Key Findings Include:

• Authentic and Personal Content Highly Resonates: Authentic and personal content written by local advisors and agents showed 10 times more engagement than content suggested by corporate marketing. This extreme engagement boost illustrates the power of the advisor’s personal connection to their community. They know their audience, and the audience reacts to that authenticity and relevance.
• Automated Campaigns Strike a Balance: Automated campaigns have become a staple of successful programs because they blend consistency in message and cadence with minimal effort from the field. These campaigns were particularly valuable for practices with little local marketing support, significantly lowering the compliance burden, even as centralized content creators tailored campaigns by region or provided multiple campaign options to ensure variety.Engagement rates for posts from automated campaigns were high across the industry, with 33% for wealth management, 32% for property & casualty insurance, and 30% for life insurance. Offering the option to make small modifications to suggested posts also increased the engagement rate by 2 times over unmodified posts.
• Trend Towards Lifestyle Content Continues: As in last year’s study, lifestyle content such as health and holidays proved to be quite popular. For example, in wealth management, lifestyle content increased from 15% of total suggested content in 2018 to 25% of the total in 2019. At the same time, the average number of publishes per piece of content increased 16% year-over-year, demonstrating an increase in advisor activity across social and signaling more comfort and buy-in from the field.

Read the study to help formulate a social selling content strategy that successfully balances authenticity along with widespread adoption.