In today’s world, great marketing results come from great content. Consumers face a seemingly endless number of choices for the services and products they need. Creating and sharing the right content is how businesses stand out from the crowd and build trust with their audiences.
At its core, great content offers something valuable to your target market in the places they’re most likely to be (we’ll call it “right message, right time” content). From insurance website content to social media posts, value-driven content will attract and engage the most viable prospects and lay the foundation for building strong relationships.
Content for Insurance Websites: Information + Relatability = Engagement
Creating articles or short videos that answer common insurance questions is a good place to start. With a firm foundation of content covering the basics, you can work on expanding your content toward more detailed information and insights.
Agencies and brokerages provide services and products that nearly everyone needs, but few people n your market understand insurance enough to make educated decisions. Create insurance website content that helps potential customers understand coverage options and costs of common car insurance policies. Explain the factors that affect the cost of their coverage. Educate them on the best way to keep them and the things they care about protected. These are great ways to build trust and show your audience you have their best interest at heart.
That said, don’t just talk about insurance! One of the most powerful things your content can do is demonstrate that your office is full of real people that are members of the community they serve. Take time to celebrate the lives and successes of your team members on Facebook, Twitter, and other popular social media platforms.
Get involved with your community and promote the human side of your business both online and offline. Every time you work with a charity or get involved with an event you create an opportunity to show that your agency or brokerage cares about more than just business. When you invest in community social responsibility (CSR), you elevate your agency or brokerage from serving a community to being a part of it. CSR also builds trust in your brand and creates greater job satisfaction for you and your team.
Using gated content for your insurance website attracts your most viable leads. When you create a piece of content that offers extra value, require your audience to exchange their contact information to access it. Maybe a guide for first time homeowners if you’re focusing on personal lines, or an ebook about protecting your business from liability if you’re focusing on commercial lines.
Insurance content marketing shouldn’t focus primarily on your business. Your content should focus on messaging that shows you’re a member of their community that can be relied upon as a valuable resource to keep them protected. You’ll want to save the more direct messaging about the services you offer until after you’ve earned their trust and acquired their contact information.
Marketing Funnels: The Building Blocks of Insurance Content Marketing
When you create content to share with your audience, a marketing funnel is your blueprint for delivering the right message at the right time. Clients will either be at the bottom, middle, or top of the funnel: Your goal is to provide insight and guidance for your audience that moves them further down the funnel. At different stages of the client journey, your content will be building brand awareness, creating trust, and engaging prospects
Your marketing funnel is the roadmap your audience follows to become a customer. It breaks down into three stages:
- The top of the funnel is the broadest, where people are still unfamiliar with your brand. This is where your insurance content marketing focuses on who you are and what you offer.
- The middle of the funnel is for people who are aware of who you are and what you do, but might not be ready to become customers. At this stage, your content should focus on educating your audience so they can make informed decisions.
- The bottom of the funnel is the narrowest, filled with people who have come to trust your brand, and will be the most open to the services you offer. By the time your prospects reach the bottom, they will need content with strong calls-to-action that position your agency or brokerage as the obvious choice.
Keep in mind that good content for any stage in the journey will be appreciated by people further down the funnel.
Top of Funnel
Top of funnel insurance content marketing is all about brand awareness and building trust, such as content celebrating your staff and the ways you support your community. This is the perfect fuel for your social media feed, and should always include a way to drive people back to your website, even if it’s just a link attached to your company’s profile picture.
Don’t forget to include posts like this on your website as well! You’ll improve your SEO for your local audience and make it easier for people to find you when searching on Google, Bing, or other search engines.
Just because content like this is perfect for people at the top of your funnel doesn’t mean people further in the journey don’t want to hear about it though. Even your current customers will appreciate hearing about the people in your agency and how they support their communities when they read about them in an email newsletter.
Middle of Funnel
This content will be more focused on your insurance products and services, but isn’t pushing a sales pitch too hard. It’s okay to include a call-to-action to learn more about your services or request a quote, but such things should be treated as a footnote.
Helpful videos and articles answering common questions should be posted on your website to make it easy to share a link on their social media platforms and to sign up for email alerts about future posts like these.
This kind of content is ripe for using a portion of your marketing budget on some paid advertising to reach a broader audience of insurance consumers. Content like this should also be used in email campaigns leading up to a more direct ask to learn more, targeting contacts that have shared their email addresses with you previously.
Bottom of Funnel
This is content to convert a target audience with a high likelihood of needing an insurance policy. It should be more robust than an article or quick video, offering guidance to people such as new homeowners or business owners.
Bottom-of-funnel content should require prospects to share their contact information in order to access it. The policies you sell related to their needs should still be a peripheral element of the content, but it’s okay to call out the ways you can help more directly at this stage.
This type of content should be shared and boosted on social media, and should always be followed up with an email or even a phone call encouraging people to learn more about your services or request a quote.
Conclusion
To succeed at insurance content marketing you need to follow these easy steps:
- Understand your audience’s needs
- Build their trust by showing you’re real people that care about their community
- Show them that you’re a valuable resource to help keep them protected
- Encourage them to learn more
We know that getting started can be a daunting task. At Agency Revolution, we aim to make it as easy as possible for insurance agencies to grow their business and become more efficient.
In order to help get you going, we offer a regularly updated content library, custom website, and pre-built email and social media campaigns in our Attract™ digital marketing hub. For those that need a little more guidance, you can work with a dedicated marketing coach when you sign up for Elevate™.
Let us help you kick off your content marketing effort today!