped them learn what to do, and when.
01 The challenge
Every acquired agency arrives with its own local footprint
NavSav has grown by buying small insurance agencies, and each one was used to running its own local presence. Thaíza lists what typically comes with a deal: a Google Business Profile, a website that needs redirecting, clients who need to be contacted, and a physical location that is sometimes closing, sometimes moving and sometimes merging with another office. And they came also with a bunch of their own social media profiles that we had to manage.
Insurance raises the stakes. Insurance is also a very complex industry,
she says, and local details matter to the customers who rely on a nearby office: when it’s open, what it covers, and how to reach the people handling their policies.
Before Synup, NavSav used a different provider. The initial goal of the switch was to reduce costs, but Thaíza says consolidation is what decided it. Synup compressed a lot of different partnerships into one
: locations, social media, help when something went wrong with a Google Business Profile, and SEO support, all in one place. Not that the price was that different,
she adds. The value was in having it all together, and the team is still with Synup years later.
02 The workflow
A repeatable playbook for each new agency
What changed with Synup wasn’t one feature. It was knowing the sequence. Synup actually helped us streamline all of this process,
Thaíza says. So we knew what to ask for during the M&A process, we knew when to deploy certain kind of like rebranding or touches with our customers, or where did we need to redirect websites to.
Synup helped the team organize the questions and decisions that come with an acquisition: which local assets to request, what happens to the office’s listing and website, when to rebrand and reach out to customers, and how to manage the new location alongside the rest of NavSav’s footprint.
What arrives with an acquired agency
A separate local footprint
- Google Business ProfileThe agency’s existing listing
- Website & domainRedirect it, or keep it for now
- Existing customersPeople who need to be contacted
- A physical officeClosing, moving or merging
- Social media profilesMore accounts to manage
NavSav’s playbook
A clearer sequence of work
- Know what to ask forRequest the profile, domain and social accounts during the M&A process.
- Plan for office changesUpdate the location when an office closes, moves or merges.
- Choose where the website goesRedirect it now, or keep it tracked on the profile while people still use it.
- Time the rebrand and customer touchesTell customers what’s changing, when it makes sense to.
- Run it with every other locationListings, reviews, local posts and reports, managed in Synup.
Using data to decide the future of an old domain
One example shows how the process shaped decisions, not just tasks. Acquired agencies were often attached to their websites. They of course were very fond of their website and their domain,
Thaíza says, and didn’t want to disappear into the main NavSav site overnight.
So NavSav left the old website on the agency’s Google Business Profile and added UTM tracking to see whether people were still using the old domain or going straight to NavSav’s site. That gave the team evidence for each call: shut a domain down because people weren’t using it, or keep it a few more months because they were. It helped us build a lot of accountability,
she says, and bring data into those new offices that we were acquiring.
Are people still using the old domain?
Mapping the keywords each agency brought with it
Acquisitions also brought different search strengths. Sometimes these different agencies would come with different keywords,
Thaíza says. Synup’s reporting helped the team map them and decide where to focus time and effort on content creation.
03 Day to day
Keeping every office current, and customers in the loop
Once an agency is part of NavSav, the daily job is keeping each location accurate. The team uses Synup’s location management to change office hours, update business descriptions and add a new kind of insurance that NavSav starts covering in an area. That’s easy to add within Synup,
Thaíza says.
Local posts handle the operational news customers actually need. We use posts for locations as a way to inform our customers if the office will be closed or if they will be starting late for some reason or another,
she explains. Posts also tell people when an office will be at a local event. The team creates this content in batches: Synup really helps us build all of our content and schedule all of our content all at once.
Scheduled location posts · one week
Our office is closed today. We’ll reopen tomorrow at the usual time.
PublishedWe’re starting a little late this morning. Thanks for your patience.
ScheduledPlanned content for the week, queued across locations.
ScheduledCome say hello at the community event this weekend.
ScheduledUpdated hours now live on our profile.
Scheduled04 Insurance review management
Reviews that turn into customer follow-ups
Review management is where Thaíza is most specific. It’s the one metric she says the team actually tracks, and a KPI NavSav reports to its C-level leadership.
Less than 1% of NavSav’s reviews left without a response, estimated by Thaíza at the interview
“I believe we have like less than 1% of unresponded reviews.”
Thaíza’s estimate at the time of the interview. Most remaining unanswered reviews were over five years old or predated an acquisition.
She is careful about what sits inside that remainder. Most of it, she explains, is reviews that were posted over five years ago or reviews that were posted before we acquired an agency,
where replying now wouldn’t make much sense.
The response rate is only part of the process. Negative reviews also feed NavSav’s customer success strategy, so a negative review can prompt follow-up from a real person. As Thaíza describes it, the team brings all of our bad reviews
to the customer success and service teams so they can reach out to that customer and get all of those issues fixed.
- A review lands on a locationMonitored across NavSav’s offices in Synup
- The team respondsUnanswered reviews under 1%, estimated by Thaíza at the interview
- Bad reviews are flaggedRouted to customer success and service teams
- A person reaches outWorks with the customer toward a resolution
05 Reporting
Location reports leadership takes on the road
NavSav’s team leans on Synup’s SEO and keyword reports. I can’t stress this enough. We use the keyword report a lot,
Thaíza says. The team periodically generated reports for every location, with a focus on the grid view of keyword rankings, and printed them so leadership could see NavSav’s reach in the cities, neighborhoods and counties around an office when they travel to it.
She is equally clear about the limits. NavSav isn’t currently tracking social media metrics or actual SEO metrics,
and hasn’t put much effort into targeting specific keywords to specific areas. For now, the reports show leadership where NavSav is geographically stronger and where it needs to improve.
06 The partnership
Support that works like part of the team
Asked what Synup does best, Thaíza points to customer experience. Every time we had an issue or we had a problem or we had a question,
she says, her Synup customer success contacts were quick to reply and help the team figure it out.
That help reached strategic decisions too. While NavSav acquired agencies, it also closed a few physical offices, and the team wasn’t sure how Google would respond, or what that would do to our reputation or domain reputation.
Synup’s customer success team helped them work out which actions to take, at which point in each transition, and what best practice looked like.
That meant nobody on her team had to become a specialist in Google’s rules. The marketers could stay focused on their own work, with Synup’s people on hand to answer questions along the way. Thaíza has already shared Synup with a few colleagues.
NavSav marketing
- Focuses on what the team does best
- Coordinates marketing updates when offices close, move or merge
- Runs listings, reviews and posts in Synup
Synup customer success
- Brings Google best-practice know-how
- Replies quickly to issues and questions
- Helps sequence each office transition