Online engagement is incredibly important in reaching the younger generation.
Traditional marketing – billboards, TV ads, cold calling – just doesn’t work as well with millennials.
Everyone is on their mobile devices everywhere. When my agency set out to reach millennial consumers, we asked ourselves, “How can we appear on their screens?” We started a digital marketing approach. We try to add value to our clientele and followers as best we can through social media.
Based on the research, you want to share knowledge, tips and graphics. Fast and fun, not more than 1 minute and 20 seconds at most to keep their attention. So that’s what we do. We are everywhere now – Facebook, Google search, Yelp, Instagram.
One piece of this is educational videos. We do a lot of what we call “Minute Mondays” — short videos we produce in-house. The goal is to grab people’s attention, answer common insurance questions or give some quick tips. We try to keep it short and get our explanation out as quickly as we can in a fun way.
Millennials love the education piece, especially if it’s an added service we provide for free. Those videos tend to get good engagement, they’re also good for our brand recognition, and they’ve contributed to our retention (which is around 97 percent).
Another tactic we’ve taken is doing giveaways on social media. When Brightway, The Young Agency moved office locations recently, we did a social media giveaway. Anyone who went to our new location and took a picture with the sign and tagged our agency in their post was entered to win a gift card. We’ve done other giveaways for referrals, reviews, etc. Basically, we’re having other people do our brand recognition. This strategy impacts so many more people than boosting a post from our agency on Facebook.
We try to bring a local feel to our videos and social media, because we’ve found that consumers of all ages prefer to buy local, if possible. A lot of insurance agents assume that millennials only want to do things online. To an extent, that’s accurate. Millennial insurance customers will buy online if necessary, because it’s cheap and easy.
But I’ve heard from many millennial clients that they like to be able to establish a relationship with someone who is doing their insurance. Millennials may not show up at an agency’s storefront, but they like the idea of having an agent who is around the corner – if that agent is reaching out to them, providing good service and has an online presence they can check in on.
Read more about how to engage your customers online in our new research report
