How to Grow Your Insurance Business
Learn how to make your insurance business grow to new heights with tips and tools in this guide, and serve your clients using Talage technology.
Read MoreSocial media isn’t just a place to post what you ate for lunch or share vacation photos. Nor is it just a place to share company updates and ask people to buy from you. Social media is a far more complex landscape that often blends the personal and professional sides of people.
Yet this complexity can be used to insurance agents’ advantage, as social media offers the opportunity to learn about customers and prospects, rather than just blindly selling to them. By learning more about your target customers, from their work history and their hobbies to their communication preferences, you can gain several benefits, such as:
In this guide to using social media to learn about your customers, we’ll dive into how insurance agents can gain a deeper understanding of what customers are saying about their agency and/or insurance overall, as well as what customers care about.
If you want to learn how to convert more leads into customers, we can help. Fill out our simple form below to learn more.
To understand your customers more, you need to listen to what they’re already saying on social media, rather than just posting your own content and hoping for the best. Listening on social media allows you to learn what your customers think about your brand, competitors, and your industry, as well as other valuable information like personal and professional interests.
“Social listening allows you to watch people’s feedback, questions, conversations or comments in order to discover opportunities or curate interesting content for those audiences,” explains social media platform Buffer.
Learning that your customers tend to be interested in sports, for example, could affect the small talk you decide to make during client meetings. You also might learn that your commercial insurance customers tend to engage with other content related to, say, improving their marketing. As such, you might then create more of your own content around helping small business owners with their marketing.
One relatively straightforward way to engage in social listening is to conduct searches through social media platforms. You can filter your searches to just those you follow on social media if you want to stick to customers you’re already connected with, or you might want to broaden your search to find new potential customers. Some ideas for searches include:
While you can find out a lot about what customers and prospects care about by conducting manual searches on social media sites, you can also use social listening tools to automate the process and discover perhaps even more insights. Tools like Sprout Social and Sprinklr enable you to set up automatic searches for keywords and hashtags relevant to your business.
Some tools even have the ability to gauge how positive or negative certain mentions are. So you can see if customers are upset with, say, current insurance buying processes, which could indicate a need for more streamlined sales processes.
In addition to listening to what customers are saying on social media, you can also learn more about your customers through a bit more active engagement with them on social. Again, this doesn’t mean you need to share overly salesy posts. Instead, aim to understand what your customers care about through real conversations, much as you would get to know someone in offline conversations. Some of the ways to do so include:
If you see that a customer you follow has shared a post that you feel like you can respond to, chime in so you can start to develop a relationship and learn more about them. For example, a customer might ask for book recommendations. You might then offer a few suggestions and ask if they’ve read those. Depending on their response, you might learn a little bit more about your customer’s preferences, and you also could have a good conversation topic to circle back to next time you chat offline.
When sharing your own posts, ask your customers questions to build engagement and learn more about them. You might ask anything from “how do you like to decompress on the weekends?” to “what accounting platform do you recommend?” As you start to get answers, you might identify trends among your customer base that reveal insights into who you should target going forward. Or you might learn something valuable like your customers prefer simple software over more advanced, feature-rich ones. That might then affect how you design your website, your email newsletters, etc.
In addition to engaging with customers within your regular newsfeed, you can also join groups to have good conversations and learn about your clients. Sites like Facebook and LinkedIn have groups for all sorts of topics, and sites like Twitter have niche hashtags you can tap into to find a community. You can also join things like Twitter Chats, which are typically hour-long live conversations. Only a few of your customers or leads might be in these chats or groups, but you can at least learn about what similar individuals care about, which could inform your prospecting strategy or your networking with current customers.
As you start to learn more about your customers on social media, it’s important to be able to turn these insights into more sales. Pay attention to what customers care about so that you can both improve your communication with clients and adjust your sales practices. For example, you might learn that most of your customers prefer to communicate via email rather than on the phone or through video calls, so you can work on improving your email newsletters.
From there, you can use tools like Wheelhouse to build targeted landing pages that speak to the concerns of different customer segments. This more personalized approach can then help you get more renewals, referrals and can be more effective when reaching out to new prospects.