People buy from people. It’s an old adage in business that still holds true today: Trust and relationships are the bedrock of insurance. A deeper agent-customer relationship means more products sold over a longer period. It’s crucial to understand that trust extends to the world of digital, especially social media.

In today’s environment, it’s not enough to release content from your carrier’s social accounts and hope that consumers will connect with it. Your strategy needs to include agents, the advisors building customer relationships in their communities. Enabling agents to leverage social media to engage and form bonds with existing and potential customers opens the door to agent-centered digital sales. As part of a bigger digital strategy, a social selling program for intermediaries helps establish their presence within the digital landscape, showcasing thought leadership, building relationships, and ultimately growing business.

Why Is Social Selling Important for Building Trust in Insurance?

As digitization continues to be a hot topic, one thing has remained steady: the agent’s role. Although many customers are accustomed to buying auto coverage online, for example, that isn’t the case as their needs mature. Just because a customer is digital-first doesn’t mean they don’t want human guidance, especially when protecting their futures.

Social selling is a powerful addition to an agent’s toolbox (and your marketing toolbox!). After all, most consumers spend roughly two and a half hours online daily. So, agents who engage their online networks through social media are more likely to expand their prospect and customer relationships.

However, it’s not enough to show up in digital spaces. “Being there” is a great first step but doesn’t ramp up trust-building in a systematic, measurable way. Instead, you need to establish digital marketing strategies that lean on social media and social selling as powerful sales tools (which they are!).

Here are some key steps:

1. Identify your agents’ social maturity.

There will always be varying levels of social media experience from the agent perspective. From naysayers to dabblers to experts, evaluating and segmenting your agent group is critical before constructing a social selling program.

The agents most comfortable and active on social media often become early adopters and champions of internal social selling programs and digital marketing strategies. With some education and profile optimization, this elite team is an incredible tool for securing more buy-in. Getting them started on social selling before their peers allows them to gain experience with the process, build interest, and better advocate for the strategy.

2. Educate agents on the value of social media as a sales tool.

Agents might assume that because they have social accounts for their business, they must be social selling. They’re not. Social selling is much more than “keeping up” a social media account. It’s consistently posting organic content, strategically weaving in paid advertising, and engaging with an audience. Just like in-person relationship building, the value comes in the conversations and connections. Agents should continually engage and turn those conversations into digital-first relationships to grow their business.

It’s worth the effort to teach your agents about the unique benefits social selling can bring to their roles. Patience and demonstrating value are key. One way to demonstrate that value is by sharing a striking social selling statistic: 80% of salespeople who hit at least 150% of their goals say they’ve leveraged technology consistently to connect with consumers. That statistic is hard for ambitious, high-performing agents to ignore. More agents will be willing to get on board with social selling when they believe it can directly affect their paycheck, promotions, and commissions. (And it can!)

3. Invest in a comprehensive social selling platform.

Social selling at scale can seem overwhelming for even the most seasoned leaders. Understanding that not all social media management tools are created equal is the best place to start. Finding a platform dedicated to social selling, especially one that’s industry-specific, is key.

A solid social selling tool should do several things. It should enable a small and mighty team of marketers to manage a robust content library, analyze the broader story of the value of agent social selling, and monitor and archive from a compliance and regulatory perspective. Most of all, it needs to be easy for agents to use.

After choosing a social selling platform that does all these things, it’s good to run some test drives with your expert social media users (the agents who were first identified as being active on social media). Beginning with a concentrated group of agents allows everyone involved to learn the social selling tool’s nuances before scaling. After the initial user group is up and running, it’s easy to fold more agents into the process.

4. Collect data and optimize over time.

Getting your agents to believe in social media as a powerful relationship-building tool is the foundation of any successful social selling program. Building a content library to help position them as thought leaders within their social networks is the next layer. Once agents have adopted the concept of social selling and are posting regularly, you can establish benchmarks for what social selling means for your organization.

