INSURANCE 2.0

If you can’t distil your social media goals in one statement, you don’t have a clearly defined social media strategy. Most insurance businesses are going to dive into social media marketing in 2010. How many do you think could distil why use social media strategy? 90% wouldn’t know the answer or would say its where our customers are, or it’s important we should have a facebook page or a twitter page.  All these reasons are valid reasons but still aren’t clear goals. Most businesses get it wrong, where they confuse launching into social media as a goal and then hope it will bring them customers or improve business engagement. Hope is not a strategy.

How every business could use each of the popular social media networks / platforms could be unique, driven with clear goals. You can’t be everything to everybody, and then your business is in the danger of being nothing to nobody.

It’s important for businesses to identify business goals and then drive contact strategy with their customer. For some businesses it could be to increase customer base, for some it might be to drive sales, for some it might be to reach new channels of customers, and for some it might be to crowdsource product development. But you can’t have all of them as your goal because your strategy might get diluted.

Its very important for your business to distil your social media strategy in one sentence or else it might fail to reach its objectives.

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Social media is mainstream in few industries, but definitely hasn’t made its way into insurance space. Few companies like Direct Line have experimented with community creation around Tea helps people in emergency. That idea never took off and overall its been gloomy. 2010 might be different as more and more insurance businesses understand the importance of it and following on the success of comparethemarket case study.

The following 5 areas will be the biggest growth areas in social media for 2010.

Location Based Applications

These applications could be web based, mobile based or any other interactive platform. Users are getting used to news and information coming to them rather they having to reach out for them. Twitter launched geotagging service so users can precisely find the source of the tweet on the planet. The potential of creating a whole new social media platform is low but potential to use the existing platforms and leverage them into bespoke new ideas is high.

Augmented Reality Applications

Most AR applications in 2009 were basic simple experiment to showcase the true potential of AR. There are quite few applications which show you nearest tube stations in London or nearest banks, coffee shops, restaurants, petrol stations etc. They are cool, but of low utility, shaky screens and not the best user experience. AR applications of new breed will take over our lives in 2010 and it will practically go mainstream by summer. Few major brands like Bacardi are already investing in AR and I don’t see some daring insurance businesses lagging behind. Most AR applications are marketing gimmicks, but some high utility everyday use type applications are on its way.

Social Search will grow

Google is not getting into trouble but will loose market share. Search engines taking social media criteria into consideration will gain market share. It doesn’t mean Google wont change its code to be more competitive. Business models of user reviews, facebook and twitter has had a huge impact on how we treat information these days. Search engines will start taking this into account when ranking pages. Facebook bought friendfeed to get involved in real time search. Microsoft’s Bing introduced few social features and are eating away some of Google’s market share.

The Fourth Screen Revolution

2010 is the year of the mobile. More and more applications would be accessed using mobile. Bandwidths will improve. Smartphone market penetration will surpass normal handsets. Growth of data intensive handsets like iPhone and BlackBerry will naturally influence the users to access more information when on the move. Businesses which wont a defined mobile strategy for 2010 will loose market share and will be reactive followers in 2011.

Enterprise level 2.0 applications

Few major businesses might evolve to create enterprise level solutions for bigger businesses to manage the social technologies

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Insurance is deemed as a boring industry with very little innovation. Most of it is due to old legacy systems and merging of layers of different systems talking to each other. The industry has second thoughts about change. Times are now changing and few insurance businesses are advocates of innovation in the online space. Some online insurance businesses have started hiring usability experts which is an indication that there is a willingness to bring innovation.

I’m a huge advocate for customer focused design and if insurance businesses start using their customers for product development, they will discover a wealth of ideas that’ll help insurance businesses build next generation online models. Insurance 2.0 is still a fiction because insurance businesses haven’t figured out the area of opportunities where they can introduce customer engagement or two way communication.

I find insurance is one of the toughest financial services product to work with. We spend so much on it yet hope we never use it!

I have a theory about 5 stages where financial services interact with their customers. This is applicable to most financial services and not just insurance.

