Social Media Archives - Smarts Publishing

Facebook Marketing for Insurance Agents: Dos and Don’ts

January 17, 2021 By jwhitaker Leave a Comment

In 2020, over 223 million people in the U.S. used Facebook. By 2025, this number is expected to exceed 235 million, according to Statista. If you’re looking to grow your policy sales and aren’t on Facebook, you’re leaving money on the table. Money that other insurance agents are picking up.

There’s the right way for insurance agents to do Facebook marketing and the wrong way. The right way will help you build your business, while the wrong way will antagonize your prospects. Stick to the following dos and don’ts, though, and you’ll do great.

Facebook Marketing Done Right

Done right social media marketing can skyrocket your insurance business. You’ll be able to generate leads, increase your customer acquisition rates, and turn existing customers into loyal fans and advocates, leading to a significantly higher customer lifetime value.

So, what should you be doing?

Create Engaging Facebook Posts for Insurance-Oriented Readers

While it’s fine to promote your agency’s insurance products, the vast majority of your posts should provide your audience with value.

You should provide insurance-related tips but consider taking it further. Think about what associated advice your audience would find useful.

If you sell personal lines insurance, for example, post articles with advice on how people can keep their homes safe. You can even provide reviews and/or news on home security systems.

You can also post completely non-related topics, such as:

Helpful tips and local information
Support for client businesses
Support for your community
Special offers (infrequently)
Status updates for your own agency
Funny posts

The key to success is to provide your audience with value first, without asking for anything in return. You’ll become someone they trust for insurance-related information, which will naturally transition into you becoming the person they come to for their coverage needs as well.

Your audience will also feel subconsciously indebted to you, so when it’s time to renew or purchase a policy, they will want to repay you for all your help. And if you don’t believe it works, there are lots of charities that would beg to differ.

Facebook Posts for Insurance Agents Must Be Optimized Too

If you want to increase the number of eyeballs on your posts and get more people to know your agency’s name, you need to be consistent and make life simple for your readers.

Use branded hashtags in your insurance Facebook posts and tag other pages to make it easier for your target market to find you. But don’t overdo it. One or two hashtags per post is plenty. More than that and you’re getting into annoying territory.

Also, make sure to post on a regular schedule. If you post sporadically, it erodes trust with your audience and sends the message that you have more important things to do than engage with them. Posting regularly, on the other hand, keeps you in front of your audience and first in their mind.

Short and Simple Insurance Facebook Posts Are Key

Keep your posts as short as possible. Fifty characters or less seems to be the sweet spot to get people to stop and read.

For longer content, include a link for people to click through and read. This has the added advantage of getting people on your site, which should be your ultimate goal.

Short is great but keep it simple too. Avoid insurance jargon. It doesn’t make you look smart; it just annoys people.

You also run the risk of delivering a confusing message, which is exactly what you don’t want. Just remember that if people have to stop and think about what a word means, you’ll lose them.

Get into Video

Video content is gaining a lot of traction on Facebook. Video posts have an average engagement rate of 0.26% compared to an average overall engagement rate of 0.18%. Additionally, over 1.25 billion people check out Facebook Watch every month.

So, posting video content on Facebook is a great way for you, as an insurance agent, to expand and quickly connect with your audience. Like your text posts, though, keep your videos short. Digital marketing experts say that about one minute is the perfect length for Facebook videos.

Interact with Your Audience

You must interact with your audience and you need to do it quickly. Whether they’re asking questions, posting comments, or complaining, be on the ball.

If you keep people waiting too long, they’ll feel unappreciated and turn to your competition. According to the 2020 Sprout Social Index, 40% of consumers expect a response within the first hour, while 79% expect a response in the first 24 hours.

The problem is that most businesses either don’t respond in a timely manner or even at all. The highest average response rate is from legal and real estate businesses at 29%, while sports firms have the lowest rates at 7%.

If you just answer all your readers, you’ll be far ahead of most other businesses. If you do it quickly, then you’ll basically be a Facebook marketing rock star across all industries and not just insurance.

