Social Media Marketing for Insurance Agents: Top Industry Tips You Should Know

Social media has become an increasingly crucial aspect of digital marketing, with tremendous potential to influence consumers, build brands, and sell products. If your insurance business doesn’t have social media channels set up, it’s missing out on a huge opportunity to expand and evolve.

Best of all: once these platforms are set up, they’ll be a steady source of growth and traffic from which consumers will naturally find your business. The difficult work is brainstorming and building up one’s social media platforms.

In this blog post, I will be identifying five essential tips for insurance agents looking to boost their brand and start their social media journey.

1. Put in the work beforehand: brainstorm, discuss, and consider.

Thinking carefully about your branding and the social media image you want to cultivate is crucial to your social media platforms’ future success. Tackle the hard questions: What are my long-term goals in running these platforms? How can I feasibly get there? Don’t be afraid to set goals for yourself that are optimistic, but also realistic.

Something to especially consider is: What defines my insurance business? What makes me stand out? What will make my content interesting to engage with?

On social media platforms, you will be competing with not only other insurance businesses, but also an unlimited amount of competitors. Seek to carve out a niche for your insurance business that will make your social media platforms genuinely intriguing to peruse.

This might take the form of posting fun and accessible content about insurance, or this might be even delving into other topics entirely, such as mental health and social justice, that consumers are more likely to find interesting and engage with. The key is to balance these off-topic posts with ones relevant to insurance and your product, so that everything ultimately links back to your business.

2. Have a distinct and personable voice.

Consumers on social media are looking for an authentic and personable voice, which fosters trust and endearment towards the brand. Company accounts that come off as too robotic, sales-y, and corporate will be avoided as consumers will stay away from what they see as ulterior motives.

Apart from being personable, also consider when deciding a voice for your social media account, the tone that matches your target audience. If your target audience is younger, you might want to make your posts more short, snappy, and attention-grabbing, sprinkling in emojis, pop culture references, and slang. For an older audience, you might elect to adopt a more serious tone.

3. Use a variety of social media channels for different purposes and to reach different demographics.

Each social media channel– Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc– reaches a slightly different user base. As an extreme example, Instagram users might be on the app for social networking, while LinkedIn users would likely be utilizing the app for career and industry purposes.

When brainstorming your social media strategy and setting up your channels, you should consider which social media platforms appeal to your insurance business and your goals most. While it’s generally a good idea to spread your presence across multiple platforms, you might want to use your bandwidth to focus on 1 or 2 platforms at first to really build them out. As an insurance business, you might want to focus on more social media platforms with an older audience that emphasize product selling– such as Facebook.

4. Schedule posts at specific times of higher traffic for your audience.

To maximize the impact of each of your social media posts, make sure to schedule your posts at specific times where more of your audience is online to see and engage with them. Scheduling your posts also saves you the trouble of you having to be online at a certain hour to manually post.

Throughout my internship here at EverQuote, I’ve learned to use several different tools essential for professionals in content and social media strategy. Two standouts have been SEMRush and Hubspot– tools that allow social media managers to schedule posts, see optimal posting times, and find out a range of other useful information about their accounts.

SEMRush specifically has the capacity to track and report a range of fascinating statistics about your social media accounts. Check out the following infographic for important things to track with SEMRush for each social media platform.

5. Do research and reflection to continually refine and improve your social media strategy.

It’s rare your original social media strategy won’t have to be refined. As new information surfaces about your audience through experience managing your accounts, shift your strategy accordingly.

For example, if you find that your audience enjoys posts on a particular topic (seen through an increased amount of ‘Likes’ and ‘Shares’), you might want to orient more posts around that area. If you notice posts on a particular subject aren’t garnering attention, it might be time too switch to a new topic. Just as it’s important to have a solid strategy and goal when starting your social media platforms, it’s important to adapt.

Analytics reports using applications such as SEMRush and Hubspot, as well as automatic reports generated by each social media platform itself, will be essential to aiding this continual refinement of your social media strategy. Discovering what works, and what doesn’t, is an ongoing journey, but consistent monitoring and analysis of your accounts will ensure you reach your insurance business social media goals.