No one wants to read content about insurance, right? Wrong. According to the LSA, 68% of insurance consumers ran a search before scheduling an appointment or starting the buying process. The proof is there in black and white. Your potential customers want you to answer their questions and help solve their problems.
You can do this cost-effectively with informative, educational, and engaging content. By consistently publishing quality content, you’ll drive traffic to your website and be seen as an authority in the eyes of your target audience. Importantly, you’ll also be contributing to your success on search engines and providing constant “fuel” for your social media platforms.
Use this insurance content marketing guide to shape your content strategy, and you’ll benefit from increased traffic, convert that traffic into leads, establish your authority, and drive long-term results.
What is insurance content marketing?
Insurance content marketing is the development and implementation of a marketing strategy that promotes insurance products or services to potential customers using content. That content could be text, visual, AV or a combination. We will focus on text content here – because that’s what we’re best at!
Building an insurance marketing strategy involves thorough audience and competitor research and creating effective campaigns across multiple content formats to reach the right people.
Many brands get their insurance content marketing wrong because they assume people don’t want to consume content about insurance. True, it might not be at the top of our weekend reading list, but to many people, it’s an essential part of researching and buying insurance cover. And from your perspective as an insurance marketer, good insurance content marketing is vital for capturing attention, engaging users, and ultimately, securing conversions.
Why is it essential to have a good insurance marketing strategy?
Most users shopping for insurance products or services search for information on the internet first. While many of these searches are to assess their options, once a user has a brand in mind, they’re using Google to find out more about that brand’s reputation. Here are five more reasons why you need to have a good insurance content marketing strategy:
- Mobile queries that contain “insurance near me” have grown by over 100% in the past two years, making it more important than ever to optimise for local SEO.
- 89% of customers scour the internet to find out what others are saying before they commit to your service, so make sure your company’s reputation is up to speed.
- 78% of insurance consumers call a business after running a search. If your brand isn’t showing up on the first page of SERPs, you can bet you won’t be on that call list.
- Satisfied customers are 80% more likely to renew their policies than unsatisfied customers. If you can dot the Is and cross the Ts of the entire insurance purchasing process, you’re off to a good start.
- Insurance prices jumped by 15% in 2023 and are projected to rise even more in 2024. If, through great content, you can help customers find a good balance between saving money and getting coverage that makes them feel secure, they’ll stay on your side.
Insurance content marketing research
Creating a good content marketing strategy starts with research, and this section of our guide covers just that. Thorough research and devising a comprehensive marketing plan will determine the success of every piece of content you create. With clear objectives and an even clearer roadmap, your marketing plan will help you meet company goals, stick to budgets, and determine how you can serve your target audience with content that answers their search intent.
Setting your goals
Before putting pen to paper (or fingers to laptop), stop and step back. Understand what you want to change in your business and how content will help you get there.
Prioritise your goals, starting with the most important right at the top of your list. Here are some ideas to get you started:
- Increased brand awareness
- Driving more traffic to your website (through search or social media)
- Educating your audience
- Lead nurturing
- More sales
- Demonstrating your authority
Your goal can be one or all of these, but remember to attach KPIs to your goals so that you can track how well you’re progressing towards them. For example:
To track brand awareness, measure:
- Social media mentions and engagement
- Reach and impressions on social media platforms
- Website traffic from brand-related search terms
- Growth in social media followers
- Number of backlinks to your website
- Media coverage and press mentions
To track website traffic, measure:
- Total website traffic
- Organic search traffic
- Referral traffic from social media platforms
- Click-through rates (CTR) from search engine results pages (SERPs)
- Bounce rate and dwell time
- Conversion rates from website traffic sources
To track your content’s impact on your audience, look at:
- Time spent on educational content pages
- Number of downloads or views of educational resources (e.g., whitepapers, eBooks, guides)
- Feedback from surveys or quizzes related to educational content
- Social shares of educational content
- Increase in subscribers to educational newsletters or email courses
To track how your brand is nurturing leads, analyse:
- Conversion rates of leads through different stages of the sales funnel
- Number of leads generated
- Email open rates and click-through rates for lead nurturing campaigns
- Engagement with lead nurturing content (e.g., webinar attendance, resource downloads)
To track sales, look at:
- Total revenue generated
- Conversion rate from leads to customers
- Average order value
- Customer acquisition cost
- Sales cycle length
- Customer lifetime value
A note on Customer Lifetime Value – Semrush suggests that this KPI is a key metric that all brands should track in 2024. To be profitable, Semrush says that your CLV needs to be higher than your sales and marketing spend for acquiring a single customer. To track CLV, you need to use this equation:
Customer Lifetime Value is the average transaction value divided by the Average number of transactions in a year, divided by the Average customer retention in years.