It’s important to track social selling like any other marketing or sales program. You can set general KPIs to start, such as agent adoption, basic content usage, and engagement. More KPIs can be added to the mix later, such as return on ad spend and leads generated.

Finally, it’s essential to make sure agents know social selling is a slow-and-steady process. The power of social selling grows over time — the way trust and good relationships do. When done correctly and patiently, it can move the sales needle in trackable ways.

Whether in person or online, consumers will always value the guidance of a trusted advisor. Building that trust and providing value through an effective social selling strategy with the above steps is crucial to establishing your agents’ positions within the digital landscape. Some things change in business, but others never do: “People buy from people” will always be true.

*This article was originally published in Digital Insurance.

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The insurance industry is abuzz with discussion around digital transformation, with tech topics dominating this year’s Global Insurance Symposium and InsurTech New York agendas. Digitization, automation, and the direct-to-consumer business were on everybody’s lips, and one sentiment was clear: The role of the trusted advisor will always be necessary to the industry because human connection remains central to the insurance transaction.

That said, the way insurance agents interact with customers must evolve alongside technology.

Digitization is meeting people's needs in areas ripe for automation, but it’s also replacing some of the more mundane tasks that agents have traditionally handled. Agents don’t need to sit at their desks to sign papers anymore, but they do need to promptly answer their social media direct messages. This is all part of meeting customers’ changing needs.

While digital evolution is intimidating for many industry veterans, there is ample opportunity for carriers, marketers, and agents who are open to adopting new technology. And those who embrace change can shape the role of the advisor in the future. From investing in social selling to outsourcing your work (to AI!), here are some of the ways I see digital changes boosting your relevance and success:

1. Prioritize social selling in the prospecting, sales, and retention mix.

What's the biggest change coming to insurance agents? The way they connect with prospects. As the digital age continues, social media needs to be a larger piece of the communication pie. This doesn’t mean tossing out other communication methods, like phone calls, virtual appointments, emails, or in-person meetings. But it does mean agents should be incorporating social selling into their digital marketing and sales strategies.

Social selling is more than just being present on social media. It means giving intermediaries the reins to not only help humanize your brand, but also build personal connections through their own social networks. Why is this so important? Because people buy from people — even in this digital age. Those people are on social media, and when the intermediary is too, they're more likely to sell there. Stats back this up: Almost 80% of social sellers outsell their peers who aren't on social at all.

To stay relevant throughout the buyer's journey, marketers will need to help agents cultivate a healthy mix of organic posts and paid social ads. This will not only keep agents (and the insurance carriers they represent) top-of-mind, but also offer value to potential and current leads through thought leadership, insightful tips, and real-world advice.

Agents can also set aside time to respond to comments, engage with followers, and proactively reach out to audiences on social — after all, the whole point of social selling is adding the human touch to the sales process. Building community and rapport with leads will establish agents as trusted experts in the industry.

2. Use tech to free up time to focus on relationship-building.

As tech gets smarter, we'll see it taking over more repetitive or low-stakes tasks, which will free up workers in the insurance world to complete higher-level work. According to Deloitte's 2022 Insurance Industry Outlook, 74% of insurance provider CIOs say they’re focusing on bringing more AI into their processes. In other words, insurance professionals will increasingly make fewer decisions alone; instead, data and analytics will support and guide them. And in the process, agents are getting more time back to invest in customer relationships.

Sure, you can automate emails and use online scheduling tools — but tech is going so much further. The industry is investing in everything from AI-powered underwriting to telematics, often improving the quality of service in the process.

The bottom line is that with tech on their side, agents and advisors have more time to do what they do best: build relationships and sell their products and services.

3. Don't assume “digital-first” customers don't want an agent’s expertise.

As insurance products modernize and AI and automation make underwriting, pricing, and the entire sales cycle shorter and more accurate, it's important to remember that this doesn't take away the important role of the intermediary. Even consumers who want a digital-first experience still value the guidance of a trusted professional as they're making decisions to protect their futures. Believing digitization is here to work with you, not against you, is key to agents securing their roles within the digital landscape.

