83% of marketers indicate that social media is important for their business. Does your agency agree? Whether or not you answered yes to that question, consider this:

Social media marketing industry statistics show that:

• The number of businesses that say Facebook is critical or important to their business has increased by 75%.
• Social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing.
• Companies that have acquired customers from Facebook: B2C is 77% and B2B is 43%.

Is your insurance agency convinced yet?

While your inbound marketing strategy is the foundation of your insurance marketing initiative, components such as social media, blogging and email marketing make the process whole. With the increasing importance of social media, it is important to implement a strategy today.

However, not all social media strategies are created equal. When you look at social media, one thing is essential: Engagement. It is not about the number of followers you have on your networks, but how you connect with them.

What Is Social Media Engagement

While social media marketing is difficult to measure, your agency can determine positive results from engagement. In fact, whether or not your agency will be successful with social media marketing can be determined solely by engagement.

Ultimately, engagement is anything your fans and followers do to interact with your agency and engage with you on your social networks. It may include:

• Sharing your posts
• “Liking” your posts
• Commenting on your posts
• Starting up a conversation with your agency on your social network
• Posting a picture to your wall
• Entering a social media contest
• Sending you a tweet

Without engagement, your social media marketing is nothing. Engagement is how you will build a loyal fan base and reach all of the goals your agency set out to achieve with your strategy.

Social Media Engagement In The Insurance Industry

In the insurance industry, the local agency is constantly looking for a way to build a local presence, establish expertise and engage with their community. What better way to do so than with social media. However, how can your agency really stand out among the crowd?

Keeping in mind that an effective social media marketing strategy works well when it is in line with best practices and enhances the overall marketing strategy, Zywave hypothesized two things about social media marketing for the local insurance industry and insurance marketing:

1. The use of image-based status updates would result in a greater reach and more engagement.
2. Socially derived blog topics – that is, topics generated from engaged social media conversation—would increase traffic to the agency’s website.

After testing these hypotheses using social media pages for a local insurance industry, it was proven that social media best practices do in fact enhance the insurance marketing strategy of the local insurance agency.

In Zywave’s latest White Paper, your agency can see the comprehensive results of this case study, learn how to increase your agency’s social media engagement and build a social media marketing campaign that enhances your insurance marketing today.

Download it right here.