And lastly, to monitor your brand’s authority, track:
- Number of speaking engagements or guest appearances
- Publication of thought leadership articles or research papers
- Social proof metrics (e.g., endorsements, testimonials)
- Backlinks from authoritative websites
- Growth in subscribers to industry-specific content channels (e.g., newsletters, podcasts)
- Mentions in industry publications or forums
Doing a content audit
If you’re at the beginning of your content development journey, then this stage will be straightforward. A content audit aims to identify what existing content you have, how it’s performing, and where the gaps are.
Content can come in many forms. When you review your content, remember to include all of the following:
- Articles
- Images
- Videos
- Audio
- Presentations • eBooks
- Comments and reviews
Once you have a list of your content, it’s time to assess its marketing effectiveness. Be brutal. If a piece of content is redundant, outdated or trivial, then delete it.
When you’ve exposed the holes in your content, suggest how you’ll fill these gaps by repurposing existing content, archiving or removing irrelevant content, and producing more of the kinds of content that have proved successful in the past (Google Analytics is probably the leading tool for identifying this).
If you are looking for a handy template to guide you through a thorough content audit, we recommend:
- CoSchedule Content Audit Template
- HubSpot SEO Template
- Alexa Content Audit Template
- Distilled Content Audit Template
Understanding your audience
Don’t fall into the trap of getting absorbed in what content you want to produce and how you will share it. The most important question to answer is who you’re trying to reach.
One of the rules of good content marketing is to understand – and write specifically for – your audience. The best way to do this is to create customer personae. Without these, you’ll revert to guessing what your audience wants, typically resulting in writing about your products or company. You want to figure out what information your audience is actively seeking.
For the insurance sector, your personae should be based on life stage, buying behaviour as well as details on content preferences and consumption patterns. Through data, research and customer feedback, you’ll start to identify your audience’s interests and motivations, allowing you to communicate with them in their language.
Generating your ideas
Now that you’ve set your goals, identified what content you already have, and understand what new content your customers want, it’s time to start generating ideas.
This can seem like a daunting task at first, but here are some tips on how to create great content ideas.
- Start with the problem—list your customers’ questions and answer them with blogs, videos, and slide shares. Ask your sales team if you don’t know what your customers are asking. Review customer complaints as well as enquiries—what are the barriers to customers signing up with you?
- Review the reviews – look at customer forums related to your type of insurance. People talk openly to their peers, so you may get a more realistic idea of what your target audience thinks than from more formal customer research.
- What’s trending? – take some keywords from the first two ideas and put a few variations into Google Trends.
- Eye up the competition – have a look at what content your competitors are creating and decide if you can offer a different viewpoint.
You can also use tools to help you generate ideas for your content. Here are some of our favourites:
- BuzzSumo: Analyse popular content and trending topics across various social media platforms.
- Answer the Public: Discover questions people are asking online related to your keyword or topic.
- Google Trends: Explore trending searches and topics on Google.
- HubSpot’s Blog Ideas Generator: Get blog post topic suggestions by entering three nouns.
- Quora: Explore questions and discussions related to your industry or topic.
- Reddit: Browse subreddits relevant to your niche to find popular discussions and content ideas.
A note on using AI – for idea generation and idea generation only, AI is a great tool. But as we approach the next section of this guide – writing – we can’t stress this enough: do not solely use AI to create your content. Google’s latest update is enough to tell you why, but if that doesn’t convince you, trust us when we say AI content will put you on a one-way train to bored, disengaged users.
It’s time to write
Now it’s time to put your ideas into action. But first, we’ll be blunt – this will be the most challenging part if you’re not a natural-born writer, and really, you have two options:
- Hire an internal copywriter who has experience in the insurance space.
- Outsource to a reliable insurance copywriting agency or freelancer.
Whatever you choose to do, the process will be similar. Here’s how to deliver an effective insurance content marketing strategy:
Agreeing on your topics
When you produce content that your audience finds useful and engaging, it can be the catalyst for dialogue to begin. From here, you can use this as feedback to improve performance and business results. That’s why the best content covers subjects that engage the audience, creating the highest ROI (we’ll cover this later).
You can discover the best ROI-producing topics for your company by scoring your ideas according to volume (the number of people who would find this topic useful) and value (the benefit they will bring to your business).
For insurance, it seems as though the content that you can produce must fall into two categories – boring industry topics or ‘fun’ topics. You can successfully merge these categories by speaking as an authority in your chosen field yet keeping the content engaging and conversational.
Try to avoid producing content about less boring topics which are not related to insurance. Your audience is more likely to engage with your content if they believe you have the relevant expertise.
