As a local independent agent, being present and active on social media can have a huge impact on your brand awareness and relationships with customers. But constantly creating relevant, insightful, and engaging content can often feel like an impossible feat.
View this webinar on-demand as Digital Marketing Coordinator Chelsea Peterson offers an inside look into our social media experts’ process at BrightFire. She’ll also share practical tips to help you stay on top of your social media content and develop a robust social media marketing strategy.
Planning a Month of Social Media Content for Agents
Watch the webinar, read through the full transcript, or jump ahead to the section you’re most interested in to see how your independent insurance agency can streamline your social media marketing process.
- Create a Content Calendar
- Leverage Holidays, National Days, and Seasons
- Three Types of Content to Write
- Schedule Content Ahead of Time
- How BrightFire Helps Agents with Social Media
Watch the Webinar
Additional Questions?
If you have any questions about this webinar or our Social Media Marketing service, please schedule a call with sales or call us at (888) 778-4393.
Webinar Transcript
Hello everyone! My name is Chelsea Peterson, and I’m a Digital Marketing Coordinator here at BrightFire, as well as your host for today’s webinar. Thank you all for joining us.
In May, we covered 6 Reasons Why Accurate Local Listings are a Must. If you missed it, or any of our previous webinars in the 20 Minute Marketing Webinar series, you can access the whole series on-demand by visiting brightfire.com/webinars.
Our goal with these webinars is to provide you with digital marketing advice and discuss current digital marketing topics in a brief 20-minute format followed by a Q&A period to answer any questions you may have. If you have questions during the webinar, please use the Q&A feature. We’ll do our best to answer all of the questions that come through; otherwise, we will personally reach out to you afterward.
Today’s webinar topic is Planning a Month of Social Media Content for Agents. As a local independent agent, being present and active on social media can have a huge impact on your brand awareness and relationships with customers. But constantly creating relevant, insightful, and engaging content can often feel like an impossible feat.
So today, we’re going to offer an inside look into our social media experts’ process at BrightFire. We’ll also share practical tips to help you stay on top of your social media content and develop a robust social media marketing strategy.
Today’s webinar is being recorded, so everything we discuss will be saved and emailed to you in the next business day or two so you can watch it later on-demand.
Lastly, we do have a couple of polls for today’s webinar. When launched, you’ll see the poll pop up on your screen with the question and response options. Every poll is anonymous, and we’ll give you roughly 30 seconds to share your response, and then we’ll discuss the results with the group.
About BrightFire
Before we dive into today’s webinar, I’d like to share a brief background on BrightFire, since we have a mix of current customers and agents that are new to BrightFire attending today.
BrightFire began by providing insurance agency websites in 2000. Over the years, as the needs of insurance agents grew, we expanded our digital marketing services beyond agency websites to also include:
- Search Engine Optimization
- Reviews & Reputation Management
- Local Listings Management
- Pay-Per-Click Advertising
- Social Media Marketing
Currently, there are over 2,500 independent agencies across the nation using at least one of BrightFire’s digital marketing services.
So with that background on BrightFire, let’s get started.
What’s Ahead
With 70% of insurance companies using social media to reach consumers, it’s important your agency remains active online and leverages social media channels to connect and engage with current and potential policyholders.
But with so many other daily tasks to complete on your schedule, we know social media is often the first to-do item that’s placed on the back burner. And finding ways to streamline the process of planning, creating, and scheduling content can be difficult.
So today, we’ll walk through the steps that our social media experts at BrightFire take when they are creating a month’s worth of content for our customers. We’ll offer tips for planning and organizing your content with a content calendar, writing for your ideal audience by leveraging holidays and three specific types of content, and scheduling your content in advance.
Finally, we’ll discuss how BrightFire can do the heavy lifting for your agency with our Social Media Marketing service, so your agency can save time and focus more on building meaningful relationships with your followers on each platform.
Create a Content Calendar for Insurance Agents
The first step in planning a month’s worth of social media content for your agency is to create a content calendar. At its most basic form, a content calendar is a document, digital calendar, or spreadsheet that lists every day of the month and identifies what days your agency will post on social media.
Content calendars don’t have to be complicated or costly. At BrightFire, we use Google Sheets to create our content calendar for free.
I recommend noting each day’s topic to focus on so that you can ensure your agency is covering all of the different types of insurance you offer, as well as other events or general information about your agency that you may want to promote on social media. This also helps ensure you’re offering a good mix of content, not overly selling, and not promoting one type of insurance too much at any given time.
