Our LinkedIn learnings and why our ‘People. Passion. Partners’ business ethos remains firmly at the centre of Unisure’s online strategy

People don’t buy products from companies, they buy products from people. And this is especially true of insurance.

According to ReMark’s Global Consumer Study 2022 – 2023¹, when it comes to health and life insurance, 32% of consumers listed “a recommendation from friends and family” as the initial trigger to consider a policy. Following that, as far as detailed policy advice goes, over 37% of consumers look to insurance agents and financial advisers for purchasing advice.

While online/TV adverts (17%) and independent online research (25.5%) certainly have their part to play, it’s clear that brands need to lead with people to carry their messages forward. Now, recommendations from friends and family are great when you’re an established brand, but in The Unisure Group’s case, as a relatively new global player that’s starting to make big waves in numerous international markets, the next best thing is embarking on a strong employee advocacy campaign.

An employee advocacy campaign is, quite simply, a company involving its employees in its marketing efforts by asking them to help promote the company’s products and services and generate general brand awareness. The success rates of employee advocacy campaigns are compelling. According to Everyone Social², not only are brand messages re-shared 24 times more frequently when distributed by employees through employee advocacy (versus by the company itself), but leads developed through employee social marketing convert 7 times more frequently than other leads.

At The Unisure Group, we have a strong B2B focus and we therefore prioritise LinkedIn as a preferred digital platform. As our Head of Marketing, Loura Joubert³, explains, we’ve seen very positive organic growth on LinkedIn as a result of our Business Development Managers sharing company content on their own profiles, but a big focus for the company this year will be on encouraging staff members across all departments to get involved in our employee advocacy campaign.

“We launched our ‘People. Passion. Partners.’ business ethos last year and it drives everything we do, including how we approach our online marketing,” Loura says. “People are at the heart of why we sell insurance, and without our staff and our partners passionately carrying our message forward, we wouldn’t be where we are today.”

While our Business Development Managers’ online profiles and networks are invaluable for creating organic brand awareness, networking, and lead generation, Loura notes that it’s important to remember that employee advocacy isn’t only a sales function.

“I’ve long held the belief that introducing a company’s employee advocacy strategy should be something all companies familiarise their employees with from day one, in their induction phase.

Explaining what a company stands for and encouraging employees to share their positive work experiences on social media is an authentic source of user-generated content that really goes a long way towards building a brand and igniting powerful word-of-mouth marketing too.”

“It doesn’t matter how simple the sentiment is that the employee conveys,” Loura emphasises, “if the message is warm and sincere, and it gives a human perspective to what could otherwise be perceived to be quite an impersonal industry like insurance, in our experience, it’s very likely to perform well, even on a serious B2B-focused platform like LinkedIn.”

Of course, organic reach is only one part of the story. Last year Unisure also devoted a significant part of its marketing budget to LinkedIn campaign advertising spend, which is very much in line with global advertising trends. As Insider Intelligence⁴ reports, in the US, B2B display ad spending on LinkedIn totalled an estimated $3.01 billion in 2022, and it is set to grow to $4.56 billion by 2024.

“I would never have predicted that LinkedIn would boom like it did,” Loura admits, “and nor did I predict that it would play such an integral part in our marketing and communications with the brokers and IFAs that sell our products. LinkedIn’s growth and success has undoubtedly been a big part of our success and we’re looking forward to taking what we learned from 2022 and applying it to 2023 and beyond.”

In the space of under a year, our Marketing department grew our LinkedIn following by just over 60%. This was through a strong employee advocacy programme that was bolstered by regular thought leadership articles (featuring interviews with our very own internal experts and department heads) and further driven by eye-catching, product-specific follower campaigns.

Here are 5 lessons we learned along the way:

• Educate & empower your employees. “Your staff are your biggest brand ambassadors,” Loura confirms, “but if you want them to feel comfortable sharing their stories and perspectives, means you need to empower them to understand both your products and also the platforms you want them to speak on.” In Unisure’s case, we saw our greatest successes through hosting company-wide LinkedIn training sessions and giving staff members examples of what and how they could best share their Unisure stories.

• Get leadership on board. Everyone is busy, but if staff members see top company leaders making time to post, comment and reshare on LinkedIn, they’re that much more likely to make the effort themselves. This can be especially effective when using platform features like LinkedIn’s “Give Kudos” occasion, for example. A good way to start is to encourage top management to start small and to set a goal to post even just once a month while they get the hang of it.

• Keep your content engaging & visual. “Digital fatigue is very real and people are becoming more reluctant to read longer pieces of text,” Loura reminds. “Make your content as brief as possible, but also as human and gripping as possible. Use stories, testimonials and anecdotes to hook your audience, and keep innovating your designs, especially when new platform features and styles of posts come to the fore, like document posts, which are becoming increasingly popular for their versatility and visual nature.”

• Celebrate your team’s expertise. According to Edelman’s B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study⁵, B2B decision makers not only use thought leadership to vet a company’s capabilities, but 59% agree that an organisation’s thought leadership is a more trustworthy source for assessing a company’s capabilities than the company’s marketing material. At Unisure we had a great year last year of interviewing internal experts within our company and positioning them as the central voices in monthly thought leadership articles. These were shared on our website and across all of Unisure’s social media platforms, particularly on LinkedIn where we put advertising spend behind them as well to ensure that they are read by as wide an audience as possible.

• Measure and recognise your success along the way. “We were delighted to reach a milestone of 10 000 followers on LinkedIn last year and we made a point of celebrating our success, through a celebratory mailer and our Chairman announcing our success at our company-wide online catch up,” Loura enthuses. “It’s so important to measure your progress, not for vanity reasons, but to see how you’re progressing and whether or not your content is resonating with your audiences.”

At the end of the day, you want your employees to truly live your brand and believe in your business ethos. If you’ve got that right, and if you’re leading by example, then asking those engaged employees to share their optimism, passion and inspiration on social media from an authentic and credible point of view will be second nature.

Sources:

1. ReMark, Global Consumer Study 2022 – 2023
2. EveryoneSocial.com, 38 Eye-Popping Employee Advocacy Statistics That Matter the Most
3. Interview with The Unisure Group’s Head of Marketing, Loura Joubert, 5 January 2023
4. Insider Intelligence, LinkedIn will capture nearly 25% of US B2B ad spending by 2024
5. Edelman, B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study