Many of the tactics insurers, agents, and brokers used to get and nurture leads vanished in 2020. Goodbye networking events, meetings of professional organizations, in-person visits, and speaking at or sponsoring community events! So they’ve had to make a shift and reimagine their strategies in this digital age, shifting networking efforts online.
With over 830 million members in more than 200 countries and territories, LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network on the internet. It’s become more than a social networking tool for connecting with colleagues and industry peers, endorsing skills, and sharing job updates. It’s also a powerful marketing and lead-generation resource for companies.
For example, when it comes to the highly competitive insurance industry, LinkedIn provides insurance companies with everything they need to retain clientele and generate new leads … if you know how to use it.
The entrepreneurs who know the platform do so well that you’ll find many sharing how they no longer make cold calls because all of their leads are now inbound thanks to their LinkedIn success. But successful LinkedIn marketing is more than creating a personal or company profile. It’s also about building brand awareness, identifying your company’s target audience, and finding the best ways to connect with them.
Share Valuable and Optimized Content
From blogs and videos to infographics, content is critical to position insurance companies as industry experts while building trust with their key audience. Good content also helps educate and inform prospective insurance clients on coverage options, current trends, and more. It helps guide them through the phases of considering a purchase, while also helping insurance businesses achieve goals related to:
- Brand awareness.
- Lead generation.
- Engagement.
- Sales.
- Customer retention.
- Upselling and cross-selling.
- Lead nurturing.
LinkedIn makes sharing content, links to articles, graphics, videos, and more extremely easy. Research shows that LinkedIn’s algorithm encourages original content, which helps establish your professional expertise and credibility.
Don’t forget to include these in your posts
The most common question we get is: what do I put in my post? What do I write about? Well, anything really. We even recommend you share some personal posts so people can get to know who you are. The most important thing to remember about your posts is “value.”
When you share content that your target audience finds useful, helpful, inspiring, or entertaining (content they value), then you’ll have no problem getting engagement. So put yourself in their shoes, and think about how what you do intersects with their needs and desires.
LinkedIn suggests using three relevant hashtags in your posts so people who search for related material will find them. In addition, incorporating hashtags into posts and tagging other people and businesses can lead to more engagement and lead generation opportunities.
Lastly, don’t forget to include a call-to-action or CTA. Once prospective clients reads your post, they may wonder, “What’s next?” Telling them to “Learn more” and leaving in a link in the comments often leads to more engagement. Or, asking a question and telling them to “comment below” can start conversations.
Track LinkedIn Insights
The only way to know what’s working for you is to track the data related to when and what you post. Each time your company or employees share on LinkedIn, it builds a stronger relationship with your audience and expands the brand’s social media presence to prospective clients. It also provides insight into what forms of content resonate best with your target audience.
Track your views, likes, and comments on your posts, and then go back and analyze which posts performed best. This information is critical to influencing future content creation that can better attract traffic and leads. For example, you’ll notice posting during the week between 9:00 and 5:00 is likely to attract more impressions and clicks than posting in the evening or weekend when fewer people are on the site.
Be Consistent
It’s not enough to just share content on LinkedIn; it’s also necessary to post consistently. Engaging with LinkedIn followers drives traffic to the company’s page, giving visitors a reason to return. It also reinforces the company’s values and vision while establishing it as an authority in the industry.
LinkedIn recommends sharing 20 posts a month, an average of one post every business day. The platform also suggests that companies don’t post more than five times daily. The frequency and timing of posts can directly impact how many people engage with the posts from account to account.
Creating a social media calendar for the platform helps support consistent engagement thanks to planned and well-thought-out sharing of quality and valuable content that will ultimately drive the target audience to depend on the company as a go-to source for insurance industry news and insights.
Increase Employee Engagement
Tapping into employee networks is a free and easy way to attract new leads and retain current customers. No matter how many employees a company has, encouraging them to like, share, and comment on its posts can help drive more traffic, raise brand awareness, and generate leads.
According to LinkedIn, employees have 10 times more connections than the company has followers. Additionally, people are reportedly three times more likely to trust content shared by an employee over what’s shared by a CEO.
How do you get your employees to be more active on the platform? Good question! You can better train them in how to be active on the platform (making sure they understand the benefits of it) by giving them a link to our online LinkedIn for Leads sessions.
Then, think about what incentives you could offer them for their activity on LinkedIn. You could run an office-wide contest, give them small awards or bonuses for hitting certain milestones, and make sure your company page shares their posts.
Don’t Be Afraid To Cold Message
If you’re not yet a LinkedIn master who generates all inbound leads, then you may need to cold message people. First, make a list of businesses and people you’d like to target. You can do this by conducting a filtered search on LinkedIn and then adding names and profile links to a list you’ve created. Then, start following the people on your list and commenting on their posts.
After commenting on a few of someone’s posts, now you can try sending them a connection request. Remember to customize the request with information specific to them to make a more personable impression.
Once they accept, further your lead generation efforts by creating a series of a few short, informative, and relevant messages, such as sending them content you’ve created that they’d find valuable. At the end of the cadence, make a small ask like requesting that they subscribe to your newsletter or complete a short poll. Then, periodically keep in touch to stay on their radar should they ever have a need you could meet.
Pay to Play
It pays to engage. LinkedIn Ads allows companies to create paid advertisements targeting their specific audience. Turning old and new posts into paid ads is a cost-effective way to generate leads. This feature is beginner friendly, offers multiple budgeting options, and has both hands-on and hands-off approaches.
These ads don’t have to be manual and mundane tasks, thanks to automation. Companies can set a budget for ads and a specific time frame for them to run. This approach allows more time to allocate to other business aspects.
LinkedIn provides detailed insights into who the ads target and how the audience responds to them. Data on impressions, clicks, and shares can help influence future content creation strategies and provide insight into what does and doesn’t resonate with the audience. Over time these statistics can help create more robust and targeted campaigns to drive lead generation.
LinkedIn Could Be the Missing Link!
All it takes is a little trial and error, dedication, and quality content to drive visibility, traffic, and ultimately results. How long does it take? Everyone is different, and some find success sooner than others, but it takes at least a few months of building and connecting to start seeing real engagement. The key is to not give up. Like farming, if you keep showing up to cultivate every day, you’ll yield a great harvest.
If you need help generating content for LinkedIn, contact us to talk about a content marketing strategy for your insurance business.