July 11, 2016 | less than a minute read

Is it time for London Insurers to Market through Social Media?

Passle

This insight from Gracechurch highlights the opportunity for London Insurers to take advantage of marginal gains through social media marketing.

Whilst typical marketing is still extremely valuable to ensure brand awareness the major opportunity of utilising social is to reach a larger volume of the right people in a timely, relevant and expert-led manner.

Although there are cultural challenges, corporates should see the opportunity of leveraging the independent networks of their employees to communicate. With LinkedIn alone the average number of connections is 930 per user and therefore a firm with 1000 fee earners could potentially be broadcasting too an additional 930,000 individuals, far more than their corporate reach. The personal message also carries more weight than another corporate message.

With 73% of Londoners using social media at work for 1hour+/day and 90% connect on LinkedIn after an event, social media really is an untapped resource.

We will be looking at the online presence and dissemination of content further as part of our RankMyFirm studies.

We are now regularly asked about what types of marketing works best. Apart from our stock answer, ‘it depends on what you’re trying to achieve’ there is one channel that London insurers aren't using but should be, Social Media, according to our research, the most cost-effective and impactful untapped medium for insurers. Typically ‘marketing’ has meant large sports sponsorships, with all the accompanying corporate entertainment. Insurer websites are typically ‘brochure-ware’ and definitely not state-of-the-art, so the valuable intellectual capability of the insurers ends up hidden from view. Social media is an effective, timely and easy way to distribute information about your business, but currently very few London insurers use it at all, let alone effectively. Most of the resistance appears to be cultural