1. Educating

2. Quoting

3. Buying

4. Servicing

5. Deepen Customer Relationships

Most sites do (2) Quoting and (3) Buying well enough, although usability in quoting is far from perfect. The biggest area of Insurance 2.0 opportunities are around (1) Educating (4) Servicing and (5) Deepen Customer Relationships. Some brands are moving into DIY servicing, online claims, chat, click2call etc. But it’s the opportunity to educate and acquire customers then deepen the relationship & retain customers where I see the opportunities exist to really differentiate. Introduction of web 2.0 technologies like Ajax could be used to improve Quote and Buy stage of the cycle.

Insurance 2.0 will soon be a reality in short-term future.  Some insurance businesses are already innovating towards opening new channels of two way communication with customers.

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Social Media strategy is a buzzword for many businesses to dip their toes into. Most businesses are doing it without a goal. They hear the buzzwords in popular media sources and follow the leaders without applying any business logic. The social media goal is of higher significance than social tools. The tools are one level down and quite simple to use once you can define your social media strategy goal in one sentence. Don’t just open a twitter account, or publish a facebook page because you want to do it to please the board of directors. The social networking tools if applied without much thought could damage your business. Another question which is common for businesses to have is how a company can effectively allocate marketing resources if they cannot define the value of investment?

So WHY create a Social Media Strategy?

Whether businesses like it or not, people want to interact with their brands. A recent report by Forrester Research said 93% of users believe a company should have a social media site. Also 42% of adults and 55% of youths want to interact with their favourite brand using one or more social media tools.

But HOW they want to interact varies

26% of adults prefer online discussion forums
21% prefer videos
15% prefer profiles on social networking sites like facebook and twitter
Only 12% prefer blogs
And less than 10% listen to podcasts

The SCIENCE of Social Media Strategy can help any online business, financial service business, retail business, service or product provider launch a social media strategy. It’s suited to most business models.

Search
Communicate
Influence
Engage
Novelty
Content
Establish

Search

There are hundreds of things being written about your brand in the social space. Search for them and find out what’s being written about, it could negative ranting or positive raving. But it’s important for your brand to identify those spaces where your customers talk about you. Technorati and IceRocket are good sources to stay tuned about your brand. Google Alerts is also a nice free tool for the same purpose.

Communicate

It’s important to communicate with your customers in the same place where they are hanging out. You could choose to promote your brand or protect your brand. But to do that you have choose the medium or platform of communication. You could launch a blog to increase communication and collaboration with customers and open them for comments. You could also establish a Facebook persona and increase awareness among your customers. You could launch a community catering to your customers interests. You could open twitter account and manage some of the customer service from there. There are lots tools you could use to communicate, buts it’s important that it’s done in a consistent manner.

Influence

Once you have started communicating and launched conversation platforms, it’s important you don’t control the conversations but influence them. It’s important you listen, follow and come back with responses which are understandable for the user. At first it might be chaotic to follow so many voices, but soon a pattern is represented and you could response with statement which answers combinations of conversations.

Engage

Engagement differs with industry. Financial services have low engagment with their customers compared to media and technology. It’s important you engage with your customers and deepen trust and customer relationship by bringing in transparency. Take criticism positively and encourage feedback. Take feedback on board and proactively manage customer expectations with short bursts of information updates. But it’s important you participate as you might trigger a World Wide Rave or prevent a World Wide Rant. You could engage your customer with thought provoking articles, products, blogs, advertising, humour and it’ll vary from business to business. Be respectful, human and considerate with your audience. A report by Engagementdb defined four engagement profiles:

 1) Mavens - Brands which are actively engage in 7 or more channels. Brands like Starbucks and Dell fall into this category. They don’t just engage actively, but its part of their core marketing strategy and their participation positively impacts their bottom line.

 2) Butterflies - These are brands which flutter around 7 or more channels, but are not as active as the Mavens. Brands like American Express fall is this category and social media is not 100% mainstream for them.

 3) Selectives - These brands engage is six or fewer channels but have above average engagement. Brands like H&M and Philips fall into this category. Very few resources are dedicated to social media for these brands.

 4) Wallflowers - These brands have six or few channels of lower than average engagement. McDonalds falls into this category where they are just dipping their toes is social media waters.

