How should advisors promote protection insurance to consumers? May protection forum part 1

Adam Higgs: Good morning, everyone. Hi, I’m Adam Hicks from Protection Guru. Welcome to our forum. We’ve got quite a few hopefully new people. Hopefully we’re going to have quite a busy session today. In terms of our sessions, for those of you that may not have joined us on one of our forums before, we like to keep these sessions pretty interactive and get as many people involved as possible. The first session, we’re going to be looking at ‘how should advisors promote protection insurance to consumers?’ We’ve got a few advisors lined up. 

Now, as part of this, there was an article a month or so back written by Kevin Carr, which was looking at how we might be able to better promote protection to consumers, whether insurers could come together to do an insurer backed campaign and what advisers could do. And it kind of occurred to us that we see an awful lot of promotion protection from a wide range of advisers out there, all doing really, really good jobs, of discussing the key issues of protection and why someone might need it. Being quite frank in terms of the way they approach it using different mediums. And we wanted to kind of go into the detail of looking at what the kind of key learnings these guys have had, what’s really landing with consumers, and just see what we can learn and see how other advisers might be able to take that on and do more to promote protection. So with that being said we’ve got a few people that have volunteered to come in and share their experiences. I’m going to go first to Zoe Priselac who has kindly offered to spend five, ten minutes just talking about her approach. 

Zoe Priselac: Good morning. Hi, guys. 

Adam Higgs: Hey, how are you? 

Zoe Priselac: Very well, thank you. How are you? Thanks for having me. Inviting me to speak. Thanks. 

Adam Higgs: No problem at all. So I’ll pass across to you. So what do you do? How do you do it? And what’s the impact? 

Zoe Priselac: Yeah. So obviously, traditionally advisors have used, you know, networking, building, introducer relationships. That has always been a traditional way of getting business, maybe buying leads and obviously, they’ll still certainly always be a place for those things. But what I have been using, particularly over the last sort of 18 months or so, is social media. And what I’ve found is that social media has the potential not only to reach consumers that you may not otherwise reach, but it’s also a really great opportunity to educate them because a lot of people don’t really know about the different types of protection and what they actually do and why they’re important, so if they don’t, then how can they see the value? And how can they realise how it could help them, their family, their business? Now protection isn’t the most visual or exciting topic. It’s not like you can show photographs of wonderful cakes that you might be making or projects that you have. So how do we kind of make that engaging? One thing that I’ve tried to do is sort of build a bit of a personal brand within it because people resonate with people and find that that engaging. And also really to sort of use storytelling, which is what I was would always use with my clients anyway. So for example, I often tell people about why I moved into this industry and why I’m passionate about what I do and it’s personal experiences. I lost my mum to cancer when I was a teenager. My mum didn’t have any protection in place. My father was a self-employed mechanic. He didn’t work for the last 12 months that she was unwell because he was spending time with her. The savings that they had, they spent on alternative treatments when it was obvious that the chemo and radiotherapy wasn’t going to work. So when my mum passed away, he was left with a mortgage, two teenage children, one going to university, no money, no business, no savings. So the financial impact of that, not only did he lose the person he’d been with since he was 16 years old for 28 years and had that grief, that he had the financial stress. And my mum didn’t work, she was she was a housewife, but you know, it shows how still that individual being critically ill had a huge financial impact.  

That’s why I’m passionate about what I do and wanting to help people understand the value and just know that when I walk away from clients, they’re more protected than they were before. So if you explain that story, whether it’s your story or the story of a client that has much more of an impact than saying, you know, income protection means that you can pay your bills if you’re off or, you know, if you pass away, the mortgage is paid. So you can use social media to tell those stories. So in posts, in videos, you can use those videos to cover off objections, misconceptions. You can use a bit of humour, which I try and do as well. And you don’t need to do long videos, which is something that I also try to focus on doing videos as well. Less than a minute certainly. Short, snappy, 30 seconds, 45 seconds, just educating in some way. So, yes, education probably isn’t seen as engaging. 

I’m trying to make it more engaging and I think that we can. What I’m trying to do as well, and I’m sure that we all are, is to change the perception about talking about health, illness and death. So instead of people seeing it as a really morbid topic that they don’t want to address, that actually they can talk about it and they do see how essential life and health insurance is. And it would be great one day if people did see it as essential as they do car insurance. An essential to ensure the financial stability of their family, their business. Employers understanding how they can help their employees have more financial stability through employee benefits. So certainly, I think I started in probably 2020, the lockdown, doing more on social media, got more into the stride with it in 2021. But the best thing I did was this year I actually took on somebody internally. So obviously, you know, you can do the social media yourself, you can use an agency, but I actually took on somebody in a Kickstarter role. And I looked for somebody who was creative. He got good GCSEs, he did photography GCSE, and then at college photography and creative media and he’s been exceptional. So now he’s moving onto a digital marketing apprenticeship. So the main focus has been certainly sort of social media posting, but we are going to be starting to look at sort of Facebook advertising, creating funnels. We designed some e-books. That is effectively what I’ve been doing and just trying to make it a little bit more engaging. 

