A strong social media presence can be challenging to accomplish for B2B (business to business) insurance agencies. Many B2B companies struggle to demonstrate their professionalism, and build an audience through social media marketing. Consider the following tips to help ensure your agency is maximizing your social media marketing efforts.
Create Your Online Persona
Your social media presence should have a well-defined personality. Informative, helpful, engaging, timely and relevant are all characteristics that the best B2B social media accounts consider when creating their online persona. Decide how your voice will be heard online. Will you be formal or informal, speaking to individuals or businesses, sounding like a reporter or op-ed contributor? Will you be sharing company employee events, creating contests, reporting on industry changes or regulations, or all of the above? The goal of your agency is to build rapport and a sense of community with both clients and prospects. But first you need to determine your social media persona.
Create a Written Strategy Including Prospect Scorecard and Buyer Persona
When creating your marketing strategy, ask yourself these questions:
- Who is your target online audience – and how diverse is this group? Start by creating a Prospect Scorecard.
- Which social platforms will best target that audience? You may have to browse the different platforms to see which social media platforms are most applicable to your customers and prospects.
- What type of content will that target audience find most useful? Will it be infographics, long-form articles, tech support information, breaking news commentary, regulatory updates, or some combination of all of these?
- What are your short and long term social media goals? Maybe your short-term goal is simply sharing content consistently. And your long-term goal includes an ad budget for growing and engaging prospects.
- How are your competitors using social media? You can learn a lot about what to do and what not to do by studying your competitors.
Comment on News and Regulations Relevant to Your Target Industries
Offering commentary on the latest news and changing industry regulations is a great way to demonstrate your knowledge of your industry and to provide your clients with insight on how to understand these updates. This can lead to higher levels of engagement and greater exposure to your social media pages. You can use Google Alerts and social media alerts to monitor industry keywords and stay ahead of dynamically changing events.
Organic vs. Paid Posts
Once your insurance agency is consistently publishing quality content, you can consider boosting posts and ads. You may want guidance with this, as budget can be spent quickly, and multivariate split testing with compelling images and custom graphics can dramatically improve your reach and ROI.
Get a Respectable Follower Base
Looking professional and showing a respectable number of followers and level of engagement is half the battle when embarking on your insurance social media marketing initiative. The best platforms for your agency to leverage are: LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Google+, probably in that order, although your target markets may have an impact on this. LinkedIn and YouTube can be of great value to B2B businesses. LinkedIn is a good place to start, it’s very much a business-centric platform. Then leverage YouTube using videos, recorded webinars or even simple voice updates on PowerPoint. Try to build your follower base as quickly as possible, to a respectable number. For example, this could be 500 followers on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Although 5,000 or more would be great, initially your agency is striving to achieve a baseline of professionalism and credibility.
