Insurance leaders know the value of agents when it comes to product distribution, but smart marketers should be making the case to invest in digital enablement at the agent level. This means extending social media efforts beyond the brand and to the intermediaries building relationships at the local level.

Helping agents feel comfortable on social media and weaving it into their everyday sales mix is much different than managing a social presence at the brand or company level. But when your business goes to market through intermediaries, empowering them on social media is crucial. 

Unsure where to start with a social selling program? It can feel daunting, but Denim Social can help. Learn how to set the right tone, train, create content and more in the latest guide from Denim Social: Guide To Social Selling for Insurance. 

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Social selling is just what it sounds like: using social media to sell a product or service. It’s leveraging social to build personal relationships, showcase thought leadership, engage with prospects, interact with existing customers, and ultimately build trust and rapport that will eventually lead to sales.

It enables intermediaries – like insurance agents – to add value to the customer journey where there wouldn’t otherwise be an opportunity.

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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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Risk is a double-edged sword for insurance agencies and carriers. The insurance industry certainly thrives because it deeply understands risk. But being knee-deep in risk makes many carriers reluctant to adopt new marketing methods such as social selling. This is an epic missed opportunity (which you, as an insurance marketer, understand and probably have to navigate daily).

Social selling isn’t as new as it seems at first glance; insurance agents have always relied on relationship-building for sales. Social selling is just another way for them to build trust with customers. The only difference? The connections happen online via social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn rather than in person. And those digital connections can become the foundations for long-term relationships and sales.

So, how can you integrate social selling into your carrier’s marketing strategies? Start with these three steps: overcome reluctance to change, invest in bonds with sales, and deploy a comprehensive social selling program.

Let’s get into it.

1. Getting Leadership Onboard

Change doesn’t happen overnight (just look at the timeline of digital transformation in the insurance industry). It also doesn’t happen without some kind of catalyst. This is your chance to lead marketing change. Insurance marketers who want to launch a social selling program need to educate their teams and leaders about what social selling is and why it’s so essential.

“What is social selling?” is a crucial first question to answer to get buy-in. Step one is to advocate and share resources with colleagues and carrier leadership that explain what social selling is and its benefits. If you tell them that social selling will allow agents to get more face time with customers, humanize your brand, and bring in leads, they might just be willing to hear the rest of your plan.

Decision makers at the carrier level might be more willing to fund social selling programs once they gain a deeper understanding of them. Be patient but persistent about building a culture that supports the overall strategy.

2. Reshaping the Traditional Insurance Sales-Marketing Relationship

More so than other digital marketing strategies, social selling requires sales and marketing teams to work together. When properly executed, social selling helps both teams make a more significant impact during the customer journey and, ultimately, can increase the number of leads agents generate. The sales team is essential to your social selling dream team because it understands what makes agents tick and how to get them invested in the program.

Results matter to a sales team, so one way to get this kind of relationship moving is by using metrics to show that social selling isn’t just another to-do on the growing task list. It can increase profits (and agent commission or bonuses!). For instance, you could share that associates who regularly post content are 45% likelier to exceed their quotas, and their companies are 57% likelier to generate leads.

Show your sales team how social selling can keep their prospects. Once bought in, the sales team will serve as an essential conduit to agents, demonstrating that social selling can keep prospects warmed up and engaged. Social selling isn’t just for prospects either; it’s an important way to stay in touch with current customers, supporting retention and referrals. Think about it this way: Net promoter scores are significantly higher among insurance customers who’ve interacted with their providers in the last year than those who did not. Staying in touch matters to the bottom line. The benefits are measurable, so use that to your advantage when getting sales buy-in.

3. Choosing the Right Social Selling Platform

Another way to seamlessly integrate social selling into an existing digital marketing strategy is  using the right social selling tool. Digital platforms can make social selling at scale streamlined and intuitive. Show sales, leadership, and any other decision makers how the right platform can make it easy to support intermediaries, showcase thought leadership, and build trust and relationships that will lead to sales.

A solid social selling platform will manage your social channels, ensure compliance, curate relevant content, and boost the effectiveness of your social efforts. Seek technology that understands your industry’s nuances and the impact intermediaries can make through social selling. The right solution should create efficiencies for you, your team, leadership, and users.