As an example, in this small snippet of one of our social media expert’s content calendars, you can see each day is highlighted with a certain color based on what topic will be covered. They also mention at the top how many times each topic should be featured that month, and then cross out the content once it has been scheduled or published.
Other information that will help your agency stay organized and make scheduling content easier that you can include in your content calendar is any URL that the post should link to, a link to the photo or video you want to use, and any relevant hashtags.
Leverage Holidays, National Days, and Seasons
The next step in streamlining your social media process is to leverage holidays, national days, and seasons to help your agency with content ideas. This is also a great way to help your agency stay relevant, being mindful to talk more about things like Medicare open enrollment in October, or insurance for college students in the summer.
By proactively researching national days or holidays that could be relevant to the types of insurance your agency sells and adding them to your content calendar before you start writing for the month, you can make it that much easier for your agency to plan your content in advance and know what you’re going to be writing about each month.
For example, if your agency created a content calendar using Google Sheets, you could go ahead and create a calendar for every month of the year. Then, in a single day, you could research national days, holidays, and any seasons that you would want to write about throughout the year. In this example shown, your calendar for August might include national holidays such as National Wellness Month, National Non-Profit Day, and National Senior Citizens Day.
Then, when you start looking at August and what you’re going to publish for social media, you already know that you want to talk about some specific topics and types of insurance. For National Wellness Month, you can offer general tips for staying safe and healthy over the summer. For National Non-Profit Day, you can talk about how important it is for non-profits to safeguard their business with the proper insurance coverage. National Senior Citizens Day might be a good time to talk about Medicare and how it can help protect your social media followers or their loved ones. You can even have fun with national days like International Cat Day or National Dog Day, posting fun pictures of these pets and mentioning the benefits of pet insurance.
By identifying these national holidays and seasons to talk about on your social media channels, you can more easily and quickly create posts that have relevant fun facts, tips, or links to resources that will benefit your followers.
3 Types of Insurance Social Media Content to Write
You may be thinking, “Okay, that sounds great. But that only marked off a handful of days in the month.”
This next step in our social media experts’ process is what’s going to help your agency come up with the remaining pieces of content.
In general, there are three main types of content that you should write for social media. They’re also the three that people are most interested in and most likely to engage with. And they are content that is educational, inspirational, and entertaining.
Educational Social Media Content
Educational content is really important for your social media content because as a local independent agent, you want to show your followers that your agency is a credible source of information and an expert in the industry.
By sharing timely reminders about when to enroll in Medicare, providing key statistics on the importance of having life insurance, sharing tips on how to maintain your home in every season, or even defining what it means to be an independent agent and how that benefits your policyholders, your agency can become a guide and help individuals select providers and policies that best fit their unique needs and budget. Another way you can educate your audience is by starting an FAQ series where you answer common questions your agency gets.
If your agency has a website blog, you can also repurpose that content and make multiple social media posts from a single blog. Not only will this alleviate some work trying to come up with new educational content, but it can also help you streamline your process that much more.
For example, if you have a blog titled, “10 Benefits of Choosing Independent Insurance Agencies,” you can easily write 10 social media posts on each individual benefit from the blog. Chances are, you can also write at least 5 other social media posts from the introduction, conclusion, or by summarizing the blog.
This type of content is also called evergreen content because it will always be relevant to your readers. Because you won’t need 15 social media posts linking to that one educational blog in a given month, you can create a document with all of these evergreen social media posts to pull from when you need some additional content in the future.
On a side note, repurposing blogs like this also helps gain traffic to your website and visibility on each blog. There isn’t just a single post linking to your blog, but now, there are at least 15 posts. This gives much more purpose to your blog writing as well.
Inspirational Social Media Content
The next type of content to write on social media is inspirational content, and there are a couple of directions you can take with these posts. The first is to share positive customer reviews your agency has received. Showcasing how your agency has positively impacted a customer’s life when an unexpected situation occurred and they needed insurance is a great way to build trust and credibility with prospects. And when customers share their stories about why they needed insurance to protect them, it can also encourage others to make sure they have a similar policy in place so they and their loved ones are protected as well.
Another way to write more generic inspirational content is to share motivational quotes and include a nice visual behind the quote on your graphic. You can also share a quick tip or something that ties in insurance to the quote if you want to include some thought leadership from your agency.
