You are never too old to learn, and jewelry insurance broker T.H. March can prove it. The 130-year-old company’s 18-month-old digital marketing campaign has already paid promising initial dividends, driving increased customer satisfaction and a higher Klout score—no small accomplishment for a company with a product that is, essentially, intangible. (After all, people see the diamond engagement ring or the high-end watch, not the insurance policy.)
“We’ve been using Social Relationship Management for quite a while and have learned some lessons along the way about how content drives a conversation with customers,” says Neil McFarlane, managing director at the London-based company.
The ultimate goal, he says, is to turn that conversation into revenue. “Over the next 12 months we’ll learn to use that engagement to drive revenue by attracting millennials, reducing customer abandonment, and increasing up-sell and cross-sell opportunities,” he says. McFarlane thinks the company is ready to move on that strategy, and says that the following social engagement lessons were instrumental to getting the company to this point:
1. Listen more and listen to learn. T.H. March needed to better understand its customers’ preferences in terms of new communications channels. “When we first started our digital journey, a lot of the stuff we posted was pretty bland and issue-oriented,” he says. “Sometimes it wasn’t getting ‘liked’ or reposted because it was boring.”
T.H. March’s in-house team has worked with Oracle and a digital agency to refine what the company says, and how they say it. For starters, the company pays close attention to what specific content generates interest. “We actively monitor interactions, responses, and viewing metrics,” McFarlane says.
If the audience likes something, they build on that—if not, it pivots in another direction. “Over the past 12 months, we have focused much more closely on what content works and what doesn’t—it’s a fundamental change—maybe we weren’t doing that enough before,” McFarlane says.
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It is beginning to work: Since January 2016, the company’s social audience has grown 100%, and McFarlane expects that number to grow substantially. It also tracks new customers that come to the company through social media, in order to keep the conversation going.
2. Know your audience. T.H. March has two distinct markets: Commercial insurance for jewelry retailers and designers and personal jewelry insurance for consumers. “They are distinct audiences, and we were able to use SRM to figure out what each group responds to,” McFarlane says. The consumer audience gets content heavy on education and entertainment, and light on insurance-speak. The idea is to drive a two-way conversation to engage both current and prospective customers.
“We keep it as visual as possible but also have a side link for education that will be text-based,” he says. The B2B audience tends to get industry news, as well as content targeted at improving business, such as risk management articles—LinkedIn is a key channel for them. “When we landed on the kind of content that the jewelers wanted to see, it increased the upselling and cross-selling opportunities for them, which makes it more likely that they’ll use our service,” he says.
3. Learn your channels and demographics. Learning how social media channels work boils down to maximizing results at the lowest cost, but McFarlane compares the nitty gritty to learning to work the dark arts, Harry Potter-style. “There’s a learning curve that has nothing to do with SRM or customer experience, and all to do with understanding how channels work,” he says. For example, you could post a great article on Facebook that bombed because it wasn’t sponsored. Once the company figured it out, their content performed much better. However, it’s not a one-and-done type of lesson—the rules change, and McFarlane says they are constantly researching in order to keep up.
They also target content according to the demographics of each social channel—Twitter skews more male and a bit younger, while Facebook tends to appeal to older women in T.H. March’s audience. Meanwhile, LinkedIn is a key channel for the commercial jewelers in the company’s B2B market. The company is beginning to use Instagram—“It’s fairly new to us, but we like that it is strongly visual and we think it will do great on a B2C basis,” McFarlane says.
4. User-generated content is gold. Done right, user-generated content not only helps the company meet growing demands for more content, but also fuels better engagement with prospective customers. “One of our biggest lessons is that very simple, personal competitions drive shorter and better customer engagements,” he says.
For example, on the consumer side, the company ran a contest asking people to post pictures of where they got engaged and why it was special to them, which generated significant response. On the B2B side, the company sponsored a contest for the best up-and-coming jewelry designer, with the prize presented at an international jewelry show in London. “We published profiles to social media and linked to the contest—it was relatively inexpensive to do and gave us good penetration into the market,” McFarlane says.
As the company increasingly provides accurate, relevant, and interesting content to its target audiences, it looks forward to linking those programs to financial results. “We now have analytics to provide the ROI on our social activities,” McFarlane says. “We can go back to the board and show the value of what we’ve invested in.”