Adam Higgs: Thanks Zoe. So in terms of the content you’re putting out there, obviously, you just said you’re using a lot of the personal experiences and that could be hugely powerful, especially with a story like yours. But outside of that, in terms of the content, is it all your own contents or do you use stuff from insurers? 

Zoe Priselac: It’s really sort of the content ideas we come up with. Yes, we may look online for stats and things like that to use statistics sometimes, but to be honest, we’re just coming up with the content really ourselves. 

Adam Higgs: Thankyou very much Zoe. I’m going to move on to Nina Brown, who has also very kindly agreed to share with us how she goes about promoting protection. 

Nina Brown: Morning, everyone. To be completely honest, my story is basically the same as Zoe’s. I started doing social media about two years ago, 18 months ago now. Similar situation, it was lockdown. That was just a way to get out and reach clients. My focus is LinkedIn. That’s where I get most of my interactions from and I just try and keep the whole insurance notion just light and fluffy because it’s such a horrible situation to talk about. No one wants to talk about dying or becoming having cancer or anything like that, so I try to make it as nice as possible talking about the worst situations. I think when people think about insurances and all the different options and everything, it just scares people because there are so many different options. And some of the words and the jargon that’s used is ridiculous and it just makes people very wary about what they’re getting into. So I try my hardest just to make everything as simple as possible, and I do that by using videos.

Like Zoe said, all videos should not be however long because no one has the patience to watch videos for a very long time. So all my videos are less than a minute and they are just straight to the point. For example, over the last couple of months I’ve been doing insurer videos. So twice a week for April, I did two different videos for every provider and spoke about my favourite parts of the provider. So just say if their added benefits were good, I would speak about that and how that would obviously then affect the clients policies and if they have like a certain condition that they covered, which other providers didn’t I would mention that. I think it is literally just about education and just making sure that clients are aware of what they can actually get with the policies. Because I think everyone just thinks of insurance and they think of life insurance and they don’t think of anything else when they don’t know that there’s income protection. They don’t know that their family income benefits, they don’t know all the different options. So I basically just do the videos just to educate them and to realise that there are so many different options and you have to go to someone that knows what they’re talking about to get all the right options. I think social media is definitely the way to get this whole insurance industry having a good name for itself. Because sometimes it doesn’t. 

Adam Higgs: Is there certain areas of protection or certain content you get a better reaction to than others? 

Nina Brown: I did a couple of videos, a couple of months ago, and I got a very good reaction. Obviously, when you get critical on this cover, the main focus is cancers, heart attack, strokes. That’s what everyone obviously focuses on. And I did videos and all the different other conditions that you’re covered for under a critical illness plan, which you would have no idea that you’d be covered for. So I got a lot of interactions for those sort of videos from clients saying ‘I didn’t realise that if I was in a coma for however long I would be able to claim a critical illness plan’. So those sort of videos definitely resonate a lot more with clients because they don’t realise. 

Adam Higgs: You’ve said predominantly your interactions are more on LinkedIn.  Generally on LinkedIn, it’s more of a business kind of platform. So I’m kind of interested in terms of your reach and how you’re getting to the end consumers and you’re following on there. I mean, if you look at my following, there’s probably no one outside of financial services that follows me, but I think yours is probably quite different. 

Nina Brown: Yes. I mean, I do have quite a lot of following on LinkedIn and it is everyone it’s not just financial services, it is absolutely any walk of life. I do also have Instagram but it doesn’t necessarily pick up as much engagement as LinkedIn, but I am trying on Instagram and Facebook. I think the target market on something like Instagram is much younger and don’t necessarily think they are the target market that I’m looking for in terms of getting these insurances. I obviously wish it was, but unless they’re buying a house, they don’t necessarily see the importance of the insurances. 

Adam Higgs: Okay, thank you very much. Stephen Pickering has had his hand up for a few minutes now. Stephen, do you want to come in there? 