Legacy insurance agents and those fresh faces looking to jump into a new career in insurance shouldn't worry! The digital era isn't going anywhere, but it's here to make our lives easier. Lean in and let it work for you, knowing that human connection and advisorship will always be core to the insurance transaction.

‍This article was originally published in Property Casualty 360.

Independent agents are taking over the scene — 62% of property and casualty premiums in the U.S. were written by independent agents in 2021 — so competition is fiercer than ever. Independent agents who want to stand out need to build up their personal brands online to reach customers and keep relationships strong. When agents use their personal social networks to find prospects, build relationships, and grow their thought leadership, they’re using one of the most powerful strategies available to them: social selling.

Social selling might be a familiar strategy for captive agents who have their carriers’ built-in marketing support, but independent agents must create their business (and relationships) from scratch. More and more, those relationships are built over social media. That’s the challenge for agents in this new landscape, but it’s also the big opportunity. People buy from people, and building personal relationships is what insurance agents have always done best. They just need to translate those rapport-building skills into modern digital spaces with a few key strategies.

Adopt social selling as a go-to strategy.

Social selling unifies sales and marketing, transforming social media into a revenue driver by giving agents an avenue to showcase their thought leadership, engage with potential and existing customers, and build trust and relationships in the process. It is similar to offline selling: Build trust with customers, get to know them, and explain how your product helps solve their problems. But it proves even more powerful — 78% of social sellers outsell their peers who don’t use social media.

To get ahead in social selling, agents must harness the power in their relationships and personal networks. Research shows that content shared by employees gets eight times more engagement than content shared by a brand. A social selling strategy can not only help agents reach more people, but also can also help them humanize their own work and brand.

For independent agents, personal branding can make all the difference. Agents shouldn’t be afraid to be unique and show their authentic selves on social media. From sharing personal photos to comments on client posts, the more clients see agents as personal friends and unique people, the more engaged they will be.

Why does letting personality show matter for agents? Credibility has become increasingly important for customers, with 88% of consumers citing authenticity as a key factor in deciding what brands they like and support. Clients want to know they can trust their agents, especially when making decisions that majorly affect their families and lives, so social selling content should reflect authenticity and relatability.

Understand and accept agents’ evolving roles in the changing landscape of digital insurance.

The sales process has gone digital in many ways, but that does not change the value of human guidance from an insurance advisor — the role of the trusted insurance advisor isn’t going anywhere.

Human connection remains a meaningful part of the insurance transaction. When people’s lives change, their relationships with their agents matter, and the work that agents have put into fostering trust and strong relationships will pay off.

Social media is a crucial tool in keeping intermediaries connected in this digital age and agents need to be comfortable using modern social media marketing and sales strategies.

Don’t go it alone — look for trusted support resources.

When independent agents are active in social selling, they shouldn’t go it alone. The resources agents have been consulting for years often have active blogs and social accounts from which they can source content. Many carriers and insurance industry thought leaders also offer curated social content that is ready to share and can typically be personalized by the agent.

A social selling strategy powered by a thoughtful content mix can help independent agents not only reach more people, but also reinforce the thought leadership and trust-building they’ve been demonstrating to clients outside of social media for years.

Find the right tools.

Curating content, creating a regular cadence of posting, monitoring multiple social channels — there are a lot of moving pieces in an independent agent’s social selling strategy. Social selling is just one of the many things an independent agent has in their sales repertoire. This makes it so important to have technology built for social selling specifically. The less time agents spend on the organizational aspects of social selling, the more time they have to build customer relationships, communicate authentically and, ultimately, build trust online.

This article was originally published in Insurance Journal.

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Most insurance companies were setting out on a digital transformation journey with an expected time frame of about three to five years before COVID-19. Then the pandemic accelerated the need for digitization and shortened that time frame drastically—to about six months, in most cases.

