Insurance Social Media Marketing – How to Start

Your insurance firm wants to build a social media presence to stand out, but you’re not sure where to begin.

How can insurance agencies take advantage of social media marketing?

Through insurance social media marketing, you can grow your audience with engaging content, build relationships, strengthen trust with testimonials, and use referrals and social ads to increase your leads.

This guide will be your introduction to social media marketing for insurance firms. You’ll learn the types of content to post, which social platforms to use, how to utilize paid social advertising, and even how often to post.

Content Is King: What Insurance Companies Should Post on Social Media

Your insurance company’s Twitter feed or LinkedIn page is blank. It’s time to start posting, but does that mean anything and everything needs to go on your timeline?

No. It’s not better to have anything on your social feeds than nothing at all. To determine what you’ll post, you need to know your audience. If you haven’t already scored and segmented your audience by their geographics, psychographics, or pain points, that’s the first order of business.

An audience audit can also help, as you can then identify your insurance audience’s value, makeup, and demographics.

Once you have this information, it’s time to sit down with other advisors, brokers, or agents in your insurance company to decide what kind of social media content will drive the most value to your audience segments.

Content is a major part of your insurance social media marketing plan, so getting it right is paramount. As you think about what kind of content might gel with your audience, ask yourself why a lead or client is on your social media page.

• Do they want to learn more about you?
• Discover the services you offer? 

Based on those answers and the information from your audience audit, you can craft a marketing campaign full of content that informs, educates, and even entertains your audience.

This content may include:

• Relevant posts on your blog
• Whitepapers or webinar transcripts your team produced
• Articles written by other experts on insurance trends or news
• Company videos
• Infographics or graphs

According to Neil Patel, based on data from a Skyworld survey, the average Internet user spends 20 percent of their time online digesting content. That may not seem like much time, but it’s an open enough window that you can get in if you know how.

Patel also mentions that when someone is interested in a brand, they’ll read about that brand more often. Respondents did that at a rate of 68 percent. Custom content can also be an educational tool, as 80 percent of respondents mentioned they liked using custom content to learn more about a company.

Insurance Social Media Marketing for Brand Awareness and Relationship Building

Increasing Brand Awareness Through Social Media

Let’s talk about your marketing goals.

One reason you’re focusing on social media is so your insurance agency stands out from the competition, right? Brand awareness can help you achieve that goal.

Website and video maker RenderForest has some 2021 stats that underscore the importance of branding. According to them, 59 percent of shoppers would rather purchase from brands they know and love than those they don’t. Some customers, 1/3^rd of them, already know which brands they want to buy from before they even go shopping.

More companies of all industries are prioritizing brand awareness as a result. RenderForest says 75 percent of businesses have begun focusing more on branding.

Insurance social media marketing can build your brand with every post you make. Here are some branding pointers to get you started:

• Use one profile picture across your social media profiles, ideally of your logo, as consistency is crucial to branding.
• If you have a color scheme or design palette you like to use, include it throughout your social media posts. This is especially important on visual platforms like Instagram.
• Be willing to use different marketing personas per platform based on the demographics of your users. For example, your audience on TikTok might skew younger than those who use Twitter.
• Determine what your brand voice will be, including its tone. Are you friendly or strictly business? Neutral but informative? Whatever your brand voice, it should already be expressed in the content you post. Keep the brand voice consistent in all your social posts, even if multiple people manage your social accounts.
• Consider different accounts for various areas within your insurance agency. For instance, you might have one account for car insurance and another for home insurance.

Building and Strengthening Client Relationships

Your lead generation methods churn out qualified leads. You may even use automation to get those leads through the funnel. Along the way, you need to engage with and nurture your leads.

It’s not just your leads who enjoy a little one-on-one time with your company reps, but your customers as well. Social media is a great avenue for maintaining those professional relationships your brokers worked so hard to build.

How do you develop professional relationships across social media? Here are some suggestions:

• Host a contest or giveaway or do a freebie offer.
• Ask for reviews or testimonials, then share positive user experiences on your social accounts.
• When posting content or publishing your own, ask for your audience to share their thoughts in the comments. 
• Respond to as many comments as you can, including the negative ones, as you want to try to ameliorate the issues those customers have.
• Encourage customers to send your insurance company a direct message and reply to the messages you receive.

The Power of Referrals

The best leads are the ones that drop into your lap from your customers, also known as referrals.

By harnessing the power of referrals through your social media marketing efforts, you just may notice that more qualified leads enter your funnel than ever before.

