Stephanie Jaynes, marketing director at Citadel Insurance , faced significant challenges managing social media for multiple niche insurance programs with limited resources. After adopting Agorapulse, her team cut social media management time in half, successfully expanded to multiple niche audiences, and made data-driven decisions that improved engagement across platforms. The centralized platform enabled better team collaboration and helped transform their social media approach from reactive to strategic.
Underwriting the Expert: Meet Citadel Insurance
Citadel Insurance is a specialized insurance brokerage based in Utah that serves unique professional segments, including home inspectors, beauty professionals, transportation companies, and nutraceuticals. Unlike traditional insurance providers focusing on auto, life, or health insurance, Citadel targets niche professionals who face distinct risks in their respective industries.
Stephanie Jaynes, Citadel’s marketing director for nearly nine years, leads a small but mighty team that includes two employees and several external consultants, including Anne Popolizio from Social Squib , who manages their paid social media efforts.
When Stephanie joined Citadel Insurance, she was a “one-woman show” tasked with creating content to educate clients about risk management while growing brand awareness across multiple niche audiences. Initially hired to develop educational blog content, she quickly identified the need to expand to social media—particularly Facebook, where many of their target audiences (like home inspectors) were highly active.
Without a social media management tool, Stephanie found herself:
- Manually posting across multiple platforms on the same day with no ability to schedule
- Juggling different login credentials for each social media account
- Lacking consistent reporting across platforms to guide strategy
- Unable to efficiently collaborate with growing internal and external team members
- Struggling to find time to create high-quality, storytelling content due to administrative burdens
“The main issue was time,” Stephanie says. “It doesn’t seem like a lot when you think about logging into a platform, creating a post natively, and posting it natively. But when you ultimately add up all the minutes that you’re wasting doing little things like that… it’s a huge time suck.”
As Citadel expanded into additional insurance niches, each requiring its own social media presence and voice, the challenges multiplied. The company needed a solution that could scale with their growth while allowing their small team to focus on what they did best—telling compelling, industry-specific stories.
Filing a Claim for Change: The Search for a Solution
Stephanie’s background in journalism and writing meant she valued efficiency and planning.
“I really wanted to get back to my journalistic roots of being two months out on everything. Not just articles, but social media content,” she says. This prompted her to search for a scheduling tool.
Initially, Stephanie tried Buffer as an inexpensive solution but soon realized scheduling was only one piece of the puzzle. When Anne Popolizio came on board to help with paid social media, she recommended Agorapulse, not just for scheduling but for its team collaboration capabilities and robust reporting.
“The reason why we brought on Agorapulse in large part was because of the ability not just to schedule things, but to really work together as a team,” Stephanie says. “Both internally, because I was starting to hire people, and then externally with consultants. And then be able to have much better reporting.”
The Payout: Measurable Results and Transformation
Since implementing Agorapulse, Citadel Insurance has experienced significant improvements in their social media management:
1. 50% Time Savings
Using time-tracking tools, Stephanie found that Agorapulse cut their social media management time in half. “The amount of time it takes has been cut in half, which seems very dramatic, but it has been,” Stephanie confirms. “Everything literally takes about half the amount of hours, which is super significant when you’re looking at social media work.”
2. Expanded to multiple niche audiences
With the time saved, Citadel was able to create and maintain social media presences for multiple insurance programs, each with its own targeted messaging.
“If we weren’t utilizing a tool like Agorapulse, we probably wouldn’t be able to post at the frequency that we do for a lot of our audiences, and we might not even be able to have a social media presence at all for some of our audiences,” Stephanie says.
3. Data-driven decision making
Agorapulse’s reporting tools have allowed Citadel to make strategic decisions based on performance data rather than industry trends or assumptions. In one surprising example, they discovered that simple text posts outperformed video for one of their niche audiences—completely contradicting conventional marketing wisdom.
“I made Anne look at the report because I didn’t believe it,” Stephanie says. “Status posts—like no images, no videos, nothing—was what was working for that audience at that time. And it was completely counterintuitive and going against what everyone in the marketing industry was saying to do.”
4. Seamless team collaboration
As Citadel’s marketing team grew, Agorapulse simplified training and delegation. Stephanie now primarily oversees content rather than creating it herself. “Having that ability to delegate it to somebody else because Agorapulse is just easy to use and easy to train on has been a big benefit,” she says.
5. Quick answers to business questions
The ability to quickly analyze performance across platforms has transformed how Citadel makes social media decisions. Anne describes Agorapulse as their “giant question answerer”:
“The ability to make those decisions that quickly and that easily and that effortlessly is where Agorapulse is not just a scheduling tool.”
Bonus Coverage: Unexpected Benefits
One unexpected benefit was the ease of using Agorapulse’s tagging features to improve audience engagement. Stephanie found that tagging their audience members in posts (like home inspectors interviewed for articles) significantly increased engagement and sharing.
“The more people that we can involve in our audience, the more excited they are and the more they want to share the content,” Stephanie explains. “Tagging has become extremely important to us because on the average article we’re tagging five to 15 different home inspectors, thanking them for participating.”
Another unexpected benefit came from having quick access to performance data. In one instance, they experimented with reducing weekend posts but were able to quickly see that this negatively impacted their performance. “We didn’t post five or six days out of the month, and it dramatically affected us,” Stephanie notes. “So we were like, okay, let’s not do that.”
Expert Risk Management Advice
For businesses considering Agorapulse, Stephanie says, “I would say Agorapulse does a lot of bang for its buck. It goes beyond the traditional scheduling, which is still honestly my favorite. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the scheduling and calendaring abilities. But it still does go beyond it in terms of collaboration amongst internal and external teams, and that security and the reporting. I think there’s just a lot of value there that even a small company like ours can benefit from.”
Anne adds that Agorapulse turns potentially complex analysis into “non-event” decisions: “It doesn’t become a thing. It’s not an hour-long meeting. It’s an email, and it’s a ‘you should do that.’ And the ability to make those decisions that quickly, that easily and that effortlessly is where Agorapulse is not just a scheduling tool.”
Through Agorapulse, Stephanie and her team have transformed from being overwhelmed by manual social media management to confidently expanding their presence across multiple niche audiences. By cutting their management time in half, they’ve been able to focus on what they do best—creating compelling, industry-specific content that genuinely connects with their unique audience segments and drives business results.
Ready to cut your social media management time in half?
Like Stephanie and the Citadel Insurance team, you can transform your social media strategy from time-consuming to time-saving with Agorapulse. Our all-in-one platform helps you schedule content, collaborate seamlessly with team members, make data-driven decisions, and expand your social presence without expanding your workload.
Start your free Agorapulse trial today and discover how much time you could save.