Choosing the proper content format
The format you choose for your content is the key to its visibility by your target audience. Use your personae to help you understand how different types of customers like to consume information and then create content relevant to them in that format.
Simple, right? If only it were that easy. Unfortunately, you also need to consider what budget, resources and time you have available, as this will influence what formats can be used.
The following formats are relatively straightforward to produce:
- Blog – (read our ultimate guide to blog writing here)
- Social media post
- Slideshow
- Infographic
- Whitepaper
It’s important to remember that insurance customers want you to take away complexity, so funding the production of more challenging-to-implement formats such as videos, webinars, and podcasts may be worth the investment.
Finding your SEO keywords
When you’ve spent time creating valuable and engaging content, it’s worth considering Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and keywords.
Start by researching keyword resources. There are many free tools available which will suggest possible keywords for your business. Once you have a list, make sure the suggestions are relevant to your target audience.
To find your keywords, tools we use often include:
Now that you have a list of keywords, be confident that you can naturally incorporate them into the content being produced. There’s no point in writing an exceptional blog about a topic your audience is interested in if you only use the keyword once in 750 words.
As long as the keywords don’t appear forced to the reader, aiming for your target keyword every 200 or so words is recommended.
We created a free SEO checklist to help marketers refine their search strategy. To download it, click here.
Creating your content calendar
Producing a content calendar is the most efficient way of having a holistic view of your content marketing outputs. It will get your business into the habit of posting regularly by planning ahead.
If you don’t have one, your content marketing will become impromptu rather than strategic. There’s no set template for your content calendar, so use whatever works best for you.
As long as you’re tracking what content is being delivered to who and when, then you should be able to measure success – and specifically your ROI – effectively.
Tips for writing compelling insurance copy
But how do you create effective insurance marketing material? While the specifics of each piece of content will depend on the content format and its purpose, as a rough guide, good insurance copywriting will:
- Start with a strong hook: Grab the reader’s attention from the beginning with a compelling headline or opening sentence that addresses a specific pain point.
- Focus on the customer: Write from the customer’s perspective. Use “you” language to make the reader feel personally addressed and emphasise how your insurance solutions can meet their needs.
- Create vivid imagery: Use descriptive language and storytelling techniques to paint a vivid picture of the benefits of your insurance products or services. Help the reader visualise how their life could be improved with your coverage.
- Use power words: Incorporate persuasive words and phrases that evoke emotion and urgency, such as “peace of mind,” “protect your loved ones,” or “limited-time offer.” These words can influence readers to take action.
- Establish trust: Build credibility by citing statistics, industry awards, or customer testimonials. Use social proof to demonstrate the reliability and effectiveness of your insurance offerings.
- Keep it simple: Avoid overly technical language and complex sentences. Write in a clear and concise manner that is easy for readers to understand, regardless of their level of insurance knowledge.
- Highlight benefits, not features: Instead of focusing solely on the features of your insurance policies, emphasise the benefits and outcomes for the customer. Explain how your coverage can solve their problems or improve their lives.
- Create a sense of urgency: Encourage readers to act now by highlighting limited-time offers, upcoming deadlines, or potential risks of delaying coverage.
- Address objections head-on: Anticipate and address common objections or concerns readers may have about purchasing insurance. Provide reassuring information and explanations to alleviate any doubts.
- End with a strong call to action (CTA): Instruct readers on the next steps they should take, whether it’s requesting a quote, speaking to an agent, or signing up for coverage. Make your CTA prominent and persuasive.
This list is not exhaustive, but as a bottom line, good insurance marketing will boost brand credibility, develop a referral network within your community and propel positive online reviews. What other people say about you is increasingly important, so if you’re only beginning to build your online presence, content that boosts your brand authority and increased brand awareness should be at the top of your list.
Promoting your insurance content marketing
Promoting your copy and content is just as crucial as writing effective marketing materials. Here are our thoughts:
Owned media
Use your website to its full potential. This is one of only a few channels your company/brand owns and manages. Ensure your site is optimised for SEO, professionally designed to help secure your status as an insurance expert, and allows you to develop relationships with your audience.
Posting relevant and valuable information on your website in the form of blog posts, articles, or whitepapers will demonstrate to prospective customers that you’re an expert in your industry. This level of authority acts as a strong motivator for them to do business with you.
Content marketing allows you to communicate with your customers in a way that develops trust and builds credibility. Both of which are vital for insurance companies.
Email communications are also a great way to share content, encourage direct action, and elicit responses from customers.
Earned media
Social media is categorised as owned media, but any shares, mentions and reposts your content generates are known as earned media.
Different social media platforms can be used to share your content, depending on your objective and audience.
