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For insurance businesses that are looking to update their social media strategies, this recent article collects some top tips and pieces of advice offered by executives from the Insurance Marketing & Communications Association.
With nearly 5 billion social media users worldwide, the scope of the opportunity is obviously significant for companies seeking to expand brand awareness and share their vision and values globally, in addition to identifying customers and engaging with them on the platforms that already receive their attention.
Another major advantage that social media marketing has over many other marketing channels is the ability to gather very specific data about who is interacting with your content and accounts. This data analysis enables adaptability with content that can be tailored and redistributed practically in real-time in response to feedback and engagement levels.
In fact, there may be no better way to both challenge and improve upon internal assumptions than to put those assumptions to the test against social media sharing patterns. Not just listening to what your audience says but also paying attention to what your audience does are often two of the most important drivers behind how content strategy changes over time.
That said, despite the value of experimentation, the process should be one of continuous fine-tuning on a consistent theme and tone. The goal of adaptability is to improve, but there must be a consistent baseline against which small improvements can be tested for effectiveness. An environment of continuous wild swings in voice or content selection can devolve into chaos and is generally counterproductive in most social media spaces for most company promotional purposes.
In terms of developing an effective social media strategy that is optimized to meet the needs of your business, one key is clearly defining in advance the particular goals for any given campaign. Mission creep - where the goals of an initiative slowly evolve over time as the project progresses away from the original objective - can be particularly problematic in digital marketing where there are so many different potential approaches and endgames.
By first outlining the reasons that your company has elected to utilize social media, those decisions can then shape how the company and/or product offerings are presented via content. Further, determining in advance the particular audience segments that you most want to target is an important precursor to deciding what social media platforms are most appropriate, which in turn also shapes content and posting frequency (i.e. how much content you need to produce), as well.
It’s also important to recognize that different platforms have different norms and expectations when it comes to tone and voice, which should be complementary to your company’s own brand in order to avoid customer confusion, misrepresentation, and dilution of the existing brand value.
In order to engage with these sought-after customers through social media, of course, your company’s social content must first attract their attention. One tried and true strategy is to use the platform to boost the reach and penetration of thought-leadership-related content, which helps position your business in the minds of the consumers as a source of expertise and prominent player within the relevant industry/space.
And in the process of engaging with customers/clients/competitors and the general public across social media, it’s of course important to make sure employees don’t lose sight of their responsibilities as representatives of and spokespeople for the company, which is true of both formal, team-produced content as well as likes, shares, and individual comments or messages.
While there is clearly much to be gained from effective social media use and many more avenues for insurance professionals and their companies to explore, the bottomline with social media is that there will never be one right answer, as the optimized social media strategy for any given person or company will likely look just a little different from the optimized social media strategy for just about any other person or company. But clearly defining your targets and working through the process of content-creation followed by analysis and adjustment - then rinse and repeat - is a great place to start, as is getting in touch with social media marketing specialists with experience in your particular industry and/or market.
You can read more about this topic here.
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