How Effective Is Your Insurance Agency on Social Media?
Steadily growing platforms such as Facebook (2.18 billion active monthly users), Twitter (336 million), YouTube (1.9 billion), LinkedIn (294 million), Instagram (1 billion), Pinterest (200 million), and Snapchat (255 million) have ensured that brands use social media as channels for establishing and growing their online presence. – MarketingProfs.com
However, it’s important to ask yourself – is social media living up to its promise in your marketing efforts? Is it truly reaching your prospects and delivering business results?
There are several challenges to measuring the return you’re getting from social media marketing. It’s a conversation we have with many agents we work with to develop a social media strategy that fits their business goals.
You can measure your social media presence and its effectiveness by tracking some key components:
Awareness: The number o people who know about your insurance agency on social media
Reach: The impressions that your content/mentions receive on social channels
Engagement: The total number of social interactions (e.g., likes, comments, and shares)
Association: How your audience feels about your insurance agency in the form of positive, negative, neutral sentiments, along with specific emotional associations
Next, it’s important to look at critical metrics for measuring your insurance agency’s brand, based on that list.
Website Traffic
The most common way to measure your insurance agency’s brand awareness is to track website traffic from social channels. You can check your website traffic by signing up for Google Analytics to learn the number of daily, weekly, and monthly visitors from various sources. A higher percentage of new visitors could be an indication of improving your insurance agency’s brand awareness.
The second metric that you can track in Google Analytics if your direct traffic. Anyone who’s typing in your insurance agency’s name to find your website is considered “direct traffic.” It’s an indication of your insurance agency’s brand awareness because it consists of users who know about your agency through one or more of your marketing activities.
Insurance Agency Mentions
Another crucial metric that tells you about your insurance agency’s brand awareness and reach is social brand mentions. You can check through your mentions using a tool like Brand24 or HootSuite. These tools can help run analytical reports from all your social channels. They also provide live feeds for mentions, reach, sentiment, and engagement.
The reach of your insurance agency mentions shows the influence and following of those who have talked about your business. The next important metric that you should be tracking is sentiment. This is essentially the comparison of positive mentions vs negative mentions.
Brand Association
A good way to gauge your insurance agency’s brand association is to conduct online surveys. You can create a set of online survey questions like:
- What brand comes to mind first when thinking of <product X>?
- What are some of the words that come to your mind when you’re thinking of <brand X>?
- What are some of the traits you look for while choosing <product X>?
- Have you interacted with <brand X> on social media?
In the questions above, you’ll want to substitute product X for something specific like Medicare Supplements, Life Insurance, ACA Health insurance, etc. For brand x, you’ll want to replace that with your competitor, or your insurance agency’s name.
This activity gives you time to track your insurance agency’s strength, not only on social media but in general. This can help you revise your marketing strategy if needed. Once you know how your insurance agency’s brand is doing, you can work on a strategy to improve your presence on social media and offline.
For more information regarding social media strategy, how to effectively measure your social media ROI – and establishing a strategy that aligns with your unique business goals, give us a call at 800-962-4693! You can also download our Social Media Self-Study Coursework to begin your journey for social media success.