Entertaining Social Media Content
The last type of content to consider when drafting your social media posts is entertaining content that is not related to insurance. This is the time to have fun and really engage your audience. Consider asking questions that will spark curiosity and encourage followers to comment on your posts. You might create a poll of the week or share an infographic and ask what statistic resonates most with them. Another way to entertain and engage your audience is by sharing some fun facts about the city your agency serves or promoting different local events that are happening soon in your area.
The key with this type of content is to break up your profile from being a monotonous feed of only insurance-related content. Sharing posts that are purely meant to entertain and spark engagement help your channels stand out and encourage people to follow your account and like or comment on your posts.
By writing with these three types of content in mind, your agency can increase the chances that your social media posts will gain more impressions and engagements, which will help your agency get more visibility online as a whole.
Additionally, you want to be mindful of using any relevant hashtags in your content so you can receive even more visibility. You can also tag any companies, events, or places that your agency may partner with, sponsor, or attend to help those social media accounts see your posts, engage with them, and again increase your post’s visibility online.
Finally, when it comes to writing social media content, I highly recommend you analyze your agency’s past posts, as well as your competitors’ posts, to see what content, media type, days and times performed best. What are other agencies talking about on social media? Should your agency publish more photos or more videos? Does your ideal audience engage most with insurance-related content on Saturdays or Thursdays? These are the kinds of questions you want to ask yourself and analyze in order to optimize your content.
Schedule Social Media Content Ahead of Time
Once all of the content is written for the month ahead, the last step in our social media experts’ process is to schedule each post!
There are a number of ways to schedule content in advance. If you’re looking for free ways to do so, you can log into Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter individually and start creating a post. Instead of hitting “publish,” you can click to schedule the post for a different day and time.
For Instagram, you won’t be able to schedule the post in advance, but you can go ahead and save each post as a draft in the platform. Then, set reminders for yourself to go in and publish the post when you’re ready. The only platform you can’t schedule in advance or save drafted posts for is Google. Your Google Posts will have to be created and published in real-time.
Going into each platform to schedule posts individually can take a lot of time, though. So to save time and energy, your agency can also take advantage of several different free or paid scheduling platforms, such as Hootsuite, HubSpot, and Buffer. A nice benefit to platforms like these is scheduling all of your content for each of your channels in one place.
Now, once you get into a rhythm of planning, writing, and scheduling content a month in advance, you may find you’re tempted to schedule content even further in advance. That would just save you even more time and allow you to schedule posts and move on to the next task on your to-do list, right?
While this may seem like a great idea, it does come with some disadvantages. Say, for example, your agency decided to attend or sponsor a community college event a couple of months from now at the end of September. To promote your presence at the event, your agency would likely want to create additional content for the event itself throughout the month of September, as well as related insurance content about types of coverage that best benefit college students.
If you had already scheduled content two or three months in advance about, say, pet insurance or life insurance, your agency would now have to spend additional time shifting your already scheduled content around while still trying to offer a good mix of post topics.
Another reason you don’t want to schedule content too far in advance is to help protect your agency should something happen that could make your content appear insensitive. For example, a post your agency might publish could be talking about how your agency is making waves in helping customers find affordable boat insurance. But if you scheduled it in May to publish next week and a natural disaster occurred like a tsunami or hurricane right before, your originally fun and lighthearted post about boat insurance could now come off as being insensitive toward those who were impacted by the natural disaster.
Instead, we find that planning and scheduling content a month in advance is really the sweet spot of staying on top of your content and your to-do list, while also being able to stay relevant and ensure you won’t have much updating to do if an event comes up or you decide you want to shift your content focus one month.
As I briefly mentioned on the last slide, it also gives you a great opportunity to analyze how your past content performed and more easily optimize future content to help your channels as a whole increase engagement such as likes, comments, and shares on your posts.
At the end of the day, your agency will benefit from scheduling regular educational, inspirational, or entertaining content about a month in advance, while being open and available to post and respond to current events in real time when it makes sense. Creating a nice balance between scheduled content and real-time content also allows your agency to have fun and get personal on social media, posting behind-the-scenes videos of your team working in the office or attending a local event.
How BrightFire Helps Insurance Agents with Social Media
That wraps up our social media experts’ process for planning a month of content for our customers! If you’re ready to set your agency up for social media success, but maybe don’t have the bandwidth to do so, or you’d like to leave it to the digital marketing experts, BrightFire’s Social Media Marketing service is available.
This service aims to take the burden of constantly coming up with ideas, writing, and scheduling social media content for your agency and posting the content to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google Posts. If there’s a social media network you don’t have an account with yet, our experts can set that up for your agency and make sure your new profile is filled out and branded properly to be found more easily by people in your local area.
