Almost every day is a holiday, from the classics, like Memorial Day, to the lesser-known, such as National Donut Day. While some may be a stretch or meaningless for your insurance agency to engage with, others might be opportunities for you to take advantage of the buzz. In this week’s post, we dive into seasonal insurance marketing and we explain how to leverage social holidays by picking the ones that resonate with your audience and inspire great campaign ideas.
In the early 1900s, nonprofits and global agencies began creating holidays to connect people to social causes and build support, take International Women’s Day or Earth Day as examples. These organizations focus on spreading awareness for some of the world’s most pressing issues by creating days and months. But these holidays have evolved in parallel with the growth of social media and their purpose has shifted.
Today, social holidays, hashtag holidays, or micro-holidays have been created with the primary goal of generating engagement on social media. In opposition to more traditional holidays, such as Thanksgiving or Christmas, social holidays are unofficial and commemorate a wide variety of objects, food, animals, and occurrences.
What do these holidays have to do with your insurance agency? Ultimately, it is all about the quality of the content you create and how it resonates with your audience. Taking a look at the calendar can spark inspiration and help you when you run low on ideas. Below, we share four reasons to leverage seasonal insurance marketing and social holidays:
As a business, you probably use social media to share information, updates, and news about your insurance agency or the health insurance industry. But social holidays give you a reason to post and share a different type of content with your audience. Getting a break from business-oriented posts will feel like a breath of fresh air to your readers.
Creating content around social holidays will help enhance your personality and, by extension, your agency’s. Consequently, participating in a social holiday celebration is a form of branding and can result in a sense of reliability and trust, if you make sure the holidays you pick align with your audience’s values.
Celebrating social holidays is fun, but also engaging. If you incorporate social holiday content into your social media strategy, you can ensure you’ll be creating content around one of the most popular topics of that day. By doing so, you will attract attention to your insurance agency and reach a larger audience.
When you leverage seasonal insurance marketing, you provide an unusual type of content and you show a common interest with your audience. This strategy can help you adjust your social presence from impersonal to personal, and humanize your insurance agency.
There are 10 federal holidays in the United States and more than 300 social holidays. With there being so many to pick from, make sure you choose the holidays that will both resonate with your audience in some form and help build a strong social media strategy. Below, we share a list of less traditional holidays we think you can leverage in your insurance marketing.
The following tips will help you leverage seasonal insurance marketing to refine your efforts and ramp up sales:
Your audience will engage with your content if it is relevant to them. But creating content for every single holiday on the calendar won’t be effective. Instead, make sure the holidays you are going to leverage for your insurance marketing are meaningful and can easily be tied back to your agency. Once you choose them, you then have the advantage of planning ahead.
When creating content for social media around the holiday, don’t forget to add the right hashtags. Conduct research on different social platforms to find out what hashtags people are using since they can act as content hooks.
The most obvious channel to leverage seasonal insurance marketing is social media, but it is not the only one. Social holidays can increase engagement when used as the idea for email campaigns or blog posts. For example, as you can see in the table above, in August you can celebrate International Youth Day. Create a blog post focusing on why Millennials are taking less vacation time and advise your groups to help employees unplug.
Just because you are leveraging social insurance marketing does not mean that the content can be overlooked. Any post associated with the holiday needs to be relevant and serve a purpose. Make sure the tie between your insurance agency and the holiday is clear. It shouldn’t feel forced.
For example, May 5th-11th is National Small Business Week, you can target entrepreneurs by recommending insurance plans that better fit their needs or introducing a technology solution to help them manage their benefits and HR.
Businesses often make the mistake of only focusing on the holidays between November and January. But those might not be the best holidays to leverage since you and your groups are going through open enrollment. Look at the holidays you can celebrate the rest of the year. For example, a better option might be to focus on Get To Know Your Customers Day in July and create content around testimonials for prospect outreach.
Creating a strategy to leverage seasonal insurance marketing is key to successfully connect with your audience. Make sure there is always a strong link between the holiday you choose to celebrate and your insurance agency. Social holidays will freshen up your content and will help you sell insurance by increasing engagement. But always be mindful of your choices. If you decide to share relevant knowledge, you will build a trustworthy reputation and become a thought leader in the insurance industry.