The value of a robust social media presence for independent insurance agencies can’t be stressed enough. According to an exhaustive Pew report on social media usage from 2005-2015, social media may be your best bet to reach every demographic easily.
Surveys found that men and women are equally avid social media users. While 90% of young adults use social media, usage among senior citizens has tripled since 2010. Now, 35% of those 65 and older use social media. Likewise, rural social media users have nearly caught up with urban users, and social media usage is distributed fairly evenly across racial and ethnic groups.
Not only does social media help you connect with every demographic, it helps you to easily tailor messaging to different subsets of markets. If you want to target businesses and entrepreneurs, you might choose to focus on LinkedIn and Google+. Both allow you to drill down even further through focused subsets, such as the LinkedIn Group Automotive News Professional Community or the Google+ Community Auto Insurance Talk.
The most persuasive argument for social media marketing, however, comes from a report by A Sales Guy Consulting. According to the research conducted by the company in 2012 (when social use was still growing), social media-savvy salespeople were 23% more successful than their non-social media-using peers.
The most common complaint when it comes to the implementation of social media marketing is time constraints. If you’re going to get social, you’ve got to monitor your social presence regularly. And by regularly, we mean daily. (Find out why this is important in another post on responsible social media marketing for independent insurance agents.)
Fortunately, the tech world has been scrambling to make social media marketing easier for every business sector, including the insurance market. Use these tools to get your social media campaigns running like clockwork without around-the-clock oversight.
Hootsuite has been around for a while, so risk-averse insurance agents can rest assured that the app has had ample time to iron out any potential bugs. With Hootsuite, insurance agents can schedule posts well ahead of time and get reports that measure how those posts are performing. For most agencies, Hootsuite’s free version will suffice to cover all of your adopted social media platforms.
Coming up with lots of original social media content would be extremely time-consuming. Most businesses rely on a large quantity of borrowed, or curated, content to keep their social media platform full of compelling reading material for clients. With Feedly, you can aggregate a variety of feeds from different categories of content, effectively providing you with a constantly updated source of stories that will excite your clients.
You don’t have to be a designer to create visually arresting social media posts. Canva makes it easy for anyone to make beautiful posts for social media use. Share relevant data and statistics to your followers in easy-to-digest graphics, or offer inspiration through beautifully formatted quote posts.
Check out this Facebook post we developed on Canva to provide a winter travel tip for clients. Much more effective than a plain text list, right? Definitely. Studies show that Facebook posts with visuals garner 2.3X more engagement than those without.
We’ve gathered lots of insight on the subject on our blog, and we welcome calls from insurance agencies who want to learn more about social media marketing and your agency. It’s just one part of a healthy, comprehensive marketing strategy. We can help with all of them.