How to shift social media marketing from branding to sales
Here are three ways to make insurance social-media marketing more performance driven.
Insurance companies have long viewed social media efforts in a brand-marketing light and have leveraged it for creative messaging and corporate recognition. This is a worthwhile endeavor, but it’s time for insurance marketers to add another level to their social media strategies: Performance marketing.
Performance marketing focuses on social media as a conversion tool, driving lead generation and sales rather than vanity metrics alone. Instead of tracking a post’s comments or reach, marketers can, for instance, track how many readers click through to customized landing pages.
This switch can be challenging for stakeholders to understand and accept at first. Larger organizations may have separate marketing teams for different product lines supporting the overall brand. Within those teams, employees may have separate roles for organic and paid social media. For a successful performance marketing strategy, all teams need to share a vision and commitment to driving conversions through social media. Not every post has to convert readers into leads, but it should be part of the journey to getting them there.
If you’re at the beginning of this cultural shift toward thinking about social media from a more performance-driven angle that puts conversion metrics front and center, try the following techniques to move the conversation in the right direction.
No. 1: Prioritize internal team education.
Digital marketing is constantly changing — and changing fast. Marketing leaders must give teams the opportunity, time and space to learn about the latest trends, tools and social media marketing strategies. The more extensive their knowledge, the more comfortable they’ll be applying out-of-the-box thinking to social media in general.
One excellent resource is Facebook Blueprint, which offers free classes and certifications around marketing on Facebook. Be sure to complement dedicated social media training with analytics training to ensure that everyone knows how to measure the success of social media efforts. Google Analytics Academy is an excellent resource for getting a grip on basic analytics and then diving into more advanced learnings from there. These courses help everyone get on the same page and more fully understand the breadth of possibilities available on Facebook and other social media platforms.
No. 2: Emphasize that everyone has a role to play.
Regardless of title or job description, everyone in your organization should work toward the same sales goals and understand that both brand marketing and performance marketing are needed to achieve those objectives.
Marketers should coordinate with all departments to ensure that everyone understands their roles and responsibilities when it comes to both building the brand and converting sales. When creating social media marketing campaigns, marketers should also seek out insights from the specific departments to which campaigns will be driving traffic in order to determine the right content, messaging, and metrics for each campaign.
What’s more, agents who are also sharing branded content on social media should understand how their efforts intertwine with other content to lead users down the sales funnel and closer to conversions. By including all stakeholders in the performance marketing strategy, marketers can help everyone view themselves as extensions of the sales team and increase the focus on driving conversions.
No. 3: Combine social branding with tactical messaging.
Every social media marketing campaign should be cohesive, featuring consistent themes, verbiage and images. Plus, all the promises made in branding copy should be highlighted in more tactical performance marketing content. In essence, the brand messaging sets the tone, and the performance messaging closes the deal by delivering on the promises.
How does this work? Let’s say your insurance company has launched a social media branding campaign highlighting how easy it is to work with your business instead of with your competitors. The performance marketing aspect of the campaign includes a whitepaper that outlines your specific value propositions and client testimonials to back them up. You link to the whitepaper landing page from the social media branding campaign posts, viewers input their contact information into a form on the landing page to download the whitepaper, and your sales team gets direct access to primed leads. Brand and performance marketing work together to drive sales.
Social media is harder than it was only a decade ago. Platforms have changed their algorithms to make organic content less visible, and social media marketing strategies that rely only on brand messaging and vanity metrics alone won’t cut through the noise. Instead, financial marketers need to use performance marketing efforts that offer real, tangible value to drive sales.
Gregory Bailey (gbailey@denimsocial.com) is president and CPO at Denim Social. He is an entrepreneur, angel investor, and former corporate executive with more than 25 years of experience in roles focused on product leadership, innovation, strategic marketing, marketing communications, P&L management, cross-functional leadership, strategic planning, sales, distribution, and business unit leadership. He is seasoned in leading digital, social media, and mobile experiences at the intersection of marketing and technology.
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