Novelty

The devil is in the details. Whatever method you choose to engage with your customer, there has to be a novelty factor to it. You just can’t copy others content / media and pretend to bring something new. Anything original has a much longer shelf life. Any idea which was a viral for one business is very unlikely to be a viral another. Most facebook pages have same tools and features, but brands still manage to personalise it by giving the pages its own persona and that’s what triggers customers to engage with those pages.
Novelty doesn’t have to spaceage, it could be simple things done with original thought and original goals. Also remember, what’s in it for your customer? If nothing, don’t bother.

Content

You could create content with your users using several collaboration tools. Many businesses like Dell (IdeaStorm) and Starbucks (MyStarbucksIdea.com) are collaborating with their users to improve product development. Some call it Crowdsourcing or Customersourcing. Many businesses provide all social networking tools as standard feature in all content pages so users could share it across their preferred social site. It’s important to align content with community needs and also encourage user generated content. One shouldn’t moderate any criticism and manage it with reactive or proactive responses where necessary. Quality and quantity of content varies with your social goals. If developing a community is what you are after than you need a full time team dedicated towards content needs.

Establish

Once you have done your search, communication, influencing, engaging, novelty and collaboration, it’s important you establish yourself and follow the above cycle of listening, learning and launching. You can establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry and your customers will establish a relationship of trust with your brand. It takes a bit of effort to reach the establishment phase but once there you will already be in the zone of momentum where you are constantly communicating and engaging with more and more customers and establishing deeper relationships. Do remember people congregate around relevance and value.

The SCIENCE of Social Media needs to be tested with measurement. You could measure your social media success with comments, twitter mentions, facebook fans, RSS subscribers, clickthroughs, video views, links, inbound traffic, diggs, stumbles and many more.  Do keep in mind, doing it all may not be the right thing to do, but something must be done.

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Writing the right copy for your web audience is a simple trick many insurance businesses do not follow. Most insurance organisations think insurance as a product which is fairly complex and they pass on that complexity of jargons to their users to decode for themselves. Till recently the insurance industry jargon was ‘motor insurance’ where their entire customer called it ‘car insurance’. This awareness only got highlighted because google plays a big part in all our business decisions today. Here are few pointers on how to optimise your web copy for your customers attention.

Web copy must be usable*

Present content for the scan reader - concise chunks, instantly understandable headlines and standfirsts, smart use of bullets and bold, menus and subheads etc.

Make sure all signposting elements are as intuitive to read and act on.  

Make each content item a self-contained piece of information.

Make it easy for users to make their own journey through your content.  

Organise content into user-friendly, repeatable formats.

Make sure all anchor text is clear in its meaning, unique on the page, and explicitly descriptive of its destination.

Web copy must be written in plain language

Focus content on users’ needs/interests.

Write in everyday, simple language in line with Plain English principles.

Prefer the active voice to the passive.

Prefer short words to long ones; avoid jargon and spell out abbreviations. 

Prefer positive constructions.

Use personal pronouns as much as possible.

Web copy must be optimised for natural search

Provide instantly meaningful, keyword-rich headlines supported by keyword-rich standfirsts.

Provide relevant, engaging content that contains the key terms people are likely to search for.

Make sure link texts are self-contained and instantly understandable out of context.

Organise content types into scannable, repeatable copy formats with lots of keyword-rich subheadings.

Web copy must be on brand without sacrificing web-friendliness

Check content encourages a positive perception of your organisation and supports its brand values.

Use a tone that is appropriate for users - make sure the site has a clear idea of its audience.

Web copy must be credible

Make sure content is up to date and logically ordered.

Make sure all content has a high standard of grammar and spelling.

Avoid any unrealistic claims/unjustifiable superlatives.

Use site nomenclature and business terms consistently.

Make sure site avoids culturally-bound references and time references that could date.

Very few insurance businesses focus much on the copy and are missing out on conversion gains of a good copy.

Sticky Content is one of top vendors for digital copywriting classes. You can Refresh your digital copywriting skills… in 3 hours.

*Portions of this blog is adapted from Dan Fielder’s, How to write for the web classes?

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