As part of our Social Media Marketing service, we audit your current profiles and can make updates to profile pictures and cover photos. We can also update the information and configuration of each profile, as well as help rapidly build your audience before we begin posting regular content by sending out an email blast inviting your current policyholders to follow you on social media. We also provide you with a comprehensive social media dashboard with metrics reporting so you can analyze your performance and make updates to your content strategy.
Since most people who follow you are probably policyholders, we break up the sales-related posts with lighthearted, helpful content that makes sense for any insurance agency. This content track is called General Safety & Preparedness, and we provide 13 of these posts each month. We also provide an optional Diversity & Inclusivity content track that observes nine different heritage months throughout the year.
We also provide three posts each month in each of the following optional insurance categories: personal, business, life, health, group benefits, and Medicare. You simply let us know which content tracks you’d like, and we will take care of the rest. This adds up to a total of 32 posts each month.
Custom campaigns are additional posts outside of the content we create for all of our Social Media Marketing clients. These are generally used to cover advanced topics, like hosting giveaways, publishing customer or staff spotlights, or promoting your commercial clients.
Lastly, for agents who are not as tech savvy but want to better engage with their followers, we can walk you through how to manage your social media accounts, create stories, post videos, and share best practices so you are set up with an effective content strategy.
How to Get Started with BrightFire
If you’re new to BrightFire and would like to take advantage of our services, you can sign up for BrightFire’s Social Media Marketing service for only $90 per month.
You have the option to purchase additional custom campaigns as needed for $65 each, or you can enroll in a recurring subscription if you plan to take advantage of them every month.
Our digital marketing services don’t have any setup fees or contracts and also include a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Our onboarding process is designed to take the burden off of you as much as possible and consists of one 30-minute phone call. Typically, we can launch our Social Media Marketing service within a week of signing up.
As a thank you for attending today, we’re offering a $50 promo to webinar attendees. You can receive a $50 account credit for signing up for our Social Media Marketing service by next Wednesday, August 2nd.
To get started with BrightFire, please visit our website at www.brightfire.com or give us a call at 888-778-4393. On our website, you can submit your purchase, start a live chat with us, or schedule a call with a BrightFire expert.
Q&A on Insurance Social Media Marketing
That concludes our presentation on Planning a Month of Social Media Content for Agents. Now we’ll head into our Q&A session if anyone has any questions!
As a reminder to our attendees, we’ll do our best to answer any questions that come through. If we aren’t able to address your question during the webinar, someone from BrightFire will follow up with you via email to answer your question.
Can I publish my own social media posts with your service?
Yes, absolutely! We actually highly encourage you to do so. When we schedule out your social media posts for the month, you have the ability to go into your BrightFire account, edit or delete any posts that we create, and also create and schedule your own posts.
This is a really great way that your agency can add in those personal posts that help humanize your agency, like highlighting the fact that you’re attending or sponsoring local events, or even just showing off your team in the office.
If we already use BrightFire’s Social Media Marketing service, can we add on a custom campaign?
Yes! Custom campaigns can be added to your account at any time, and you can add as many as you would like for $65 each, per month. If your agency wanted to run a giveaway one month, that’s something that would fall under a custom campaign. Another option would be to sign up for a recurring custom campaign if you know your agency would like our social media experts to create a custom post every single month, like a behind-the-scenes post about your team or promoting a local event your agency is sponsoring.
To sign up for custom campaigns, you can either give us a call, purchase them through our website, or email your BrightFire representative.
Well, I think that is all the time we have for questions today. Thank you to everyone who submitted a question.
But before we close, I’d like to remind everyone of our upcoming 20 Minute Marketing Webinar.
Upcoming 20 Minute Marketing Webinars
Our next webinar is in September and will cover Debunking 5 Myths about Online Reviews for Insurance Agents.
Positive online reviews play a pivotal role in boosting an insurance agency’s online reputation. But managing each review platform, generating new reviews, and responding to each of them can be overwhelming. And what happens to your reputation if your agency receives a negative review?
In this webinar, we’ll identify and debunk 5 common misconceptions about online reviews so your agency can learn to love them and leverage them to protect your online reputation, improve your SEO rankings, and generate new reviews with ease.
This webinar will be held Thursday, September 28th, at 2 PM Eastern or 11 AM Pacific.
You can reserve your spot at these webinars by visiting the webinars page on our website at brightfire.com/webinars.
So that does it for today! From me and the rest of the BrightFire team, we’d like to thank all of you for attending.
