How an Effective Social Media Content Calendar can Benefit Insurance Agents
If you’re an insurance agent struggling with consistent social media marketing, a content calendar could be the solution you’re looking for. Setting up a content calendar is a straightforward process and often has impressive results for agents looking to increase lead generation and their online presence. In this article, you’ll discover how to create a social media content calendar and how it can benefit insurance agents.
What is a Social Media Content Calendar?
A social media content calendar is a detailed summary/overview of all upcoming and planned social media posts. Having this detailed summary helps insurance agents post strategic content, maintain consistent posting, and reach their audience regularly. A social media content calendar doesn’t have to be overly complicated either. Depending on an insurance agent’s need case, their content calendar can range from a simple list of dates you would like to post, specific scheduled posts, or an even more detailed and specific schedule.
The most successful social media content calendars feature specific information to maximize engagement for each post. Information often included are things like:
The social media platform: Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Etc.
- Content type: Video, Testimonial, Product, Etc.
- Date: Ideal date to be posted
- Time: Ideal time to be posted
- Title: The name of the post
- Topic: What the post is about
- URL: Any URL’s/links that will be included/relevant to the post
- Visuals: a description of any visuals the post will include
This in-depth information provides the framework from which each post can be built and gives you options for when they should go out.
However, when developing your content calendar, ensure you aren’t accidentally creating a content plan instead. While both cover similar things, there is a clear difference. A content calendar identifies the dates and times for social media posts, while a content plan focuses on the strategies and topics addressed through your marketing. Both tools are closely related and can be used together, but a social media content calendar is a calendar before everything else. A content calendar without dates is just a content plan.
Why should Insurance Agents Use a Content Calendar?
With the digital age in full swing, 72% of the U.S. population is active on social media, and as time progresses, the percentage is only rising. Clearly, your social media presence is essential for an Insurance Agent’s marketing strategy. If you are an insurance agent new to marketing on social media, check out our “5 Amazing Social Media Tips for Insurance Agents”.
A social media content calendar helps with two of the most critical details of social media marketing:
- Marketing to your target audience
- Consistency
Maintaining consistency when posting on social media is one of the most influential parts of being effective with social media marketing. It may seem easy, but consistent posting is a challenging part of social media marketing. Implementing a content calendar is a great way to help insurance agents manage their time better and overcome the consistency challenge. There are many ways implementing a content calendar will benefit insurance agents and help them reach their goals.
- Save time
- Schedule out posts
- Reduce errors
- Develop more cohesive marketing campaigns
- Develop a stronger brand identity
- Plan content around holidays
- More accurately track performance
How Can an Insurance Agent Create a Customized Social Media Content Calendar?
1.Set goals for your social media
Before making a content calendar, an insurance agent will need a clear goal for what they want to achieve. When social media posts have clear goals supporting their creation, their messaging is more likely to be understood by the targeted audience.
2.Conduct an audit on your current social media accounts
- Account details: usernames, passwords, etc.
- Platform-specific goals
- Audience demographics
- Information on the most successful posts and marketing campaigns
- Gaps in content
- information on posts with poor or very poor results
- latform-specific KPIs (key performance indicators)
It may take a bit of time to gather this information initially, but without a well-developed baseline, it is nearly impossible to track improvement.
The key takeaway to keep in mind when developing a posting schedule is that it should be realistic. Creating a posting schedule you can’t maintain won’t set you up for your desired success. Most social media algorithms favor consistent posting when deciding what to show in user feeds.
5. Decide what content you are going to post
Use the 80/20 rule to balance audience engagement and selling efforts. Social media users will tire of your content if you continuously try to sell them. The 80/20 rule states that 80% of your content should be geared towards audience engagement, information, and education, while 20% can be used to promote your agency and products.
The Social Media Rule of Thirds