Insurance Social Media Marketing for Your Inbound Strategy

In previous posts, we’ve discussed how inbound marketing can make you stand out from other agencies and engage prospective clients. Inbound marketing is the process of using valuable content to gain the attention of your prospects and to entice them to visit your website. It’s one of the best and most cost-effective ways to advertise your agency. In this post, we’ll explore why social media marketing is an essential part of any inbound strategy for insurance agencies.

Raise Awareness For Your Agency

Based on recent statistics, an incredible 77% of Americans have at least one social media account. Given how many people are on social media, it’s essential for agencies to make use of it to reach their target audience. Here are two of the most important ways you can use social media to raise awareness:

Social Media Marketing Campaigns

Agencies that successfully utilize social media marketing use the channel to spread awareness about the benefit offerings that make them unique. Research has shown that 91% of marketers saw an increase in brand awareness by devoting just a few hours to social media per week. To make social media even more engaging, get your followers involved. Create a poll asking them what frustrates them the most about managing employee benefits. Then, use the results to develop a video profiling useful tips for handling HR and benefits administration. Promote your social media campaigns across multiple platforms and use specific hashtags so your followers can easily share, find, and engage with your content.?

Content Promotion

Social media is a powerful tool for promoting your content, and can help your agency attract new prospects and engage existing customers. Whenever you create new blog posts, whitepapers, or videos, be sure to share them over your most popular social media channels where your followers can see them. Encourage them to share the content they find helpful with their network and elicit their feedback to stay engaged and get new ideas for future content. You can easily keep track of how many visitors social media drives to your website by utilizing UTM codes. Ideally, social media should represent about 15% of your overall traffic. Monitoring this number can help you decide if your social media marketing is effective or if it needs improvement.

Connect With Clients and Prospects

Social media makes it easy to connect with your audience. When it comes to social media marketing, you can create content that resonates with clients and prospects alike. In addition to sharing your blog posts, whitepapers, and videos, social media is an effective way to promote marketing events sponsored by your agency.

Using social media platforms can be particularly effective when you are trying to generate buzz about a new trending benefit like a telemedicine service or health savings account.

In these situations, you’ll want to select the social media channel where you have the most engaged followers and then focus on creating content for them. For a marketing event, you might share a video explaining how the event will help stressed employers manage their HR and benefits responsibilities more easily. If you have new benefits administration software you are promoting, you can give your followers a demo or tutorial on the software’s key features.

When promoting a new product, create an engaging and easy hashtag to encourage clients and prospects to give feedback, ask questions, and spread the word among their colleagues.

Following the release of your new product, you can share pictures or video testimonials of satisfied customers and how your benefits software made it easier to run their businesses.

Drive Sales

When done well, social media marketing can help your agency drive sales. If you can successfully generate excitement about your products and brand, that will often result in an increase in sales. Unless you have a very large following, it’s best to avoid making a hard sell on social media, which is unlikely to be effective. For smaller agencies, it’s best to regard social media as the beginning of the sales funnel.

When creating content for social media, acknowledge employers’ pain points and demonstrate how your agency can help them manage their benefits plans. You can share posts about tools that can help their business run a smooth open enrollment period.

You can also provide an incentive for your prospects that will encourage them to visit your website. An example could be a free consultation with a health insurance broker. This way you can provide value to your prospects and give them a positive impression of your agency. When they decide to invest in employee benefits for their businesses, there’s a good chance they will choose your agency over your competitors.

Final Thoughts About Social Media Marketing for Insurance Agencies

Using social media marketing successfully is an important part of your insurance agency’s inbound strategy. Social media provides a way to share valuable content with your audience, to engage your followers, and to familiarize them with your agency. When done effectively, social media can help your agency stand out from your competitors and encourage prospects to turn to your agency for their employee benefits.