What is Insurance Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is the use of engaged social media followers of a particular person or persons to promote your product. Insurance influencer marketing makes use of internet-based influencers to market and promote insurance products and services. A brand teams up with trusted bloggers, social media users, and others to help promote insurance products and give advice to readers and followers. Ultimately, including influencer marketing into an insurance marketing strategy can give your advertising campaign greater reach and more credibility.
Why is Insurance Influencer Marketing Important?
Influencer marketing is changing the insurance industry by creating new ways for companies to reach current and potential customers, making the usually staid and uninteresting topic of insurance something people will talk about with others. Consumers look to trusted influencers to help them navigate the different insurance markets and learn about the available companies.
What Makes Insurance Influencer Marketing Different?
The insurance industry has a few nuances that make it different from other industries that use influencer marketing to drive traffic. To begin with, there are several segments. Life insurance is in many ways more like an investment than protection against loss. Health insurance is, in many cases, a complicated employee benefit. Property and casualty insurance, which includes automobile and homeowners insurance, helps protect individuals and businesses against loss. Despite the abundance of different segments, word of mouth and other influencer campaigns can be beneficial for each. (Reinsurance, which is insurance bought by insurance companies to protect them against catastrophic losses, is a specialized but significant niche in the market. However, influencer campaigns are not as effective in reinsurance as in other product lines.)
Creating an Insurance Influencer Marketing Strategy
As with influencer marketing for banks, insurance influencer marketing is regulated and must be approached with care. And then there is the topic itself, which isn’t the most interesting and thus can be a challenge for insurance influencers. It is possible to make insurance interesting, though, and some insurance companies are doing great things to make the subject relevant to customers and social sharers alike. There are good industry sources of data and information that can help in creating content, including the Insurance Information Institute and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
Beyond regulation and content, the steps to developing and optimizing an insurance influencer campaign are the same as for other industries. These include doing research on who the influencers are to ensure their credibility and their alignment with the brand. It also means looking at who is trusted to reach the customers you want, who may not be same as the person with the most followers.
Several insurance companies run influencer campaigns now. These are often based on shareable content and consumer education, but not always. Among some of the more interesting programs on the market are:
Allstate
Allstate Insurance has created a strong television presence with its “Mayhem” theme, and its shareable content has helped it attract social media users who have an expertise and a following on insurance subjects. The result is a robust program for insurance influencers.
GEICO
In addition to using an animated Cockney gecko to sell people insurance, GEICO has created other campaigns that have become memes on their own. For example, the Hump Day Camel is not only shared by influencers, it gets a laugh that has nothing to do with insurance. That’s a good template for insurance influencer marketing
Nationwide Insurance
By adding extensive content to its web site, Nationwide has become a resource for bloggers and influencers looking for resources they can share. In particular, Nationwide’s website has information for small business owners, including agribusiness concerns. That gives it a different set of influencers than some of its competitors.
Prudential
Prudential’s core business is life insurance, which has many investment and savings features. This can make it complicated for people to understand. By working with bloggers and other influencers, the company is working to help people understand the concept of life insurance and the benefits of different types of policies.
State Farm
State Farm has a lot of the basics of an influencer campaign in place, especially rich blog content. It has also developed special programs at its neighborhood locations, with lots of taggable programming. Even better, its Neighborhood of Good campaign helps connect people to charitable and volunteer opportunities in their local communities. This not only enhances the brand, it makes the world a better place.
USAA
USAA serves a niche market: military members, veterans, and their families. Despite this built-in customer base, many don’t know they can become USAA customers and often don’t know the full range of services the company offers. To that end, USAA uses a lot of influencer partnerships to get the word out and keep current customers educated on their benefits.
Insurance is something that most people need but not everyone wants to think about. Influencer campaigns can help make insurance products and insurance companies part of the conversation. Companies that use influencers effectively can improve market share and customer satisfaction. Insurance may not be the most Insta-friendly industry, but different companies in different sectors are finding that influencer marketing is a success.
