A strong social media presence can be challenging to accomplish for B2B (business to business) insurance agencies. Many B2B companies struggle to showcase their professionalism, and build an audience through social media marketing. Consider the following tips to help make sure 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 top B2B social media accounts consider when creating their online persona. Decide what your online voice will sound like. Will you be formal or informal, speaking to individuals or businesses, sounding like a reporter or an op-ed contributor? Will you be sharing company employee events, creating contests, reporting on industry changes or regulations, or all of the above? Your agency goal 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 & 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 search the different platforms to see which social media platforms are most applicable to your clients and prospects.
- What type of content will that target audience find most useful? Would 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 term and long term social media goals? Perhaps your short term goal is simply consistent content sharing. And your long term goal includes an ad budget for growth and prospect engagement.
- 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 & Regulations Relevant To Your Target Industries
Offering commentary on breaking news and changing industry regulations is a great way to demonstrate your knowledge in your industry and to provide your clients with insights on how to understand these updates. This can lead to higher engagement levels and increased exposure to your social media pages. You can use Google Alerts and social media alerts to monitor industry keywords and stay on top of dynamically changing events.
Organic Vs. Paid Posts
Once your insurance agency is consistently posting quality content, you can consider posts boosts and ads. You may want guidance with this, as the budget can get spent quickly, and multivariate split testing with compelling images and custom graphics can dramatically improve your reach and ROI.
Achieve A Respectable Follower Base
Looking professional and demonstrating a respectable number of followers and engagement level is half the battle when starting on your insurance social media marketing initiative. The top platforms your agency should leverage are: LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Google+, likely in that order, though your target markets could impact this. LinkedIn and YouTube can be very valuable 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 over PowerPoint updates. Try to build up your follower base as quickly as possible, to a respectable number. For example, this might be 500 followers on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Though 5,000 or more would be great, initially your agency is striving to attain a baseline of professionalism and credibility.