Stephen Pickering: Hi there. Yes, I’ve just got a general question to Nina, Zoe, people who are using it. Like you said, Adam, my LinkedIn is just other people that I’ve worked with or people I’ve met through things like this and isn’t particularly client focussed and I’m sure a lot of other people are much better at as soon as they’re introduced to a client, will probably like send them an invitation on LinkedIn and stuff. But sometimes I just kind of wonder, do you get a lot of clients coming to you having seen those posts? I would have thought you’d normally have your conversation with a client, and by that point they’re kind of sold on taking it sort of thing. So I just wonder, do you get a lot of kind of business coming in from that sort of social media engagement? 

Zoe Priselac: I thought the same thing about LinkedIn, because very much my connections were industry related. But the way LinkedIn works with the algorithms is when somebody sort of likes or comment on your post, then their network then sees your post as well and then equally if you have any other people that sort of engage. So it’s surprising how that reach can get out there. I mean, yes, if you are having a focus on LinkedIn, it would be a great idea to start adding people whether in your local area or that would be more the type of client that you would be looking for not – to send them a message, salesy message, but just to add them. And then the idea is that they would start seeing your content and then over time they may become a client, but that’s effectively how it works. The posts still have a reach into the networks of your connections, if that makes sense. Trust the algorithms, basically. 

Adam Higgs: Nina, what’s the best way to actually grow your non-financial services followers on a platform like LinkedIn? 

Nina Brown: With our leads, I try and find them on LinkedIn and I then connect with them and then once they then start liking the post, their connections will then see them. And for me, that’s just how I’ve grown, my connections. It all starts with one connection and then the second they engage, obviously their connections will see it. 

Stephen Pickering: So I’m guessing the way your business works, but is it your mum does a lot of the mortgage advice? So would you be connecting to the clients as soon as they’re there dealing with her, perhaps even before they’ve spoken to you? 

Zoe Priselac: If I can just come in with one tip, actually, which I’ve just thought about; If you do a poll about anything, it could be controversial, it could be anything, you get people voting. I then go and add them and say thank you for voting, thank you for the like. There are times that I’ve sent out 200 connexion requests from that over time. So there are different ways that you can sort of get people engaging and then add them and increase your network. 

Stephen Pickering: That’s lovely. Thanks. 

Adam Higgs: Thanks, guys. I’m going to bring Lee Thomas into the conversation because he’s made a really interesting point with regard to business protection in the chat. 

Lee Thomas: A similar story. I mean, I’ve been using LinkedIn since the start of lockdown and I’d never used it. And then give this platform a go. It Took a while to find a voice. I haven’t done video, so I just do at the moment text. LinkedIn for me works in two ways. Firstly, I do get a lot of new clients from it,  and it’s just about, as Zoe and Nina have said, telling stories, demystifying stuff, keeping it in layman’s language.

There’s an art to how you write I think if you’re using writing, just as there is an art to how you present yourself if you’re speaking. It takes a while, but if you can find that voice where you’re just not creating flyers or leaflets, so to speak, you’re talking as a human being about what you’ve done today, who you’ve helped, a problem you’ve solved, the type of risk you’re looking after for people. I do get a lot good feedback from it.

What I found as well, which I hadn’t anticipated, is I don’t just get new business from it but I’d spent five, six years before I started using LinkedIn, building up a network of professional introducers, particularly around business protection and group risk: accountants, solicitors, HR consultants, bankers, corporate finance advisors, all those sorts of people. And I used to spend half my week driving round to these people and see them  once every four or five, six months reminding them who I am, buying them lunch, having a coffee, and I’d get a lead off them a week later, and then I’d become history again until I saw me again, because it’s just trying to keep ever present in those sorts of people’s mind. And what I didn’t think was going to happen, which happened massively with LinkedIn, is that my introducers now see my stuff three or four times a week, so I’m ever present in their thoughts. So my referrals went up as well. So the people that I’d worked with for five years, I’m getting more business off of them than I ever have, even though I haven’t left my kitchen table because they see my content every week instead of having a coffee with me once every three or four or five months. A lot of them are professionals they don’t like, they don’t comment. I wouldn’t know they’re they’re seeing it every time I speak to them, they say, I keep seeing your LinkedIn stuff. It keeps reminding me I need to talk about shareholders protection when I’m doing a shareholder agreement. Loan protection when I’m facilitating alone. Employee benefits when I’m doing my HR software. And I’ve never been busier, I’ve never had more work and it’s all on the back of LinkedIn and just being ever present in my introducers minds. And what I would say is really nice, which I didn’t expect when I first started doing it, is how many other people within our industry support each other’s posts.

