The Business of Social: Why should MGAs be on social media?

As 2021 began with another national lockdown, it will clearly be some time before face-to-face business meetings and fully in-person industry events can resume.

With this in mind, now’s the time for those MGAs that don’t have a presence on social media to take advantage of the opportunities these platforms present to communicate effectively with both capacity providers and distribution partners– especially as we navigate through a hard market where regular, strong communication is critical.

In this short blog, our content manager Helena Martin covers 5 key reasons why MGAs should be using social media.  

1.       Authenticity

Let’s start off with a big one here; one of the key reasons you should be on social media is to lend credibility to your business. Though many business and purchasing decisions in our sector are built on relationships, it’s important to have an online presence to showcase your specialist knowledge and expertise to the market. This gives brokers the confidence that you are the right partner for their client. We’re not suggesting that it’s essential for MGAs to create and manage Instagram and TikTok profiles, but more business-focused platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter should be no-brainers considering their numerous benefits.

It’s one thing to have social media profiles but another thing altogether to be ‘active’ across social media. Having a steady stream of content with news updates, product launches, and regular insights will lend much more credibility to your business than a blank profile with no updates or followers.

2.       Identity

So, we’ve covered the importance of being active across social media to lend greater weight to your business, but another key reason you should be using it is to establish your brand’s identity online. Your online identity is determined by factors such as: tone of voice in social posts, visual style of images and videos, the type of content you share, and more. It’s important to establish consistency across your social media platforms, and to give your business a personality of its own whilst maintaining company values

3.       Engagement

Lockdown restrictions have pushed many face-to-face interactions into a digital space. As a result, we are seeing more MGAs, brokers, and insurers familiarising themselves with social media and using platforms like LinkedIn to share their thought leadership pieces (via blogs), create awareness of upcoming webinars, and more.

If you’re using email marketing and have a competent website but aren’t taking full advantage of social media, you’re missing a key piece of your marketing arsenal. It can be used effectively to promote online and offline events (before, during, and after), increase awareness of your products, and start those conversations online that may be of key interest to others across the industry. Beyond just sharing social media posts from a brand’s page, you can also engage with individuals on a more personal level – whether this is by engaging with LinkedIn posts (from your personal profile) or sending private messages to potential leads. 

 4.       SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

Hand-in-hand with the points above comes the added SEO benefits of creating social profiles and staying active across them. Not only will doing this help your business to rank higher on search engines, but by sharing links to your site within your social posts you will also increase site activity. This can be especially useful for MGAs with a vast library of content - by sharing links to these across social media, you can breathe new life into old content and give it greater visibility.

5.       Reaching new prospects

‘Organic social’ refers to social media posts that are targeted towards your followers. Typically, due to algorithms across platforms, nowadays these kinds of posts are only able to reach a fraction of your actual audience. To reach new brokers or distribution partners and showcase your expertise to people who sit outside of your existing follower base, we suggest using sponsored social campaigns.

LinkedIn and Facebook in particular offer advanced targeting tools which ensure your content can be shown to individuals based on location, job title, company name, skills, interests, and much more, enabling you to closely target those businesses you’d really like to work with. Sponsored social comes in a variety of different forms, with direct messaging, lead gen capture ads, and new follower campaigns just some of the many options available.

If you would like to know more about social media, from account set-up to strategy, reporting and managing sponsored social campaigns, discover how we can help here.