Insurance marketing teams were already using digital marketing prior to the pandemic. But as the pandemic created a world mostly void of face-to-face customer interactions, they had to ramp up digital campaigns and touchpoints significantly—and quickly. Marketers had no choice but to mold ad-hoc digital marketing strategies onto existing department structures.

One problem with charging existing teams with new strategies is that they won’t always have the expertise necessary to pull them off. In-house teams might be used to handling copy and visual, as these have been and will continue to be staples of marketing for a long time. As a result of accelerated digitization across the industry, however, managing CRMs, digital marketing platforms and data are now also critical elements of insurance marketing responsibilities.

Can your team support that, or do you need to expand and restructure?

After more than a year of working this way, it’s time for insurance company leaders to take a deep breath and a step back. They need to critically evaluate the function and structure of their marketing departments to determine if they’re well-positioned to fully embrace modern approaches now and into the future. The tips listed below can help insurance company leaders create marketing departments best suited for pulling off excellent digital marketing strategies.

1. Combine your brand and business unit marketing teams.

The traditional marketing department structure at insurance companies separates brand marketers and business unit marketers into two or more teams. The brand team is responsible for building and strengthening brand identity and recognition and typically measures its marketing success in recall and impression metrics.

The business unit teams, on the other hand, are responsible for supporting each line of business in the company, like property/casualty, life insurance, etc. These teams produce insurance marketing materials that generally aim to drive direct sales of a given product or service. A large part of measuring success for these teams comes down to conversion metrics.
When these teams operate separately, they can too easily become misaligned around goals. Building the brand, especially on digital channels like social media, can also have a direct impact on conversions. Brand marketers need to think with a conversion mindset, and business unit marketers need to consider how traditionally brand-centric tools, like social media, actually can help grow the business. Essentially, you want to centralize your marketing team so every marketer can collaborate and communicate across the business and unify around shared goals.

2. Democratize digital marketing.

Marketers shouldn’t be the only team members able to drive your digital insurance marketing efforts. Agents, in particular, can have a huge impact on the business when they do marketing from their own social media business accounts. This approach, known as social selling, humanizes the brand and creates stronger connections between prospects and agents. It can help move prospects closer to conversion and continue nurturing customer relationships once they do convert.
If employees are posting brand-related content on social media, however, marketers will need a way to oversee their activity to ensure all electronic communication stays compliant and consistent with brand messaging standards. A content management platform can help. Look for a platform outfitted with permission settings, user roles and governance features to help you democratize content and eliminate any bottlenecks that could stall your social media marketing efforts.

3. Keep growing your team.

If you’re looking to expand the expertise of your team and bring on more marketers, a natural assumption might be to hire professionals with direct insurance marketing experience. But remember that growth is the imperative behind your digital transformation in the first place, and if you really want to expand, that means expanding the perspectives on your teams as well. Hiring only marketers with industry experience can make your company seem indistinguishable from the rest as content will often look and feel the same.

Instead, consider hiring people with different backgrounds and experiences, even from outside the industry, to shake things up with new perspectives. People from retail or consumer-brand backgrounds, for example, can invigorate your digital marketing strategy with fresh, new ideas and expose your team to different best practices that can help you stand out from the competition. Look into other industries that really seem to understand consumers and consumer behaviors.

4. Embrace agility.

Traditional marketing department structures at insurance companies can seem rigid and unable to change easily. But if the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that agility in the face of the unexpected is one key to a strong business.
Structure your team in a way that enables you to pivot quickly when necessary—not just in the face of a global pandemic but also with constantly changing consumer preferences. Build a team that can constantly react to the ever-changing market with new digital tactics. And make sure your marketing team is supported by the right tools and marketing technology infrastructure to support such efforts.
Invest in digital platforms that can automate campaign, content and message delivery across channels to keep your reaction nimble and responsive. The last thing you want is to spend weeks trying to get your marketing materials out, only to find they’re now irrelevant due to some market trend.