Facebook and Instagram are large and popular channels for “fan” engagement. Use videos, images, links and infographics to invite participation with your brand and create a like-minded community. Be careful not to adopt a broadcast mindset, as this will not engage your audience. Thinking of what questions your customer is likely to ask is a more helpful guide to creating engaging Facebook posts. The fast-moving and topical nature of the news feed will also favour opinion pieces that generate comments.
Twitter is great for fuelling real-time conversations and connecting with fans. Infographics, videos, images and links also work well for this channel and give you a great insight into what your target audience is really saying.
LinkedIn is the best channel for bolstering B2B conversations and influencing the industry.
Paid media
Paid media is an excellent way to promote content to drive earned media, as well as direct traffic to owned media, i.e. your website.
Paying to promote content creates awareness and gives your insurance content marketing strategy a kick-start. Meta, Twitter and LinkedIn all offer reasonably priced advertising that would boost your brand awareness.
Another way to increase the exposure of your content is to remunerate influencers who tweet or share your links. This will affect the reach and acknowledgement your pieces receive.
Using a combination of Pay-per-Click, retargeting, and display ads is a popular and direct means of targeting specific audiences. Note that these methods don’t come cheap, and it’s unlikely that you’ll increase traffic and/or conversions to your website without significant investment. Used wisely, though, PPC or display ads can work well alongside less costly promotional techniques.
Link building
Building links to your content is a must if you want more search engine traffic. There are two main ways you can create links to your website.
- Natural links
- When you create great content, other sites and pages will want to link to it. Without having to allocate any resources or budget, search engines will view your content as authoritative, increasing your ranking.
- Outreach link building
- Outreach, also known as guest blogging, is an excellent way of establishing your authority for both your audience and search engines. By producing quality, well-researched posts published on reliable sites, you’ll be viewed as an expert in your field. It’s a proven way of increasing your exposure and, therefore, your audience.
Links not only drive traffic to your website and improve your SEO ranking but also have longevity. If the links remain active, they will continue sending quality traffic for long after any temporary paid campaign has finished.
Measuring your insurance content marketing success
Last in our guide is measuring your content success. Without tracking your goals, you’ll struggle to see results that head in an upward trajectory. Measuring your goals allows you to identify what works and what doesn’t and how you can adapt your insurance marketing strategy to encourage the best results possible.
Measurement
We’ve established that content marketing is cost-effective, but it’s still an investment that should yield a return over time.
The good news is that content marketing is highly measurable. Make sure that what you’re measuring is aligned with your original goals, but to get you started, here are some primary metrics to track.
Consumption
Simply put, this is the number of people who have viewed your content. Metrics include the number of unique visitors and page views.
Engagement
Consumption metrics give you an idea of how compelling your content is. But by looking at engagement, you’ll understand how your audience interacts with your content. Metrics include average time on page, pages viewed per session, new versus returning visitors and referral traffic.
Conversion
This is the ultimate goal; we’ll look at this in more detail shortly.
Getting editorial Feedback
Once you’ve considered how much your content is being viewed, shared, and contributing to sales, you may want to make some changes.
A slight shift in tone of voice, article length, or guest blogging sites used can make a big difference. Don’t be afraid to provide editorial feedback on the content being produced. It’s in everyone’s interest to get things right.
Calculating ROI
If you’ve encountered doubters within your company about the effectiveness of content marketing, then it’s essential that you prove its return on investment (ROI). These cynics are prevalent within insurance companies as they believe the subject matter is too dull to create a successful content marketing strategy.
There are three components to ROI:
- Cost – Consider the cost of creating your content. Remember to include copywriting and design fees as well as time and internal resources costs.
- Utilisation—In addition to the content created and delivered, a significant amount of content may not be used. The cost of this ‘waste’ also needs to be considered.
- Performance – It’s critical that your measurement of performance is based on your business case and the goals that were initially set.
Your calculation would then look something like this:
Reviewing your goals
For your content marketing strategy to be successful, you need to learn from your disasters as well as your victories.
Review the goals you set on a regular basis. Are they still the right objectives for your business? If not, go back to the start of this blueprint to shape the content that best serves your audience’s needs.
Creating an effective insurance content marketing plan
There’s a lot in it, right? Your insurance content marketing shouldn’t be taken lightly; at the heart of your campaigns, the right words will make all the difference.
That’s where we come in.
We’re the insurance copywriter of choice for brands including Park Insurance, Intasure, TH March, The Co-operative Insurance and Lloyds Group. Whatever your size or specialist sector, our intelligent insurance content writing builds your brand, increases your authority and forges long-term relationships with your customers.
Want to find out more? Get in touch.
