Social media for independent insurance agencies is an important part of digital marketing today. However, the hallmarks of great social activity still elude many insurance agents. Here are five proven ways to breathe new life into your social media efforts to attract more insurance consumers to your insurance agency.
1. Study your audience
Before you can attract your audience, you need to understand your audience. Not just the needs your business can serve, but what matters to them in life. Get to know them. Listen to them, ask about their interests, their concerns, and their expectations. Explore the social profiles of clients that have liked your page and identify the common threads.
As you start to understand the decisions your clients make that lead to needing your services, you’ll have an easier time speaking to their needs and finding opportunities to connect.
2. Expand your reach with targeted ads
Once you have a better understanding of your audience’s interests, needs, and concerns, you’ll have the perfect fuel to expand your reach through targeted ads. Popular social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn have incredibly powerful targeting capabilities. Build your targeting around the common traits of your best niche or client profile in the regions you serve and boost posts and build ads around them. It might be counter-intuitive, but resist the urge to promote content that directly promotes your services right away. Instead, speak to their interests and concerns. Do you have a lot of clients with classic cars? Share resources that help them take care of their cars, or learn about cars in their area. Maybe a large portion of your clients are new homeowners. Share resources that help them understand a homeowners needs, or what to know when buying a new home.
After you’ve earned their trust and gotten them to like or follow your page is the time to speak more directly about the services you offer, in both ads and organic activity.
3. Be real, authentic people
It’s easier to connect with people than a brand. Selling insurance is a locally focused business that has always thrived on community engagement. Just because you can’t shake hands with every one of your clients and prospects doesn’t mean they can’t get to know you and the people in your agency.
Take the time to highlight your team on social media. Share when your agency celebrates a team member’s birthday. Show how your agency participates in community events or charities. Celebrate when someone breaks a personal sales record. Talk about the hobbies and topics your team members are passionate about.
When it’s plain to see that your agency is made of real members of the community it serves, you will build trust, and your audience will be far more receptive to your services.
4. Share the latest news and trends
Quality content is the backbone of any marketing strategy. Sharing stories and information through social media is a powerful tool for insurance agencies. Remember that not everything you share needs to come directly from you. If you find an article or video that speaks to your audience’s interests, share it. Take it further and write your own commentary about it. When you can show that you have a genuine interest in the things that matter to your audience, you create an opportunity to connect with them on a deeper level.
5. Lead them to gated content
All of this social media attention won’t do you much good if it doesn’t bring you any leads. In order to do that, you’re going to need to capture contact information. Promote valuable content that relates more directly to the insurance needs of your audience. The social posts promoting this content shouldn’t make it freely available, but lead back to your website and require them to fill out a form to receive the content. This content should focus on topics like how they can protect the things they care about, how to prevent disaster from happening or how you can minimize impact in the worst case scenarios. Sometimes it can be hard to make the necessary changes and build great social media habits. We want to make it as easy as possible for independent insurance agencies to leverage every tool possible to grow their business. That’s why Agency Revolution gives our Attract™ customers social media scheduling tools, ready-made messages, and a library of great content, while Elevate™ customers benefit from personalized marketing guidance that teaches best practices and helps them create original campaigns that deliver results.