5. Make data-informed decisions.

When it comes to essential infrastructure for insurance companies today, remember the importance of data. Data and analytics are critical, and you need the right technology to capture, compile and disseminate data from disparate systems. The insights you can glean from well-organized data analysis can help your insurance marketing team make the best-informed decisions and provide the room to experiment and test messaging based on the most current information.

The pandemic has forced the hand of many insurance marketing executives. Prioritizing digital marketing efforts is imperative today, but if companies want to see the most return from these investments, they need the right marketing structures to support them. Then, properly designed teams with the right tools and technologies in their arsenals can continue responding to changes as they come, constantly evolving digital marketing strategies and driving success.

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This article was originally published in Carrier Management.

Insurance companies have long viewed social media efforts in a brand marketing light, leveraging social media for creative messaging and building corporate recognition. This is still a worthwhile endeavor, but it’s time for insurance marketers to add another level to their social media strategies: performance marketing.

Performance marketing focuses on social media as a conversion tool, driving lead generation and sales rather than vanity metrics alone. Instead of tracking a post’s comments or reach, marketers can track how many readers click through to customized landing pages, for instance.

This switch can be challenging for stakeholders to understand and accept at first. Larger organizations may have separate marketing teams for different product lines supporting the overall brand.Within those teams, employees may have separate roles for organic and paid social media. For a successful performance marketing strategy, all teams need to share a vision and commitment to driving conversions through social media.Not every post has to convert readers into leads, but it should be part of the journey to getting them there.

If you’re at the beginning of this cultural shift toward thinking about social media from a more performance-driven angle that puts conversion metrics front and center, try these techniques to move the conversation in the right direction:

1. Prioritize internal team education.
Digital marketing is constantly changing — and changing fast. Marketing leaders must give teams the opportunity, time, and space to learn about the latest trends, tools, and social media marketing strategies. The more extensive their knowledge, the more comfortable they’ll be applying out-of-the-box thinking to social media in general.

One excellent resource is Facebook Blueprint, which offers free classes and certifications around marketing on Facebook. Be sure to complement dedicated social media training with analytics training to ensure that everyone knows how to measure the success of social media efforts. Google Analytics Academy is an excellent resource for getting a grip on basic analytics and then diving into more advanced learnings from there. These courses help everyone get on the same page and more fully understand the breadth of possibilities available onFacebook and other social media platforms. 

2. Emphasize that everyone has a role to play.

Regardless of title or job description, everyone in your organization should work toward the same sales goals and understand that both brand marketing and performance marketing are needed to achieve those objectives.

Marketers should coordinate with all departments to ensure that everyone understands their roles and responsibilities when it comes to both building the brand and converting sales. When creating social media marketing campaigns, marketers should also seek out insights from the specific departments to which campaigns will be driving traffic in order to determine the right content, messaging, and metrics for each campaign.

What’s more, agents who are also sharing branded content on social media should understand how their efforts intertwine with other content to lead users down the sales funnel and closer to conversions. By including all stakeholders in the performance marketing strategy, marketers can help everyone view themselves as extensions of the sales team and increase the focus on driving conversions.

3. Combine social branding with tactical messaging.

Every social media marketing campaign should be cohesive, featuring consistent themes, verbiage, and images. Plus, all the promises made in branding copy should be highlighted in more tactical performance marketing content. In essence, the brand messaging sets the tone, and the performance messaging closes the deal by delivering on the promises.

How does this work? Let’s say your insurance company has launched a social media branding campaign highlighting how easy it is to work with your business instead of with your competitors. The performance marketing aspect of the campaign includes a white paper that outlines your specific value propositions and client testimonials to back them up. You link to the whitepaper landing page from the social media branding campaign posts, viewers input their contact information into a form on the landing page to download the whitepaper, and your sales team gets direct access to primed leads. Brand and performance marketing work together to drive sales.

Social media is harder than it was only a decade ago. Platforms have changed their algorithms to make organic content less visible, and social media marketing strategies that rely only on brand messaging and vanity metrics alone won’t cut through the noise. Instead, financial marketers need to use performance marketing efforts that offer real, tangible value to drive sales.

