HUB International Limited partnered with DEG to develop a comprehensive organic and paid social media strategy that would make it a leading insurance broker in the social sphere.

Insurance is a vital piece of our life, work, and health, and has been around longer than the United States has been its own country. Yet people don’t often consider it when scrolling through their social media news feeds. With so many puppy photos to like, it can be tough to engage with consumers about insurance.

The challenge

HUB International Limited is an insurance, employee benefits, and retirement brokerage providing an array of property, casualty, risk management, life and health, employee benefits, investment, and retirement and private wealth management products and services across North America. Seeking to go beyond traditional communication methods to expand its reach and relationships, the company partnered with DEG to develop a comprehensive organic and paid social media strategy that would make HUB a leading insurance broker in the social sphere.

To start, DEG focused on the insight that insurance is top of mind only during key moments of the year. For businesses, it may be during benefits open enrollment and when experiencing a cyber breach. For customers, insurance is top of mind when getting married, buying a house or car, or experiencing the threat of natural disaster.

The strategy

DEG conducted an assessment of the social media insurance landscape to understand how HUB could better connect with an audience of both businesspeople and individual consumers. Together, HUB and DEG determined key areas for the brokerage to become the go-to resource for insurance information on social channels and crafted a plan to test the cadence of B2B and B2C content to find the right balance for a long-term strategy. This allowed DEG to gather insights into the best days, times, and content with the most engagement on each channel.

HUB International Limited saw a 110% year-over-year increase in website sessions from paid and organic social efforts, a 225% increase in leads generated from organic social, and a 21% overall social audience growth.

The solution

HUB’s goal was to set a solid foundation by developing and activating an organic and paid social strategy and framework. DEG developed the underlying elements of a social media plan, including a content strategy, channel strategy, strategic governance plan, paid social media plan, and a comprehensive analytics measurement report. In addition, the agency created a channel-posting schedule to build a cadence for the nine industries HUB serves.

DEG worked with HUB to launch its Instagram channel and expand its brand presence in an area that very few competitors dared to venture. Additionally, DEG developed an employee attraction and recruitment content strategy focused on showcasing all the ways HUB supports its employees and communities. The agency collaborated with HUB to create content centered around sharing the internal brand with prospective employees and reinforcing the brokerage’s focus on its people to clients and prospects.

For paid media, DEG focused on reaching human resources leaders with employee-benefits messaging and interactive content, as well as reaching business owners in a few key industries like transportation, construction, healthcare, cannabis, and hospitality.

As the leader of the content creation effort—while adhering to insurance compliance requirements—DEG reimagined how complicated topics and detailed articles could come to life in social media using motion graphics and video elements.

HUB collaborated with the agency to craft real-time responses to fast-moving trending topics relevant to the insurance industry, while also staying true to the overall social strategy goals and new content creative guidelines. This combination of strategy and creative provided key insights and project development for sharing content about several natural disasters, key brand moments tied to pop culture events, thought leadership, and relevant newsworthy events, like cyber security breaches and landmark Supreme Court decisions. Paid efforts expanded the reach of these real-time campaigns.

The outcome

In the first year, HUB International Limited saw a 110% year-over-year increase in website sessions from paid and organic social efforts, a 225% increase in leads generated from organic social, and a 21% overall social audience growth. In the first nine months of the employee attraction and recruitment content strategy being active, HUB employees were incredibly engaged in the program, to the tune of more than 20,000 posts shared, up to 17 million people reached, and more than 34,000 engagements.

In one year, HUB took a more-than-200-year-old necessity and transformed it into thumb-stopping social content.