Why Social Media Marketing is Important to Insurance Companies
Social media marketing is essential for your insurance company’s digital marketing plan. As customers increasingly spend their time on social media, it’s important your business follows suit.
Increasingly, consumers have been spending less time face-to-face and more time online. A poll conducted in the spring of 2020 found that half of the adults are spending more time on social media (source).
Insurance companies need to have a strong social media presence to be successful. This guide provides tips on how to create content that generates leads and sales.
Why Insurance Social Media Marketing is Essential
Social media has revolutionized how we connect and communicate, a transformation that has profound implications for the insurance industry. Establishing a strong social media strategy is no longer a luxury but a core component of any successful insurance company’s marketing plan.
Here, we explore social media’s indispensable role in shaping the relationships between insurers and their policyholders.
1. Build Trust and Credibility
As any experienced agent knows, consumers are not quick to trust insurance companies. In fact, a 2017 study found that 43% of consumers lack trust in insurance companies (source).
In today’s increasingly digital world, a strong social media presence helps your insurance industry appear more credible and trustworthy. Through engaging with your audience and creating meaningful connections, you can establish trust and build meaningful relationships with customers.
2. Provide Customer Service
Social media allows policy holders to connect directly with their insurance company without using traditional customer service channels. Instead of calling or emailing, customers can quickly send a direct message or tweet when something goes awry.
Speedy response times and efficient customer service on social media helps build strong relationships and improve customer loyalty. It’s important to respond quickly to customer complaints on social media posts, as 60% of them expect a response within an hour (source).
3. Social Listening
Social listening is a way to monitor what people are saying about your brand, products, and competitors on social media. This can help you gauge brand perception and customer satisfaction. Through understanding what matters most to your followers, you can create content that better resonates with your audience.
These days, there are several social media monitoring and listening tools that can collect and analyze data to help your company find pain points and create the best content possible.
How to Market Insurance on Social Media
While traditional marketing remains a cornerstone for the insurance sector, social media has emerged as a dynamic battlefield for customer attention and loyalty. It’s a space where informative content can become viral, customer service can be transformed, and brands can be humanized.
Let’s break down the essential tactics that can elevate an insurance company’s presence on social media, driving engagement, lead generation, and customer retention.
Focus on Creating Quality Content
The primary purpose of an insurance provider’s social media presence is not to make sales. It’s to nurture meaningful, lasting relationships with your current policyholders and future clients.
Focus on sharing informational and educational content that boosts your credibility and builds trust. Here are a few social media content ideas for insurance companies to get you started:
- Reminders of important deadlines
- Short informational videos
- Educational posts and how-to guides
- Reviews of local businesses
- Infographics
Great content not only drives higher engagement levels but also offers the potential to generate new leads and referrals. Users can discover new businesses through hashtags, Explore pages, and tagged locations, and current customers can drive referrals by sharing posts.
In fact, 71% of customers who had a positive experience with a brand on social media are likely to recommend the brand to their friends and family (source). Be sure to actively engage with your audience by responding to comments, direct messages, mentions, and tags.
Share Customer Testimonials
Customer testimonials are a great way to show your audience what your insurance company can do for them. They help build trust and show exactly how your company can help protect people’s assets and valuable possessions.
Share success stories, photos, and videos from clients who saved money or had a positive experience working with an agent to solve a specific issue. Make sure you have permission to use testimonials, reviews, and user-generated content on your page.
Highlight Your Brand Values
Your social media channels are the perfect opportunity to highlight your company’s values. Build trust and improve your brand image by showing how your company gives back to your local community.
Whether it’s photos of your agents volunteering in their community, a feature on the charitable organization you donate to, or an infographic highlighting the impact of your efforts, your followers are sure to be impressed.
If your insurance business needs help in creating a strong social media presence, Asset Digital Communications can help. Our experienced digital marketing experts can create a social media strategy that generates leads, builds trust, and keeps policyholders happy.
Strengthen the relationship with your customers
Agents work hard to build a relationship with their clients in US & Canada. And more often than not, they maintain that relationship completely on their own. But that need not be the case.
Social listening is a way to monitor what people are saying about your brand, products, and competitors on social media. This can help you gauge brand perception and customer satisfaction.
Here are some ways to engage with clients on social media –
- When posting content, encourage the audience to share their thoughts/feedback in the comments section.
- Respond to all comments, even if they are negative. This is an opportunity to show publicly that you care.
- Encourage longer conversations/grievances to be discussed over direct message.
- Host a contest with a giveaway to win over customer love and goodwill.
- Encourage clients to share their stories and repurpose them as user-generated content.
Choose the right social media platforms
There are more than 130 social media sites available for you to choose from (source). Each of these sites can be high potential, and be the next big thing that everyone starts using. It’s important to choose the right social media profiles, especially if you’re an insurance agency in the US or Canada.
Good social media marketing strategies for insurance companies is built on making the most of the right social media platforms. Social media platforms come and go, let’s take a look at the ones you should be using –
- Twitter for short and creative interactions
- Twitter has over 229 million users (source) and has been a social mainstay since 2006. Albeit a less visual platform than others, you can still post audio and video content.
- The area where Twitter really shines is customer support. It offers the ability to quickly respond to negative customer grievances online and change customer sentiment in real time.
- YouTube for engaging video content
- YouTube has more than 2.1 billion users worldwide (source), making it a must-use platform for your insurance agency. With that scale, YouTube has your target audience waiting for you.
- Moreover, with multiple content formats like YouTube Shorts and normal videos, it gives you the ability to experiment. It is also a great platform to share how-to videos or explainer videos. This is great for a product as complex as insurance.
- Facebook to make the most of the feed
- With over 2.9 billion monthly active users (source) Facebook is one of the largest social media platforms out there. It is also one of the most versatile.
- Facebook users are used to seeing all sorts of content, from long-form articles to videos, photos, and audio. This gives you a lot of flexibility when it comes to creating content.
Key Takeaways
Social media campaigns for insurance companies is a great way to grow your insurance business. Although social media can be overwhelming due to its size and complexity, it is relatively easy to get started with it. Social media is a cheap way to keep in touch with old clients, attract new ones, and build up your brand awareness.
Let’s take a quick look at what we learned today –
- Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are great platforms to begin your social media journey on. While it is important to have a presence on all the popular social media platforms, pay attention to these three the most.
- Social media is not a consumption channel. Use it as a two-way communication street. Talk to your customers, share insightful content, get feedback, build trust and establish a long-lasting relationship.
- Content is king when it comes to social media. Make and post content that addresses your customer’s pain points and eases their decision-making process.
- Portray your brand as a helpful, genuine and knowledgeable one on social media. Do this by sharing thought leadership content, responding to customer queries and encouraging a conversation.
- Last but not the least, consider the help of an agency if you’re thinking of running paid ads on these platforms as that is where the technical side of social media begins!
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