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How many of your leads are coming from social media? Should you change your strategy? Here are some ways to figure out if your social media efforts are paying off. 

Selling insurance products is a profession that is, at its core, about countering the unknown with a promise of stability. However, for an insurance agent navigating social media, a large dose of Doctor, Heal Thyself enters the picture. 

How many of your leads are actually coming from your social media efforts? 

Is it worth it to keep posting? 

Should you change your strategy? 

All marketing (including social media posting) has a “return of interest,” or ROI, factor — a measure of whether the effort going into something is worth the results coming out of it. In terms of money, this is a little easier to nail down — if you spend $100 on brochures but only get $20 of business from it, it’s not an experiment that warrants repetition. 

So what about the ephemeral quality of social media — can it even be properly examined? Thankfully, the answer is yes — if you know where to look:

1. Isolate your social media traffic
2. Drive visitors to your quote request form
3. Experiment with social media optimization through A/B testing

Step 1 - Isolate Your Social Media Traffic

If you are like most insurance agents, you likely have several marketing efforts in play at all times. These may be passive, such as having a website, or more active, such as buying and placing ads, or handing out business cards and flyers. 

You have access to the number of visitors to your website, and at least a general idea of the number of calls and emails you receive for quotes, but is social media responsible for these? 

One of the easiest ways to determine where your interested clients are coming from is by using different URLs. 

This may look as simple as using a sub-domain URL — e.g. [Your Insurance Site].com/twitter  — or more complex, such as using a different .com web domain entirely. This allows you to see at a glance which traffic is coming in as a direct result of your social media efforts, as opposed to physical ad buys or face-to-face connections. 

Step 2 - Drive Visitors to a Quote Request Form

If the end goal of your social media outreach is sales (and it should be), cutting to the chase will help maximize conversion. 

Make sure any links to your website posted on social media have a clear, highly visible indication of where a visitor should go for a quote or appointment. Structure your unique URL to pre-fill a “how did you hear about us?” field with the appropriate platform — e.g. “Facebook,” “Twitter” — so that you’ll always know which platform brought a client in. 

Step 3 - Experiment with Social Media Optimization through A/B Testing

The practice of scrutiny for success shouldn’t stop at social media vs. other marketing. 

Within social media, and even in the same platform, the practice of A/B testing will help you determine important information to optimize your online presence. 

Here are a few of the variables that experimentation will leverage to improve your social media success rate: 

• Timing of Posts: Try posting on different days of the week, and different times of the day. Do you notice more engagement (likes, shares, comments) on one post over another? 
  
  TIP: Repeat the “experiment” by continually putting your two best time slots against one another until you find a winner.
   
• Content-Length and Type: Does a shorter post get more attention than a longer one? Is there a correlation between mentioning your business and visits to your external website?
  
  TIP: Try posting on both ends of the length and link-containing spectrum to see which combination performs better.
   
• Images and Videos: Do you notice an uptick in interest and views when an image is included with your post? A video? 
  
  TIP: Try posting different types of images — infographics, explainer videos, stock photos of insurance-related subjects — to see which appeals most to your social media audience. 

Just like the previous example of those $100 flyers, it’s important to learn what impact — or lack thereof — your social media posting is having on your insurance sales. 

Use these three easy steps to determine where you currently stand, how much success you’re having, and what you can do to increase it in the future.