There’s no sense of competition, Everybody’s really supportive. The amount of other people that support my posts from the industry is great because I know we’re all, in a sense, looking at the same space. But I think anybody that uses LinkedIn also appreciates the fact if we support each other, our posts get seen by more people and actually we’re helping each other with the algorithm. So please support each other’s post. Don’t think you’re liking the competition, you’re not. We’re really supportive industry and I love that on social media, it’s been great, it’s great for business protection. 

Adam Higgs: In terms of designing your post, do you design certain posts for the actual businesses themselves and other posts that might trigger something in an introducers mind in terms of the opportunity and when they might want to introduce to you? Or is it all relatively kind of generic? 

Lee Thomas: I tend to focus on a product and in fact I tend to focus on a risk or a problem most of the time. Are they focussed towards my introducers? No, not really. But they are written in such a way that because I’m dealing with the risk, the problem that might materialise, it’s as easy for a client to go, ‘God that could be me’ as it is for introducer to go ‘Christ, I helped create that problem’. And so it just seems to hit both. So I just sort of pick on one thing at a time and I get personal stuff out of it as well. I don’t just focus purely on business protection.

It’s just finding your voice. But it really does work for business protection. There’s rarely a week that goes past where I don’t get a lead, new client. I want to count and come to me for his personal stuff. Don’t get hung up on likes, don’t get hung up on comments. I’ve had three likes and had a £30,000 case on the back of it. So the only metric I look at is ‘am I generating business?’ And I am. In fact the posts that do really well get loads of likes are stupid ones with me talking about my hair or personal stuff. But I don’t get any business from those, I might get a little bit of likeability, connecting with someone as a human being. But some of the posts that I’ve done based on from a business perspective, I’ve had three likes and no comments. You’ve only got to have one person to look at post and go ‘that’s me’. And that’s it. 

Adam Higgs: Thanks, Lee. I’m going to pass across to Matt now to throw the same question across. Now, I know you do a lot on the business protection side of things as well now, but I still remember one of the original posts I saw from you was all about the income trifecta, which I really loved at the time. How has your interaction with clients kind of developed since those days? 

Matt Chapman: Morning, everyone. Yes that’s a really good question. Lee is spot on, because what Lee’s done so well, I think is understood that the LinkedIn platform for him works beautifully in bringing in that combination of the actual client who’s going to be some sort of corporate or director, and then the introducer. And what he’s doing, it goes back to what we’re saying at the beginning, is about storytelling and getting that message across. His posts are really good explaining the problem and then the solution is put in place to do it, which is why it resonates so well with people. I think for me, my evolutionary story, I started off again very much like Nina and Zoe, it was lockdown, it was, ‘how do you stay in touch with your clients?’ ‘How do you stay relevant?’ ‘How do you keep putting content out there and keep your name up front?’. And I found weirdly LinkedIn for me, it wasn’t that brilliant at attracting clients, it was really good at sort of connecting with people from the industry and almost helping other people to work out how they could then communicate with their clients.  

If you think about what social media does for advisors – historically clients touchpoints with insurances are, they wither speak to an advisor face to face or over the telephone, or what they do is they see an advert on the TV for Beagle Street or for some sort of life insurance product, but it’s usually promoted on cost only. And it’s all right, it’s really cheap, it’s life insurance, everybody has it. And that message is where I think there’s a problem because we then as advisors think, well, hold on a minute, we’ve got to educate about what protection is, why it works, why you need it, where it comes from, what kind of things you need to be aware of. Social media gives us a really great platform to do that. And I think going on Stephen’s point a minute ago about actually connecting with people, there is a misconception that LinkedIn is purely for professional and almost corporate clients. That’s not strictly true because LinkedIn is one of the platforms that gives you a really good way of profiling the people you want to connect with.

So I think the guys will tell you from their experiences, you can actually drill down into location, professions. A really successful business is one that understands who its target client is, who they want to transact with, who they want to deal with; Is it doctors, is it nurses, is it GP’s, lawyers, whoever it is. And once you know what that is linked to and give you a really good platform to reach out to those people and the opportunity to develop a brand that suits the sort of people you want to deal with and I think that’s where LinkedIn can be really successful for advisors if they want to promote protection is understand who the target market is, put out content that’s engaging and relatable and contextual, explaining in a very sort of contextual way that kind of makes sense. And like Lee said ‘demystifying’ the complexity of insurance for people. But also this ability to sort of build an authentic brand that represents you, and you talk with authenticity and credibility about what you’re trying to get across to people.  

