Instagram for insurance agents: How to Advertise

Instagram for insurance agents might not be the first marketing channel that comes to mind but it can still be valuable. Amidst the more consumer-focused content like recipes, workouts, and dance trends, B2B brands like commercial insurance agencies can carve out a place for themselves to connect with clients and grow.

“Just because your brand may not be conventionally interesting doesn’t mean your Instagram page won’t be! A creative social strategy and feed can help more audiences discover your brand and products,” notes Meltwater, a software provider that helps in areas such as social media marketing.

For example, commercial insurance agents could create content about entrepreneurship or productivity to build engagement with those who are starting their own companies and could be in the market for business insurance. And if you want to grow your Instagram presence, or if you want to try to jump right to finding leads, then you might want to experiment with advertising insurance on Instagram.

Not every agency will find the right audience on this network, but it could be a way for some agents to connect with new customers and differentiate from competitors. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at how to advertise on Instagram for insurance agents including how it can help you grow your business.

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Build Your Advertising Strategy

Before getting into the details of how to advertise insurance on Instagram for insurance agents, you need to figure out your overarching strategy. Think about areas like:

• Do you want to build an organic presence on Instagram too or only reach potential leads through advertising?
  If you have a Facebook page for your business, then you don’t necessarily need an Instagram page too, even for advertising on Instagram since the two are connected via their parent company, Meta. However, some agents might try to build an organic Instagram presence to build brand awareness and expand their reach to new leads. So, Instagram advertising might be used to attract more followers and engagement on your Instagram page.
  
• Do you want to market your overall agency or specific lines of coverage?
  Some insurance agencies might try to build overall brand awareness. If you go this route, ideally clients would come to you whenever they have a commercial insurance need. Conversely, you might take a narrower approach where you advertise specific lines of coverage, like cyber policies. Even when casting a smaller net, you might find more success if that coverage resonates more with your audience.
  
• Are you building relationships or going for the sale?
  Essentially all agencies want to grow sales, but how you get there can differ. Some might advertise insurance on Instagram to get viewers to directly go to a landing page where they generate a quote and then sign up for coverage. But not everyone is ready to buy when they see an ad. So, your strategy might instead be more focused on building relationships, like getting ad viewers to subscribe to your email list to keep the conversation going.

You don’t have to stick with the same strategy forever, but you should think about these questions before launching ads. That way, you can create ad campaigns geared toward specific goals instead of randomly spending money without knowing if you’re reaching your intended targets.

Create Your Campaign

With your strategy in place, you can start to create your Instagram advertising campaign. If you have an existing Instagram page (a professional, not a personal account) and simply want to boost current posts, you can follow an abbreviated process to quickly launch an ad. But if you want the full experience, or if you only have a Facebook professional account and want to extend your advertising to Instagram too, you can use Ads Manager from Meta.

More specifically, creating your Instagram for insurance agents ad campaign involves the following steps:

Pick Your Objective

You can pick from different types of objectives for your ads, such as brand awareness, traffic or conversions. The choice can affect areas like where your ad appears and where it directs viewers to.

“As your business grows, your campaign goals will change. First, your campaigns may focus on building awareness and acquiring new customers. Later, you may encourage people to make a purchase or sign up for an event,” says Meta.

Determine Your Audience

Next, you’ll determine the audience for your ad. By choosing among different demographic factors, like locations and age, you can tailor your advertising toward those most likely to resonate with your ad. If you only sell insurance in one state, for example, you probably don’t want to waste money with a national campaign.

Select Your Ad Appearance

How do you want your ad to appear on Instagram? Depending on your objective, you might want your ad to appear across both Facebook and Instagram. Or maybe you just want to advertise insurance on Instagram but do so across both Instagram Stories (the short clips that only exist for 24 hours) and users’ regular Instagram feeds. You can also select your ad format, such as an image vs. a video.

Define Your Budget/Duration

One of the best things about advertising on social media is that you have budget flexibility. If you want to test certain types of ads or if you simply have a limited budget, you can start small and work your way up if the ads are successful.

You can also set how long you want the ads to run for. In doing so, you might set a daily budget to run each day for a week, for instance, or you might set a lifetime campaign budget and run the ad for however long it takes to go through your budget.

Plus, you can choose your bidding strategy to determine how your budget will be spent. Some advertisers might have a hard cap they’d be willing to spend on each click, for example, but that might mean you end up not spending your full budget because you don’t get enough clicks.  Others might go with automatic bids to reach goals like getting as much engagement as possible while using their full budget.

Choose Your Creative

Lastly, you need to choose the actual content you want to promote. You might decide to upload your own photo or video with a unique caption, or perhaps you’ll boost an existing post. You can use design sites like Canva to create a compelling graphic, or you might want to work with a professional designer who can help you create an ad that will attract the right audience.

Track Performance

If you want to get the most out of your Instagram for insurance agents ad campaign, you need to track performance. Depending on factors like privacy requirements, you might decide to use built-in capabilities like tracking online or offline conversions. You also can track other metrics through Ads Manager, like the number of engagements your ad received and your cost-per-result. That way, you can see what’s working.

If you’re spending less than what you’re getting in terms of new policy signups, then you could add gas by expanding your budget and running the campaign again. Or, if you didn’t see much in terms of business results from your ad, you might want to try again by changing factors like the ad format or the audience.

It’s hard to become wildly successful with Instagram ads straight away, but tracking performance can help you improve over time. And while advertising insurance on Instagram doesn’t work for every commercial insurance agency, it could be a low-risk effort that’s worth trying.