Podcast: the holy grail of insurance? Making a success of social media
The fintech industry is flying through the social media stratospheres at astonishing rates – we know. But how are particular sectors within it keeping up? Insurance – and its insurtech counterpart – is certainly moving ahead in leaps and bounds in some areas, but when it comes to social media, it looks like it is only just embarking on its journey now, a good five years behind banking.
In the latest episode of the InsurTech Bytes podcast series, Erik Abrahamsson, founder and CEO of Digital Fineprint, explains that insurers “aren’t trying that hard so they’re not getting it wrong, but very few [insurers] are using it and see the opportunity in it”.
So, will how could these preliminary steps see the insurance industry catapult itself into making social media a success story? Here are seven key steps:
- Give the customer a better journey
“At every step we want to make sure we add mass of value to the customer so that they have a better journey, better understanding of their insurance needs, and have their data treated in the right way,” says Abrahamsson in InsurTech Bytes.
- Social media isn’t just for millennials
Target the right audience by using the right platform. Ease and time efficiency is what every customer wants, so learn about each platform and its majority users, and target your audiences with tailored content and for different uses. Facebook, for example, could work to identify new parents who need life insurance. LinkedIn, on the other hand, could help insurers identify professional adults earning a certain band of income who could use a certain product.
- Differentiate your social campaigns into brand marketing and performance marketing
Like the banking industry who, around 5 years ago, changed their brand marketing strategies towards performance marketing, insurers must learn the difference and make use of it. “Insurers are now about to make that switch,” says Abrahamsson. “Performance marketing is much more valuable for the insurance industry.” The next step is to figure out your customer and effective risk underwriting, which is where banks are thriving now.
- Make use of each social media’s systems
“Show the customer what value they can get out [of your product] without spending half an hour on the phone,” he says. Auto-filling tools from social media accounts saves the customer time and makes them more willing to share data, according to the FCA’s Innovation Hub. Top tip: make sure you have buy-in from the social media platform as you will need this in order to access the user’s data.
- Integrate social media into your product
One of the most successful InsurTech stories we have seen is Ping An Zhong An Insurance is in China, says Abrahamsson. By embedding WeChat and Alibaba’s payment data into everything they did, from payments solutions to checking fraud, they sold 1.8 billion policies in their first year of operation. Take this and use it. MetLife are already; don’t be left behind.
- GDPR: it will affect you
People don’t want companies “creeping around their Facebook accounts like some kind of ex,” says Oisin Merrins, editor at InsurTech Rising. Rifling through someone’s picture to find out if they are smoking or not is not only ethically wrong, but will soon be illegal with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Embedding the new regulation into a strategy and campaign might finally give the insurance industry a long-awaited opportunity to rid itself of its low-levels of trust.
- “Social media: please don’t do this at home” – use an expert’s advice
We’ve seen it before and we’ll see it again: social media faux-pas are bad. Very bad. Social media is a personal and sensitive tool to use, and you don’t want to get it wrong. Rifling through a huge amount of unstructured data won’t reap effective ROI for a company. Implementing the right strategies and using the right tools will help manipulate the personal data to reveal the gold mine.
By Sophie Cater, digital editor at FinTech Futures and producer of InsurTech Bytes
Bring your hashtags, memes and gifs to this podcast, while the insurance industry in put under a 21st century spotlight.
Oisin Merrins, editor at InsurTech Rising, speaks to Erik Abrahamsson, founder and CEO of Digital Fineprint, about whether the insurance industry can overcome its traditional blueprint and reap the plentiful rewards of social media. From gaining new data to underwriting risk more effectively, they explore how the sector can tackle the ethical and implementation challenges. Dive into the good, the bad and the ugly case studies to discover how to get the most out of social.