I think it’s that personal side that needs talking about as well, that adds a bit of gravitas because I just genuinely believe people don’t buy from companies or brands, they buy from people. And if you are that brand and if you represent yourself well on social media, I think that’s where people want to start doing business with you. In terms of algorithms, for me what I found was when it was working really well, it was the consistency. It’s like being consistent with your posts and putting them out there on a regular basis. So the algorithms see that you’re doing this content, you’re tagging the right people in there, you’re getting shares and likes, and that’s what the algorithm likes because it believes you’re putting out good content. Using the right kind of hashtags – normally they say somewhere between three and ten on a post is the sweet spot, using the right kind of hashtags to get you in the right kind of feeds and just making sure that what you’re putting out there is getting the traction with it.  

Lee makes a really good point about within the industry that we’re very supportive of one another. I think that’s another really good way of getting content out to people. I’ve used other people’s posts and put on my own feed and said, ‘Look, here’s a really great explanation of something’, or like something Lee’s done because Even though we’re selling similar products, it doesn’t matter because I’m still promoting what he’s saying because it’s very valuable. The context of what he’s saying adds value to what I’m saying to my clients as well. And the market is big enough for all of us. So I don’t think it’s an issue of competition. We should just be supporting one another if we see something that we think is a great explanation. How many times have you shared a post that’s some sort of mindset quote that people share online? It’s the same sort of thing. If you see another advisor putting really good content out that you think is really good, just go look, ‘watch this video, if you want to know more, speak to me’. I don’t think advisors have a problem with that because the market is big enough for all of us. I didn’t get a huge amount of business from LinkedIn. I just got a lot of branding credibility if you like. And then more recently actually done a couple of posts on Instagram that then fed through to Facebook.  

I think going back to Stephen’s comment about ‘are you getting the right type of client through LinkedIn?’, I’ve actually had better engagement through Instagram/Facebook with my peers and local people than I did on LinkedIn, because LinkedIn is quite, quite a vast space. If you put something out on LinkedIn, you’re really hitting the whole of the UK and you might be hard pressed to find someone in your locality, whereas if you’re using Instagram and Facebook, you tend to be connected with people that you’re friends with, more probably in your vicinity or your local area naturally, and you tend to end up getting your content in front of those people. So a bit of both really, it’s sort of changed over time and I think it probably will continue as the algorithms change. 

Adam Higgs: On that point, Stephen Pickering asks the question ‘Do you mean you can get the algorithms to do what you want them to for you?’ I’ll further question and say, do you ever really target certain posts at certain demographics, for example? Or is it more kind of generic than that? 

Matt Chapman: It depends on what you’re trying to achieve. That is the real honest answer. So again, if you build your following up by inviting people of your target market and then you put a post out and you might tag some of the associations. So for example, you did one for bookkeepers in Lee’s case, if you then tag say some bookkeeping association that you’re connected with that then goes on their feed and that’s how you can almost tweak the algorithms to get the content you want in front of more people that you want to see that particular type of post. On a personal level, I remember traditionally I used to tag everyone, mainly just because I wanted to get something out there in front of people. Because you recognise, as Zoe said, once it goes on their feed, it goes in someone else’s feed and more people will naturally see it. You can sort of tweak the algorithms, but I think the systems are very smart now. They kind of know and what they actually do is essentially they change them all the time. I found when I did posts on a Monday, Wednesday and Friday, early morning-ish around 8am to 9am that’s when I got the most traction. And if you do it consistently I tended to find I got a lot more traction doing it that way, regardless of what I posted or who I tagged in it or anything. It just seemed to be there was this sweet spot this time when it got the most traction. I don’t know why. 

Lee Thomas: Can I just can I just say that in terms of the algorithm, if you write an engaging post, if we all support each other, if you pick your timing as well (…it will work well). So if you’re if your attempt to do a link to an post is when you’re lying in bed at 11:30 at night and you put it out, it’s not going to necessarily work very well.

The way that LinkedIn works with people, if you don’t know, is if you can get a high level engagement it pumps your post out to about 10% of your network. And if you get likes and comments from them quite quickly, then it will push you out to everybody else that you’re connected with and all of their secondary people will start seeing it. So really what you’re aiming with a LinkedIn post is that you get engagement quite quickly, normally about 20 points, ideally comments that are more than three words long. If you do that LinkedIn will ‘say people are liking this post’ and it’s going to show it out there. So pick your time of day. When are people likely to be on LinkedIn? 8:30 in the morning, over a cup of coffee before they start working. Lunchtime. End of the day when they’re trying to faff out the last 20 minutes before they go home and they’re not going to start a new job that’s going to take them an hour. So think about your timings, think about the quality of your posts and help each other. If you all engage in each other’s posts by commenting and liking, their post will go phenomenal. They’ll do the same for you, if people will like and comment on your post their connections see it. You’re not really tricking the algorithm, but you have to think carefully about how you’re making the most of it. 