This was originally published in PropertyCasualty 360.

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The property & casualty insurance industry had a particularly rough year in 2020 with lost premiums and high claim volumes resulting in harsh hits to bottom lines for many companies. Though the insurance industry overall is poised for recovery in 2021, many P&C insurers will be slower to bounce back as the pandemic leaves lasting effects on some service lines. For example, the initial wave of unemployment will likely continue to stall the sale of workers’ compensation insurance, and small business premiums will be slow to recover as shops keep their doors closed or more decide to shut down.

With a slow rebound ahead, insurance agencies can take some charge to speed things up with thoughtful and effective marketing tactics. But the way marketers should go about brand messaging and communication has changed as a result of the pandemic as well.

A changing marketplace calls for a change in marketing

As people continue to work remotely, limit outings, and socially distance, insurance marketers are running into new limitations when it comes to brand reach. Traditional out-of-home marketing tactics are no longer effective, and without the ability to meet with prospects face-to-face, agents need a new means of engaging audiences.

The key is to refocus marketing attention and efforts into the digital realm. But people are looking for valuable digital experiences, not just promotional brand messaging about your products and services. To enhance your marketing efforts and begin bouncing back from the broken bottom lines of 2020, make targeted digital experiences the focus of 2021. Start with these tips:

No. 1: Don’t lose your human touch

Eighty-four percent of consumers want to see brands using social platforms for the purposes of community-building rather than overt marketing. Sharing promotional messaging and material simply won’t provide the value that will get your prospects’ attention.

What is more likely to pique their interest? Real people. Humanize marketing campaigns by putting individual employees behind brand messages. Enable and empower them to share valuable content and engage with prospects from their own accounts. This approach, known as social selling, can expand brand reach and improve customer engagement more than branded interactions alone.

To spur employees into action on social media, marketers can create preapproved libraries of content, customizable messaging, and other necessary materials from which agents can easily pull to share on their own pages. This makes posting easy for agents and helps marketers ensure brand consistency and compliance.

No. 2: Personalize the digital experience with landing pages

More than 75% of consumers said they’d be willing to provide personal information in exchange for more tailored services. Insurance companies have the opportunity to capture valuable consumer data through the use of customized landing pages.

Let’s say you’ve worked up a campaign for a specific demographic. An agent looking to target that demographic shares a post highlighting a valuable piece of information, then directs followers to click a link to learn more. The link goes to a landing page on your website where users can input their names and email addresses to receive more resources. Consumers appreciate the relevancy and value of the information, and you receive the data you need for reaching out and guiding them to conversion.

While creating a customized landing page for every campaign and target audience might sound overwhelming, it doesn’t have to be. The right software can help simplify and scale the process by offering customizable templates, so even someone with no web design experience can build effective landing pages.

No. 3: Get strategic with digital advertising dollars

With tightened budgets, insurance marketers need to focus on marketing tactics that drive the highest conversion rates. Retargeted digital ads are a great option. It’s a low-cost strategy that brings high engagement rates by serving relevant ads targeted to customers who have already shown interest.

To get the best results, segment your audience by source or need. For example, website visitors who looked at a blog post might be interested in receiving a guidebook on the same topic, while those who lingered on a product page might be ready to have a conversation with the sales team about that product.

Separating one segment of potential customers from the next ensures that a retargeting campaign speaks to a specific need as opposed to simply blanketing a message to anyone who might’ve visited your website. Segmentation allows you to drive specific consumers to the most relevant landing pages, improving the chances of conversion.

Much has changed in the past year for the P&C insurance industry, but companies can get back on their feet quickly if they learn to enhance digital experiences in the wake of the pandemic. Remember to leverage targeted landing pages, direct consumers to relevant and valuable information, and do it all with a focus on the human element. You’ll drive more conversions in no time.

This article was originally published on Property Casualty 360.