4. Executing Social Selling Campaigns

At this point, you might be wondering how to start a social selling program effectively within your organization. Once carrier leadership, sales, and the rest of your teams are on board with social selling, it’s time to construct and deploy a full-scale social selling program.

Here’s what it looks like at a high level: First, your social sellers must create authentic content to post (with your help, of course!). The content should have a human angle to it and feel very real. Generally speaking, social sellers should distribute different types of content, including images, videos, and links to articles, to keep their audiences engaged and excited.

You can help social sellers by using customizable content libraries that make relevant and timely content easily accessible. Train intermediaries on when to post, how to use the platform and libraries, and what kind of engagement you’re hoping to achieve.

Don’t forget: Once agents have shared content, it’s time to engage in the social conversation. There’s a reason intermediary-owned social content enjoys higher levels of engagement than brand-owned content: that content usually has more organic back-and-forth between parties.

Finally, remember that social selling programs perform best when they’re integrated. Paid and organic social posts have a symbiotic relationship; a strategy that doesn’t leverage both simply isn’t effective. While organic content creates richness and humanizes your brand, paid ads help your agents get in front of customers they haven’t met yet. Combined into a comprehensive social selling plan, these strategies can have a significant effect on ROI.

Paving the Way to Success With High-Quality Social Selling

Social selling as part of a larger digital marketing strategy isn’t a radical concept, even in insurance marketing; it’s a proven method that produces solid returns over time. Without a doubt, social selling takes time and energy from people outside your marketing bubble. However, by gaining leadership buy-in, building closer bonds between your team and sales, and strategically rolling out to agents, there is so much more to gain than to lose. The more comfortable everyone becomes with social media, the more likely they’ll see it as a welcome addition to the sales and marketing playbook.

Are you interested in learning how to get your team excited about social selling? Want to know how it can expand your marketing reach and develop richer relationships with customers? Request a demo of Denim Social today.

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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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Content is king. And in today’s digital market, social media is the queen consort. Considering that 40% of Generation Z prefer to use social media over Google as a search engine, every brand (in every industry) needs to be thinking about how to stay relevant and discoverable on social media. So, how do you, as an insurance marketer, help your brand stand out? Include your agents in your strategy by activating a social selling program, empowering them to post unique content to their own social networks to leverage social media as a viable sales avenue.

Including social selling in your brand marketing strategy is so important because consumers want to speak with more than just a brand; they want to feel connected to the services they use and the people who provide them. The distribution of genuine content — from both carriers and local agents — helps humanize insurance and forges stronger connections between agents and the communities they serve. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, as about 70% of young insurance agents already use Facebook and LinkedIn. But being on social channels means little if intermediaries don’t have the compelling content needed to drive engagement.

So, that sparks a few basic questions: What does effective social selling content look like, how can insurance marketers and agents curate and create the right content, and what tools are necessary to execute a social selling program at scale? Below, we’ll demystify the process of creating and distributing high-quality social selling content that fuels customer connections and, ultimately, sales.

High-Quality Social Selling Content: What Does It Look Like?

Above all else, social selling content should be personal, authentic, and tailored to both the community an agent serves and the audience they hope to reach. An insurance agent’s social outreach should illustrate not a provider-to-customer relationship but a human-to-human relationship — after all, people buy from people. As the marketer, it’ll be your responsibility to help intermediaries understand how to do this. But your efforts will pay off in your social metrics: Content shared by employees receives eight times the engagement of posts from brand pages.

So, what are the essential components of great content?

• Personal connection — Social selling content should bring agents’ personalities to life to help customers feel connected to them. Whatever skills they leverage to connect with clients in real life are the same skills they should lean on when posting to social media. Are they always cracking jokes? Digging into the latest industry topic? Or maybe relating to clients through a personal hobby? Creating content for social should be an extension of the personality agents bring to their desks when sitting across from clients.