Adam Higgs: Thanks, Lee. I’m going to go across to Adam Caplan, who’s put his hand up.

Adam Caplan: To be honest you may have seen I’ve completely backed off LinkedIn for the last six months. I kind of lost my way with LinkedIn a little bit. And like Lee were saying, it was all about the likes and the comments and how many views I could get. But actually, I think what hit home and why I just stepped away from it is that I did one post on The Trust, and within 5 minutes, I got a call from what is now a relatively big client who I’ve done all their personal stuff for, and I’m now in the door for potentially one of my biggest cases ever for their shareholder protection. I’d much rather get two or three likes and a couple of comments, but somebody pick up the phone and say, Adam, can we talk about whatever we want to do. One thing Matt Chapman has always said and I love it from his videos is, he educates people and he never says, talk to me he just says, talk to an advisor. I’ve got so much respect for that because like he said there’s so much business to go around, and it shouldn’t be about ‘talk to me’, it should be an educational video. And ‘look guys, just go and find a decent advisor to talk to, it doesn’t have to be me, but go and find a decent advisor to talk to’.

I’ve got a massive connection outside of the industry and one of the big things to do is connect with your clients, because what I’ve noticed in the last six months is a drop off of clients contacting me when they’ve moved house, had a kid changed jobs or whatever, because I’m not present at the moment so they’ve completely forgot about me. Like Lee’s said, all these introducers he had to go and see every six months, you get one referral a year, but now he’s getting regular referrals. So you also need to use it and think about your clients you’re connect with. They might not engage with you, but you’re always there in their mind that when they move they will pick up the phone. And I’ve noticed a massive drop off of that in the last six months because I’m not present in their mind. So don’t forget about your existing clients as well. Connect with them on LinkedIn because they’re always hiding behind the scenes and the amount of time the client picks up the phone and goes, ‘I’ve seen your stuff on LinkedIn’, that is super powerful as well. But you need to be present, and I haven’t been present for the last six months and it’s made a big difference. 

Lee Thomas: Can I just say that the amount of cross sales I get from clients where I’ve tried to talk to them about other stuff at the time and they’re like, ‘No, just do my shareholder protection’. I’ll Connect with them three months later they’re looking at your post and they’re going, ‘Yeah, come on, come back and talk to me about key man and private medical’. And it saves you having to pick up the phone and be more forthright about that kind of stuff. Most of them by one of four or five things at the time that you could sell them. And they’ll slowly come around. 

Adam Higgs: Thanks. Rob from our team has put his hand up. 

Robert Harvey: Thanks, Adam. It’s been a really interesting discussion so far. I think, really interesting things in terms of harnessing these platforms to engage with clients and to generate clients. I think what’s been quite interesting for me is that everyone who’s spoken, one of the key takeaways is that you’re all on platforms where clients, consumers increasingly are as well, i.e., let’s face it, social media and LinkedIn is obviously is one platform. I think it’s interesting that there are now more and more advisors using other platforms like Instagram, Facebook.

Robin Allen’s not here today, but obviously she’s quite prolific on Tik Tok and other things as well. And I suppose, it does feel a little bit like as an industry we need to be increasingly aware of where our consumers are and our potential clients are and to be there as well. And I think clearly LinkedIn is somewhere where probably traditionally there will be a more business professional type clients. But I think, Nina, you made a point earlier on that younger consumers in particular are going to be on platforms like Instagram. I mean I’m guilty of spending hours of my day in the evenings on Instagram, wasting time scrolling through an endless feed. But let’s be honest, I am influenced by the content that I see on there.

And so although I follow a very specific type of content, it does ultimately drive me to make purchasing decisions and I’m influenced by the content I see. And it does feel that as an industry we kind of maybe lag behind a little bit compared to other financial services products, and that maybe there’s a time to kind of recognise that and potentially to be on those platforms. I suppose what I was trying to get out of today’s session is, I think that advisors are probably increasingly better placed to do that and we’ve heard from some people today that are doing that. I guess I want to throw a question out there, let’s put LinkedIn to one side for a moment, what other platforms could we use? Nina, I’ll throw this to you. Thinking about Instagram and other social media platforms what might work in engaging, with say, younger consumers, which probably at the moment are not engaging with protection insurance? What kind of content do you think could be effective? What have you done that has been effective in engaging with younger consumers, if you’ve had any success with that? 