Being that responsive can be challenging. One solution is to use a chatbot service like the one provided by MobileMonkey. The bot can answer frequently asked questions, provide helpful resources, or connect the user to a live agent. The important part is that it’s available 24/7 and answers immediately, which takes a lot of pressure off you.

Facebook Marketing Done Wrong

Now, let’s take a look at some Facebook don’ts, also known as those things that will sink your Facebook insurance marketing strategy.

Avoid Constant Promotions

You’re on Facebook to promote your agency. But the way to achieve long-term success for your business is build relationships with prospects and customers. Being constantly in sales mode is going to do the exact opposite. If you’re always promoting your products, you’ll create resentment.

Instead, inform people, but do it in a thoughtful way. And infrequently. Instead, focus on helping people and providing value.

Don’t Post Only Your Own Content

Posting only your own content all the time makes you seem a bit selfish. Instead, you want to balance the content you post. You want to aim for about 30% original content, 20% personal and fun content, and 50% content from other relevant sources.

Don’t Try to Manipulate Your Audience

Avoid posting content that promises the moon but delivers dirt, also known as “engagement bait.” It’s content that attempts to manipulate your audience into sharing, liking, or commenting, which will only backfire on you.

Not only will you annoy your audience, but Facebook will demote your posts at best and remove them at worst. Stick to quality and engaging content that provides your audience with value.

Don’t Ignore Complaints

A lot of people go to Facebook to complain. The worst thing you can do is ignore those negative comments, no matter how much you might want to. People are complaining because they want someone to listen to them and react.

Instead of ignoring the problem, respond quickly and acknowledge the problem. You can then invite the person to a private conversation to solve their problem, whether that’s through messenger, email, or even the phone.

This will score you points with the person complaining but also everyone else because people are very appreciative of agencies who are proactive in helping their customers with their problems.

Facebook marketing can be incredibly powerful for insurance agents , but it does take some effort. However, if you do it right by following the above advice, you’ll find the rewards far outweigh the drawbacks.

Seven Insurance Marketing Ideas for Posting to Your Insurance Agency Facebook Page

October 23, 2020 By jwhitaker Leave a Comment

In 2020 Facebook users in the U.S. numbered over 223 million. If you sell insurance, you can’t ignore these seven insurance marketing ideas for social media. I’m going to focus on Facebook in this post, but you really need to take social media seriously if you want to build your insurance business.

There are two aspects to your social media involvement, personal and business. You probably want to participate in both, though your agency’s business involvement is essential.

Keep your personal page personal. Don’t talk about insurance products or brag about the great customer service you provide. Just be yourself. Of course maybe modesty isn’t your strong suit. You may still want to take the shameless self-promotion down a notch. Talk about your hobbies and interests and cultivate friendships.

Some of your business contacts may also be friends, but most probably won’t be. That’s fine. When your Facebook friends need your professional services, the subject will come up. If a friendly discussion turns to insurance, it will do so naturally and that’s the way you want it. This alone makes it worthwhile to be on Facebook.

The business aspect of your Facebook presence, your fan page, is another matter. It’s okay to be a little bit business, but you want to mix up it up here as well. Engage your readers.

Helpful insurance tips are a staple of insurance Facebook pages. Your fans will expect at least a few, but try to minimize the hard sell. Here are a few examples:
- When was the last time you replaced your washing machine hoses?…[link to an article on your website with more helpful tips]
- After a storm, go into your attic and check for damage caused by ice and snow… [again, link to an article providing more info on your website]
- (Get tip ideas and articles to link to at Smarts Content Warehouse https://articles.smartspublishing.com/.)
- If you have a monthly newsletter, reprint some of those articles on Facebook, letting people know they can subscribe. Check out some of our newsletter samples to see which is best for your business.
- Find a low-key way to remind people from time to time that you would love to help them out if they need someone to look at their insurance program. Cause you the boss when it comes to insurance. Right? Just sayin’. That kinda thing.

