How to Leverage Content Marketing for Your Insurance Brand?

Before we dive into how to use content marketing for the insurance industry, let’s get on the same page about what content marketing is.

Content marketing is basically the creation, publication, and propagation of content designed to add value for your target audience, in order to meet your marketing goals.

Content marketing is great for:

✓Creating Awareness

✓Generating leads

✓Retaining customers

✓Creating brand advocates

Content marketing involves the use of multiple formats, platforms and mediums across each part of the create - publish - propagate journey:

Create >  Blog posts, papers, videos, emails, social posts, downloadables, etc.

Publish >  On your website, social media, community platforms, etc.

Propagate >  On Google, Facebook & other social media, native ad platforms, etc.

Content marketing is by no means a new approach, but it isn’t one that’s frequently used in insurance marketing, due to the high dependency on agents, aggregators and the need for a personal touchpoint that consumers have traditionally felt.

However, consumers are spending more and more time online evaluating their need for insurance, insurance providers, and guides for purchasing insurance - which makes it the best time in insurance marketing to create value with an extensive online presence.

Why content marketing is a great idea for the insurance industry:

- It allows you to address common concerns online, without relying on agents, leaving customers feeling EMPOWERED and ready to make a purchase.

- With the increasing popularity of aggregators, it helps establish a direct brand connect and recall.

- In an industry that relies heavily on agents to push sales, it brings direct leads that can be informed and converted online.

- Most importantly, it turns a boring subject no one wants to hear about into an interesting journey that everyone needs to go on.

9 tips for leveraging content marketing for your insurance brand:

1. Start with keyword research to understand the questions your audience has relevant to the types of insurance you offer. Once you have these keywords in hand, you can use the insights to build your topics.
2. Analyze your audience’s buying funnel to understand what type of content they’d find useful at every stage, and what type would move them closer toward conversion - these insights should go toward building your topics too.
3. Use the pillar page strategy to organize your content ,especially if you offer different types of insurance products. This involves creating a ‘pillar page’ for each product type, and then different clusters of sub-topics under it, all linked by common keywords. This will make it easier for users - and Google! - to find your content.
4. Stick to the purview of your brand and everything that comes under it (a mind map helps!) when planning topics. If you offer different types of products, this will really broaden your scope, so remember to keep your content on-brand.
5. Create original content with your brand’s expertise, to answer the questions users are already asking online about insurance.
6. Use a mix of media formats - text, infographics, videos, etc. - to keep things interesting for readers. The insurance industry isn’t something anyone really looks forward to reading about, so the more useful and interesting-looking your content, the better it will perform.
7. Use a mix of media platforms to publish your content to correspond with your formats - your website, YouTube, social media, SlideShare, email, etc. Each of these channels can also be optimized for search engines and are frequented by your customers in their day-to-day lives, making your content a seamless part of their day.
8. Promote your content rigorously using paid media, by boosting posts on social media, by emailing it to your subscriber lists, etc. It will help you get some traction to begin with - insurance-related content isn’t something that easily catches users’ attention and time.
9. Constantly analyze what’s working for your brand, vis a vis CTR, page views, session time and pages/session for your website, traffic from each channel, engagement metrics for social media, keyword rankings, etc.

The dos & don’ts of
content marketing

Do  Don't

Do

Give it time and put in consistent effort for it to pay off.

Don't

Think of content marketing as a campaign or “something to try”.

Do

Talk about everything under the sun pertaining to your insurance products& services, not just your brand.

Don't

Be promotional.

Do

Create a content calendar and stick to it. Haphazardness has killed many a well-meaning initiative!

Don't

Jump in without a plan and the necessary resources.

Do

Promote your content - simply publishing it won’t bring enough attention in the cluttered online world.

Don't

Publish it and forget about it. Your relevant audience will not discover your content unless you put it in front of them on the platforms they frequent.

Do

Use different platforms frequented by your audience, to publish different kinds of content.

Don't

Only publish content on your website. The idea is to create a 360º experience for your TG.

There are a number of tools you can use to help you plan, execute and analyze the performance of your content strategy, and ensure you’re bringing in traffic that will add value to your business - whether in terms of brand awareness or policy sales.

Talk to our experts to know more about using content marketing for your insurance brand, or to get started right away