Nina Brown: I think it’s the same sort of content that you’re putting on LinkedIn. It is still just about education. You mentioned the other day about using influencers and I don’t know how well that would work because obviously everyone has a very big different view of what influencer is. Some people think that someone from Love Island is an influencer compared to someone who is an Olympian – there’s very different types of influencers. I don’t necessarily think someone just say, for example, from Love Island is the best example to be trying to promote life insurance because I think it would attract the wrong crowd and I think that’s just trying to get someone to buy something which they’ll end up cancelling six months later because they did it, because it was the thing to do six months ago, not necessarily actually knowing the importance of it or actually being educated around it. So I don’t think that would necessarily be a very good way to try and get younger people to get insurances. I think it is the same content that I would put on LinkedIn I put on Instagram and Facebook because it is just about education and you’re trying to get the right clients and for them to actually understand what they’re purchasing. 

Adam Higgs: I like your point there. In many ways I agree, if you just pick someone off Love Island, people will see through that they’re just getting paid to promote something, they probably don’t even understand themselves in the first instance. But there are potentially opportunities for that kind of thing. The one thing that comes to mind is Roy McLoughlin, who I don’t think is on the call at the moment, but one of his clients, Simon Thomas, is a quite a big sports presenter and he lost his wife. Simon and Roy worked together in what I think was quite a successful campaign where obviously to some level he is an influencer, but he’s had that experience and he’s talking about that experience. And I can think of other examples where potentially it has been a Love Island. I don’t know the lady’s name, but there was a Love Island contestant from a couple of years ago that suffered from cancer for quite a while. And potentially, if there’s experience there, their own experience and potentially relating that to to insurance rather than just someone that has no experience and clearly has just taken a few pennies to talk. Matt, I’m going to come to you. 

Matt Chapman: Thanks. Adam Yes, it’s a really good point. What Nina has made actually about influencers and obviously there’s a challenge in terms of finding the right influencer to do that. And then you’ve got to then question, where’s our target audience? At what age are we doing it? And this is the challenge that we’ve had in the IPTF because we’ve been trying to develop a mechanism to try and get income protection in front of more 18- to 35-year-olds. And we’ve got to set these workstreams and try and do it. And the solution that we came up with in the end was to try and have this Ziggy Money Moves channel that we put on Instagram because we thought that was the right platform. And then we’ve recently done a bit more research at schools to try and understand what get these young people engaged in this sort of stuff. And it’s interesting because it’s not a platform that I’ve particularly used or that anyone else seems to be using inherently, unless it’s just to reprint what you’re doing, but a lot of them tend to go on YouTube.

Young people tend to use YouTube as a channel and they use it as an educational platform where they’re kind of going through the videos. They go down this rabbit warren of sort of things that they’re learning about. And what was really interesting about it that out of all of this, it came that we realised that in order to get more people engaged at younger age, it’s actually about starting with them very early on and normalising protection for them. So it doesn’t become something that we try and force on somewhat educating about later when it’s too late, they’ve already got their mind made up about how the world works and how money works. And the fact that we don’t learn about money at school means that really that is the optimal time to get in there. If you normalise the conversation around protection and say to people, ‘when you get a job, the first thing you ought to be doing is thinking about what kind of protection have you got to keep that income coming in? Have you considered when you signing you’re employment contract, do you have any income cover or sick pay entitlement?’ and explain what that means and what you need to do to make yourself more financially resilient.

I think that education  is where you’ll see the biggest shift. The challenge is how do you do that and certainly how do advisors do that because it seems to me that’s an industry wide problem. But I think what we’re talking about here is going on Instagram and even Tik Tok. I think that’s a great way to start. The challenge is how much information and education can you do in a short video because like Nina mentioned earlier, people don’t tend to watch anything more than 60 seconds, 90 seconds, they just glaze over. So maybe YouTube is an answer that we all ought to be looking at as a platform to provide those educational videos and do them in an engaging way for young people to get them more interested. Just a thought.

Adam Higgs: Thanks, Matt. I’m going to bring Setul into the conversation, Setul before you come in we’ve had a question from Ian Murray in the chats asking ‘What interactions do people have with their business prevention units / compliance teams?’. I’m not sure if you’re coming in to answer that in the first place. But if not, how does OpenWork deal with potentially the risk of all your advisors going out there posting all of this stuff? There’s got to be some risk with that and compliance must have a view?   

