Smarts Publishing

Since 1954, serving the nation's premier Independent Agents and Brokers.

Seven Topic Ideas for Posting to Your Insurance Agency Facebook Page

By Leave a Comment

In 2017 Facebook users in the U.S. number over 201 million. If you sell insurance, you can’t ignore 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. Here’s a few ideas to get you started.

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.

On your personal page, you really do want to keep it 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 here, but you want to mix up it up as well.  Be a little bit rock’n’roll, too.  Engage your readers.

Look for more tips on how to get the most out of your Facebook fan page in my next post.
 

Relevant and Objective Insurance Content For Social Media

By 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:

Relevant and Objective Insurance Content Example No 2

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.

Relevant and Objective Insurance Content Example No 2

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?

By 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?

By 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.

tipping pointHow 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.

 

Resources for Insurance Social Media Writers

By Leave a Comment

Many agents are beginning to understand the importance of insurance social media for creating and nurturing relationships, as well as for creating a long-term defensive strategy against the disintermediation threat posed by insurers, which I discussed in my post last week.

Having an insurance social media presence is one thing; researching and writing about things to post on Facebook, for instance, is the hard part, as one person commented to my post last week. In my November 7, 2011 post, “Seven Topic Ideas for Posting to Your Insurance Agency Facebook Page,” I listed several general topic ideas for insurance social media writers, such as providing insurance tips, supporting local client businesses, demonstrating community involvement and so on.  This time, though, I’m going to list several sources for story ideas.

  1. Take advantage of the resources provided by non-profit organizations that  educate the public as part of their mission.

    2. I’ve written about the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud as a great insurance social media resource for bizarre, comical and sometimes tragic tales of insurance fraudsters getting their comeuppance. You might call this insurance tabloid journalism except they’re true stories. In any case, people enjoy reading them.

    For straightforward information on avoiding and preparing for adversity, FEMA is an excellent insurance social media resource. Their website is packed with information about every kind of natural disaster, including earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, landslides, tsunamis, wildfires and even home fires.  They also provide articles about technological hazards such as blackouts, hazardous material and household chemical emergencies.  You will also find articles on terrorist threats, including explosions and biological, chemical and radiological dispersion devices.

    The Insurance Information Institute has a wealth of information on insurance topics.  Name a type of insurance coverage and they are likely to have an article, video and/or white paper on the subject.

    Other useful non-profit resources:  American Red Cross and OSHA

  2. The insurance press is a good source of information and sometimes entertaining stories, such as these recent articles:  “10 Most Outrageous Excuses for Arriving Late for Work,” produced by an insurance company media department, or “Top 10 States for Dog Bite Claims,” released by State Farm. You’ll find content like this in electronic editions of publications such as Insurance Journal, for example, which you can subscribe to for free.

    3. Insurance Industry newsfeeds can be helpful, though you’ve got to turn over a lot of rocks to find that gem of a story. The subscriptions are free though:  Try Insurance Broadcasting and The Industry Radar. You can also sign up for RSS feeds directly from the major news release distribution services. These services each have an insurance RSS feed: PR Newswire,, BusinessWire, PRWeb and Marketwire.

  3. The advantage of using industry resources is the detail and accuracy provided — and it’s economical. The disadvantage is that the information is often presented in language and format that may not be reader-friendly or sound like your voice. If you’re looking for interesting insurance content, check out SmartsPro Marketing’s Content Warehouse. It has 100s of articles, often including images you can use, that combine accuracy, detail and reader-friendly qualities at low per-article rates.
  4. Find relevant regional and local stories with Google. Enter these terms in Google search:  “Your state or region” + Insurance; for example, enter “Florida insurance.”  Use Google Alerts to monitor your keywords on a daily basis. You’ll begin to recognize certain news sources, like insurance companies or research organizations, that you can depend on for quality content. Google can be the single most important tool for finding good insurance content for your social media pages.
  5. An excellent source of local information is your local newspaper. Ask your paper for permission to link to articles from time to time. They’ll probably support the idea, since it’s a form of free advertising for them, especially when people click on the story and go to their website. Besides reporting on local fires and similar news, depending on what kinds of features your local paper covers, you could regularly link to stories about new businesses and so on.
  6. The is not a news source but rather a methodology. Create a series based on a topic, and provide stories weekly, bi-weekly or monthly. Here are some examples:
  7. [Added November 14, 2014] My final resource suggestion is to link to articles published on The Insurance 411. Though these are copyrighted articles that can’t be republished without a subscription from SmartsPro Marketing, you can link to them. For example, link to an article about insuring a college bound student’s insurance needs away from home and introduce with link with a comment like “Is you son or daughter off to college this Fall? Will your insurance still apply when they’re away? Read this short article.”

The resources I’ve listed here are not going to write your insurance social media content for you, but at least they will get you started.  

PO Box 276
Ashland, OR 97520
sales@smartspublishing.com

Smarts Marketing Blog

Blogging.com

866-762-7879
541-482-5189

 

Read our special report:
17 Ways Insurance Newsletters Help Agents Build Their Business

Proud vendor partner of the
National Association of Health Underwriters
Since 2002

css.php