Personalizing goes beyond just posting, too! Engaging and interacting with others’ content that aligns with your skills, hobbies, and professional strategy is just as important. Including yourself in conversations not only keeps you top of mind, but is also an easy way to diversify your content strategy. Adding context and perspective to others’ content adds variety to your presence and takes the pressure off always having to come up with something from scratch.

• Authenticity — Anything you share on social should come from the heart; 88% of consumers cite authenticity as a key factor when choosing between brands. An agent should be real about the value they offer others, the problems they can solve, and the real-life experiences they’ve navigated. Agents can share behind-the-scenes peeks into their daily work lives, such as updates about meetings (and photos, with permission!) with long-tenured clients or snapshots of their lives outside the office. Maybe they took their dog to work and can share a photo — possibly alongside information on commercial property insurance for pets at the office.

Using firsthand storytelling is an authentic way to form deeper connections with customers. If your intermediaries feel nervous, remind them just to be themselves! After all, they’re in sales for a reason. The connections they make are equally real, regardless of whether they happened in person or on social.

• Community focus — Local agents have an advantage over national carriers because they’re living within the communities they serve. When agents speak with local perspectives, they solidify their reputations as trustworthy and knowledgeable.

When agents share snippets from their own lives, they can easily transform themselves into micro-influencers within their communities. For example, if agents are grabbing flowers for the office, they can tag their local florist in a shout-out on their agency social accounts. If one of their carriers donates to local causes, the agent could highlight what the support means to the community (and themselves).

When your social selling content hits the trifecta of community focus, authenticity, and personal connection, agents are most likely to be bringing in leads and harnessing all that social media has to offer. But understanding what high-quality social selling content should look like is only the first step; the next steps involve building out your content distribution process, or the steps between drafting a post and hitting “publish.”

Bringing Social Selling to Life

As a social media marketer in the insurance world, you’ve likely thought about empowering your intermediaries on social. There are many considerations, such as building a library of meaningful content agents want to share, empowering agents to create their own unique content, weaving paid advertising into the mix, and making it all easy. With the right tools, insurance marketers can accomplish these essential tasks more easily than ever before:

• Empowering agents to post with curated content. Getting agents to buy into your social selling program can be as simple as giving them the power to post (with the necessary approvals process, of course!). With Denim Social, you and your intermediaries can access curated social media content through a shared library, meaning users can select from a wide range of content to share that you’ve thoughtfully created and pre-approved.

Content libraries make sourcing that curated content super easy. Instead of wondering where their next social media posts will come from, agents can use pre-populated post copy or share the latest articles relevant to their audiences. Marketing teams can pre-approve and custom-curate the social media posts before housing them in the content libraries, meaning teams are free to create because they can worry less about finding content, gaining approvals, ensuring the content is on-brand, and meeting compliance standards.

• Keeping agent social messaging compliant and on-brand with approval workflows. It’s exciting when your social selling program advances to the level of empowering individuals to create original content, but setting agents free to post without prior approval could also pose risks. Approval workflows and other compliance tools can ensure all content is approved before it is published. So, how does that work in practice?

With Denim Social, insurance agents can collaborate with marketing teams to create social posts. Or, agents can initiate unique posts from the platform and an approval group will receive notifications to ensure the social posts look perfect before going live.

• Putting social ad spend behind local agents. Once the organic social foundation is set with high-quality content, marketers should consider taking their ad spend beyond the brand and delivering paid social on behalf of their local agents. Almost 30% of internet users spot new products and brands through paid ads, so if paid isn’t part of your strategy yet, it should be.

Denim Social’s paid social solution makes it simple to execute paid ads on behalf of your local agents to make your ad spend go further. The platform’s proprietary paid ads manager provides an at-a-glance view of ad performance across multiple geographies and helps you optimize your spend easily. Denim Social also delivers clear engagement metrics and allows you to share localized results with agents in just a couple of clicks.

In short, Denim Social can help you run a holistic social selling program across organic and paid. With a robust content integration, curated content libraries, and built-in compliance workflows and collaboration tools, Denim Social arms insurance marketers to launch true social selling programs that convert leads into customers. If you’ve considered empowering your intermediaries through a social selling program but aren’t sure where to start, request a demo with us today to learn how Denim Social can help.