But don’t just focus on insurance. Here are some ideas for other topics, with examples from several agent Facebook pages I visited recently:

Provide non-insurance helpful tips and information
- Find the lowest gas prices near you, enter your ZIP code here… (obviously, this links to an app)
Support client businesses
- Congratulations to Seminole Printing on its 25^th anniversary!
- Thanks to Stevens Chevrolet for making our community look festive this Christmas
Support your community
- Good luck to the Ashland High School girls volleyball team on winning the state championship. Free coffee and donuts at our offices all week in celebraion. Drop by.
- Come to the Kids/Pets Halloween Costume Contest at our YMCA
- This week’s bowling league results, click here
Make a special offer
- Refer a friend and receive a FREE Chick-fil-A, Starbucks, locl restaurant, etc. gift card.
- Join us for Cookie Friday — Free homemade cookies when you stop by to say hello.
Post status updates on your own business
- ABC Insurance is one of Chicago’s Best Places to Work
Have fun
- Dumbest Criminal of the Week: Woman Shoplifts $600 Worth of Condoms, One Pregnancy Test and Baby Wipes
- Yes, we insure Toads on Motorcycles (includes cute picture of toad on toy motorcycle)

Of course there are plenty of other insurance marketing Ideas for Facebook. Please share yours with us.

Relevant and Objective Insurance Content For Social Media

August 7, 2014 By jwhitaker Leave a Comment

In addition to your other social media posts — what’s going on at your firm, community events, and so on — you probably want to provide some insurance content from time to time. Sometimes you may want to post something you wrote on your blog, but often you’ll want relevant and objective insurance content from third party articles that reflect your insurance professionalism.

You’ve probably already identified several good sources, but let me suggest a new one you may find useful. A few weeks ago, SmartsPro Marketing launched The Insurance 411, which is a website mainly for insurance buyers to educate themselves about insurance. However, the articles are perfect for agents who want to reach out and share well-written, informative and objective insurance content on their social media sites.

Already the website has almost 100 professionally written articles on business and personal insurance, including commercial property and liability, benefits, workers’ compensation, homeowners, auto, personal life and health and more. And dozens more articles are posted each month.

One of the advantages of using The Insurance 411 articles in your social media is that they are specifically designed for social media posting. Each article has a photo and a teaser, especially written to engage social media readers.

Here’s an example of how you might post one of the articles: Let’s say you want to say something about life insurance. This article sets out to change people’s perceptions, so you could use that as your hook. You could introduce the article like this:

Just paste the link to an appropriate article into your Facebook or Twitter posting, write a few words of introduction, and click “post.” Done!

Here’s another example. You might decide to post something like this on LinkedIn.

Check out http://theinsurance411.com, and if you find something useful to post, link to it with our compliments. And be sure to check back regularly for new content, and to check out our insurance agent directory, coming soon.

Is Your Agency’s Media Style Old School, Plugged-in or Big Tent?

December 8, 2013 By jwhitaker Leave a Comment

Which communication method best suits your insurance agency’s brand-building strategy? Just to be clear, I’m not talking about how you or the people in your agency relate to people socially, as when, psychologists talk about communication styles, using words such as aggressive, passive, assertive, competitive, affiliative and so on. I’m talking about which media you’re most comfortable using to build and reinforce your agency’s brand image.

Big Tent Media Method — The Big Tent approach uses print and digital. . . What one medium doesn’t do for you, the other probably will.

For many years, most agents relied principally on print, whether newsletters, newspaper advertising or trade magazines. A few agents would also venture into broadcast advertising using radio or TV spots.

In the past 20 years, though, Internet communications in all their manifestations have come to dominate our commercial communications. Now agents have several new formats available and many older media have, thanks to the Internet, lost much of their impact.

People don’t read newspapers as much as they used to. Niche trade magazines might still have some readers, but they’re not the most up-to-date source of information; emails and social media get the word out faster. With thousands of new broadcast channels available, radio and TV don’t dominate as well either, unless you have a certain demographic niche that narrowcasting can help you reach.