Setul Mehta: So the scale or our size we have to monitor it. So we do a couple of things. Firstly, we provide social media posts and bundles and some of them are two dimensional. Post it on Facebook, post on Instagram, post on LinkedIn. We started to engage in smaller videos. So here’s what an SVR rate means You’ll have seen on my Twitter feed The first thing I’ve got is ‘Protection in 2 minutes’ to try and share what that is. And then we’ve got articles and various other sort of campaigns and flyers and so on, so forth. So what we’re trying to do is provide the social media posts because we know that they are compliant and they’re signed off. And should the FCA do a deep dive? Actually, we’re in as trusted position as we can be.  

What we then have is those individuals that want to go one step further because actually they do want to create their own posts, they have their own brand and style, which they want to try and deliver further. So they can create that and we have a sign off process because it’s easy for us because we have four people dedicated to signing off this material and providing this material and creating this material. We provide guidance on what you can say and what you can’t say and if you want to say something, this is the way in which you should say it. Because actually what nobody wants is a deeper dive from the FCA looking at people’s posts and that being the reason that they either get a fine or be asked to stop advising. Now, I haven’t come across any of those examples yet where they’ve done that on a smaller scale, but I have definitely seen examples where both the FCA and the ASA have started to engage and fined individuals for misleading posts. And if you’re not involved in the day to day understanding of what the rules and regulations around it, it’s just unintentional. You think you’re saying the right thing, but you have to make sure you’ve got the right health warnings because that’s what the regulator asks.  

So that is sort of the OpenWork view of how we do it, we try and give the post to everybody so they don’t need to worry about it, but where they do, then we provide the guidance around ‘here’s what to look out for and here’s what to avoid’ based on our interpretation of the rules. In terms of just wider elements around what I’m picking up from across the network. Firstly it depends on the size and scale in the areas you operate in. So if you’re a fully holistic firm, it’s making sure you’re managing, one day it might be a post about protection or critical illness, and then you can have a wealth management post and then you can have a mortgage post. And how do you complement all of that? The other thing that we often see is who is your target population? So is it a certain niche area, or are you appealing to everybody? And then again, you’ve got to be mindful of the strategy you have in place.   

I’m generalising here a little bit, where I say the feedback that I get is where it’s mortgage related it tends to engage better within Facebook and Instagram and regular posts at that and different varying styles of post from your 2D static to come and talk to us, we can help you with your re-mortgage or rates going up. But genuinely, without a doubt engaging short posts where you’ve got people talking do absolutely start to get people hooked. And it isn’t just about new clients too. It’s really important to remember this is about existing clients and referrals. So again, we try and say to individuals, think about your existing clients as well as new clients. Whether you’re doing financial education sessions or whether you’re doing sessions as part of a partnership at networking events or in fact to employers, tag those individuals in, try and get those institutions to promote what you’re doing. Because what you then have is a third party lens promoting what you do. Where I found it really valuable in sort of school environments is where the school is re-sharing, re-promoting, retweeting what you’re doing. You then attract the parents of those children at the same time because the parents are the ones that are going to be following their children’s school. And so therefore you’ve captured the children because you’re physically there, you’ve captured some of the teachers, don’t lose sight of the teachers that you can capture while you’re delivering the session. And then if you get the school or the institution to engage then you’ve started to promote what you do across a wider area, whether that’s financial education. Or whether actually that’s just letting people know about the services you provide. 

Adam Higgs: Thanks Setul. Really interesting to hear that. You’ve almost got a social media team signing off posts left, right and centre I’m guessing. We’ve had Shaun Ware from The Exeter with his hand up for a little while. 

Shaun Ware: I just wanted to touch upon a couple of things that have been mentioned throughout this morning and probably from the insurer perspective as well. It’s been quite refreshing actually some of the comments that have been made. And I think one thing that is very easy to hung up on, as Lee mentioned earlier, is that strive for likes and content. And I think, as Matt alluded to with the Ziggy work that we’ve done with IPTF, actually, when you’re trying to engage an audience and build a social profile, it really is a slow burn. So I think sometimes we often strive for immediate returns on investment. So we want to see an immediate flow of business or engagement for putting out a bunch of posts. But actually what we need to do and to do it properly, it’s got to be consistent. Your message has to be clear. And I think the lesson really I’ve picked up on today is not to focus so much on the metrics: The measurements of ‘how is this post returned? How many followers have we got, how many lives have we got?’ Actually, it is a slow burn. And if you’re consistent and you put out quality posts and quality content over time, then actually you will build your audience and maybe just not get hung up on the quick win stuff. It will take time. And I think that builds a bigger, better bed of content and a better following and it gives you a better position to be in then to actually say, ‘we might not be getting this huge following immediately, but actually once you get 12 months down the road, it will be a different picture’. So I think just maybe a little change in focus.