Which Social Platforms Should an Insurance Company Use?

In an article from Influencer Marketing Hub, they listed more than 100 social media platforms that are currently available. Any of these could become the next big thing. Look at platforms like TikTok, which had a meteoric rise seemingly out of nowhere.

Just as quickly as some social platforms grow in popularity though, they can disappear. That’s why no one really talks about Kik anymore. Keeping that in mind, which social media platforms should your insurance agency choose?

Here are the top platforms for insurance social media marketing.

Twitter

A social mainstay since 2006, you don’t have to worry about Twitter falling victim to shifting social media trends. FinancesOnline says that Twitter has 69.3 million users per early 2021 data. That’s a huge audience!

Twitter is less visual than other social media platforms, but that doesn’t mean you can’t post videos and images. Concentrating your messages to 280 characters is also a great way to strengthen your email headline writing skills.

YouTube

Video has huge engagement, which makes YouTube a must-use platform for your insurance social media marketing. According to video production service Lemonlight, YouTube is the top social platform for influencing consumer behavior. It’s also a recommended platform for watching videos, with 83 percent of consumers logging on to YouTube for their video fix.

Statista data states that YouTube has 1.86 billion users worldwide in 2021. Yes, we said billion.

That’s a larger audience than even Twitter!

Facebook

Your insurance company also needs an active Facebook account. Per Statista, Facebook’s user base amounts to 225.61 million people in 2021. By 2025, that number should grow to 235.15 million users.

One of the biggest perks of using Facebook for your insurance social media marketing is that you can post all nature of content. Longer-form posts are acceptable here, unlike on Twitter, and videos and photos are the norm on Facebook as well.

Paid Social Ads for Insurance Social Media Marketing

The benefit of using those platforms for your insurance social media marketing is that all three offer paid social ads. Check now the official websites:

• Facebook for Business
• Twitter Ads
• YouTube Ads.

Determining which social platform you’ll advertise on should come down to your demographics. If you have the largest portion of your audience on Facebook, then focusing your insurance company’s ad revenue on Facebook is best.

The variety of paid ads afforded to you depends on the platform you chose. For instance, on YouTube, here are your ad options:

• Masthead ads on the YouTube homepage that auto-play a 30-second video preview of your ad
• Outstream ads like in-feed content, interstitials in an app, or web banners; these ads appear on the sites of Google video partners outside of YouTube
• Six-second bumper ads within a video; they’re short but can’t be skipped
• Video discovery ads that appear on the mobile YouTube homepage, in video search results, and in related videos
• 15-second non-skippable ads within a video
• In-stream ads within a video; the average time for these ads is 30 seconds, but they’re skippable, so it might not even matter

On Facebook, you can advertise in these ways:

• Facebook Playables, which are adds for apps and games with a download link within the ad
• Messenger ads, or ads in the Facebook Messenger app
• Collection ads, which can be videos or photos that showcase up to four products or services your company sells
• Slideshow ads, which can include your own photos or stock photos
• Carousel ads with 10 videos or photos max
• Stories ads that are six to 15 seconds long and only available for 24 hours
• Video ads, which can be up to 240 minutes long!
• Photo ads with a text limit of 90 characters

Use your budget as well when deciding which ads to run for your insurance social media marketing campaign. Most social media ad platforms have their own built-in analytics so you can see which ads performed well.

Best Practices for Insurance Companies Posting on Social Media

To wrap up, let’s share some best practices:

• Know the ideal times to post content based on the social media channel. Social Media Today, in a 2021 report, suggests these days and times:
  • Facebook: Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday; post B2B content on Thursdays and Fridays between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. and B2C content on Saturdays and Sundays between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m.
  • Twitter: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday; post between 12 p.m. and 1 p.m. and then again during rush hour around 5 p.m.
• While it’s good to be aware of the recommended days and times to post on social media, use your audience as your guide. If they react to posts at a different time than what the current data suggests, then post when your audience is most receptive.
• How often you post is very important. Limit Facebook posts to twice a day, says Social Media Today, and Twitter posts to up to three a day.
• A/B test your social posts as you would an email or blog post. You can split-test for differences in tone, emojis versus no emojis, and post length.
• Copying and pasting the same text on every social platform is a no-no. You can post variations on the same message, but change it up. 

Conclusion

Insurance social media marketing is a must for getting a leg up on the competition and connecting with and growing your audience. For all your marketing needs, Mediaboom is here to help.

Get in touch with our team today to discuss what we can do for your insurance firm.