A Quick Guide to Content Marketing for the Insurance Industry

You keep hearing that content marketing is crucial for growing your insurance business. Maybe you've heard it so much that you're sick of it. And if you're like many agencies, you probably think that there are so many avenues for insurance marketing that you just don't understand why it's so important.

You have two choices. You can learn about content marketing for your insurance agency and adapt for growth or choose to ignore it completely and fail to thrive.

Not really a tough choice, is it?

Let's get started.

Content Marketing Defined

No matter how big or small your insurance agency is, content marketing should be at the core of your strategy. Content marketing works as a bridge between your insurance agency and your clients. It's a way of reaching out and providing something valuable to them, without pitching or pushing for a sale.

To put it simply, content marketing focuses on creating and distributing valuable content that's relevant to your target audience. To effectively optimize this strategy, you need to produce great content regularly and consistently.

The goal?

For your insurance agency to get noticed by your target market and encourage interactions that will ultimately lead to sales. In fact, content marketing generates 6 times the conversion rates of other methods. It's impossible to successfully market your business without content.

Before we can really get on with the ins and outs of content marketing, it's crucial to understand what content is. Basically, content is anything you create to share with your audience, and it takes many forms:

• Blogging
• Newsletters
• Long Form Content (think guides and tutorials)
• eBooks
• Videos
• Case Studies
• White Papers
• Infographics
• Reviews
• Podcasts
• Memes, and the list goes on and on...

Understanding the Need for Great Content

No matter what direction you decide to take with your digital marketing strategy, content is the key that brings your insurance agency's marketing to life. This is true whether you have a huge budget for pay per click ads, or you're just starting out and are relying heavily on social media and SEO to build your image with minimal financial investment.

In any customer journey, there are four steps to the buying cycle, and they apply to the insurance industry as well. These steps include:

• Awareness of a want or need
• Researching products and services to fill the need
• Giving each option careful consideration
• The commitment to buy

Makes sense, right?

You see this journey everyday in your career. Content marketing will effectively reach your target clients during each step of this journey. When content's done right, you win with increased sales, higher ROI (return on investment), and customer loyalty.

Let's break the need for quality content down a little further, and let's start with a question:

What if you could get over 400% more pages indexed by the search engines?

The answer starts with the valuable relationship between content marketing and SEO, or search engine optimization. If you're not familiar, SEO is the process of generating traffic through organic results on search engines. All that focus on high performing keywords? That's for SEO. Paying attention to the quality and quantity of content you put out there exponentially builds your SEO success.

If your insurance agency has a website with some products on it, sure, you'll get some hits with a few keywords. But each form of content, infused with high performing keywords, provides an opportunity to automatically increase the volume of clicks you're going to get from organic search. A blog alone gives a company 434% more indexed pages on search engines. Now, think about the potential when each piece of content gets shared on social media.

Do you see how content marketing can easily expand your reach further into your audience than you ever thought possible?

The Customer Experience Connection

Raising brand awareness through valuable, or entertaining, content is goal one. But, something amazing happens right along with that, and it's providing an improved customer experience.

Customer service has always been a priority for great businesses, but we're now living in an age where the entire customer experience, that journey through each of the four steps, has begun to overtake the value of the product or service offered when it comes to making purchasing decisions. Today's consumer will often pass over the best product in favor of a company that invests more in their personal outcome.

If you're optimizing content marketing, you're going to crush customer expectations.

Here's why:

Great content isn't a flat promotion of your business. In fact, it's barely recognizable as a promotion at all. From the consumer perspective, content marketing shouldn't be about you and your insurance agency. It needs to be about them.

For example, a customer is purchasing new home and will need homeowners insurance. They come across your blog and find it's a wealth of information on not only insurance, but also offers posts about home ownership topics. They decide to follow you on social media where you've posted a few videos that talk about the difference in policy types. You've captured their email address, so you send them a newsletter with a great incentive offer.

With just a few pieces of content, you've educated, answered questions, showed your value, and made it easy for them purchase. You streamlined the process for them with content marketing and made it so customer focused that they never realized you were selling.

That's marketing perfection.

Why the Insurance Industry Needs Content Marketing

While every industry benefits from content marketing, there are a few reasons why insurance agencies should be placing extra priority on content creation.

• You stay within view of your policy holders. Aside from paying a monthly bill, how often do people think about their insurance. Probably only when they need to use it, right? This means you're out of sight and out of mind, and it's hard to form a relationship when you're only touching base once or twice a year. Content marketing for your insurance agency keeps you in touch and helps build relationships.
• You learn more about your market. Social media is a great platform for discovering how your market is growing and changing. Each time you share content is an opportunity for interaction. It's a chance to see what they like, what they don't, and how you can improve to better meet their needs.
• It builds your credibility as an expert in the industry. The more quality content you share, the more valuable and trusted you become. It's that simple.
• You can soften the blow. How many times have there been spikes in premiums or changes in coverage that were beyond your control? Content let's you explain industry changes through a communal platform. Reading or watching content gives them time to digest the information before they come to you with questions and concerns.

We have more about content marketing that we would love to share with you. When you're ready to grow your business, and learn more about insurance agency marketing, we're here to help. Contact Confluency Solutions today!