One old media channel that hasn’t really lost its luster, surprisingly, is postal mail. Everyone still has a mailbox and everyone looks through their mail every day. Even Millennials get postal mail.

Many agents realize this, which is why as a publisher of client newsletters in print and digital, we still have more customers who use print or print and digital formats than just digital.

Some agents who take an old school approach to building and nurturing their brand by using only print newsletters might just be resisting new media because they’re deterred by the challenges. Using social media and blogging requires a lot of effort. You need content, you have to post regularly and you have to be active in the medium to able to engage your audience and know what they’re posting about.

To take the easy approach to plugged-in communications, you could just send out an email newsletter. But to get the most out of your investment, you should pay attention to your analytics: Who reads your newsletters? Which articles do they read? Which addresses don’t work anymore and need to be updated?

Aside from the additional time you might have to invest in using digital, there are pragmatic reasons to be old school. Email newsletters get opened about 25-35% of the time, whereas print newsletters at least get noticed by someone and so at a minimum they accomplish your branding mission.

All in all, choosing a communication strategy for brand-building boils down to taking one of three different approaches:

Print or Old School: It’s tried and true, dependable and you don’t need to invest a lot time engaging on social media or counting clicks.

Digital or Plugged-in: To be effective, get engaged in the process. After your email newsletters go out, track who reads your newsletter and which articles. Update your contacts regularly. To make the most of your digital content,; use it on your social sites, your blog, in your drip campaigns.

Big Tent: Take the belt and suspenders approach. What one medium doesn’t do for you, the other probably will.

Whichever approach you choose, the goal is to communicate regularly with your clients and to give them quality, actionable information that helps them manage their insurance and risk. SmartsPro Marketing can help you whatever route you take by providing professionally written and designed newsletters in both print and digital formats that will position you as the go-to expert in your niche.

Is there a Content Tipping Point for Converting Insurance Prospects to Customers?

October 1, 2012 By jwhitaker Leave a Comment

Here’s one thing I know: Hundreds of our customers have used our insurance client newsletters year after year after year — some of them for more than twenty years now — because their clients and prospects read the articles. It’s as simple as that. They read the articles, so they trust the agency that provides the articles, so they do business with the agency.

How do I know this? I know that the agency owners and marketers who buy our services are smart, intelligent people and that they don’t spend their hard-earned money foolishly. But do I know this empirically? No, I don’t. I don’t even know if any of our customers have scientifically tested this assumption. If you ask them, they usually say they know newsletters work because they do.

One of the great things about the Internet is that it gives us the ability to test the scientific validity of things we “know” in our gut. This leads to actual knowledge we can use to improve our marketing.

There’s a social media marketing guy I follow, Marcus Sheridan, who writes a blog called The Sales Lion. Marcus, who also owns a pool-building business, wrote a blog about his epiphany several years back when he realized after reviewing leads obtained from his website that the difference between leads who bought a pool from him and those who didn’t was that the pool buyers were leads who had viewed more than 30 pages on his website. There is a tipping point for making a pool sale, he discovered, which is getting people to view at least 30 pages of his content.

The challenge for Marcus was to get more visitors to read more content. So he started writing more and more content related to buying and building pools.

I suspect there is a content tipping point for insurance marketers as well, whether that content is delivered to visitors via paper or email newsletters, social media or websites. I wonder what it is? I challenge any of you insurance marketers to discover that tipping point. Delve into your analytics and see if you can discover how many pages of content a visitor who has converted from prospect to customer has read. I know there is a tipping point for my business — providing marketing tools to insurance agents. I’m trying to nail it down. I’ll let you know when I do.

Meanwhile, above all, keep providing fresh, new content. Even if you can’t always measure it, as Marcus Sheridan has discovered, there is a tipping point for every business. And the more content of value that you provide, the more likely your prospects will reach it — and become customers.