Are You Content Marketing? Maybe You Should

[Josh]

In 2015 people are increasingly likely to go to the internet to find answers to their questions about a product. The internet searches are hammered with affiliate sites, carrier sites, and extremely expensive PPC ads, so how can independent agents and agencies use the internet to generate the highest quality leads if they lack an SEO guru or an expensive AdWords budget? Content marketing is key!

What is content marketing? Simply put, it's a way of using content to get in front of potential customers. "Click here for a free report" or "click here to find out why our product is so great" or "10 things you didn't know about X", those types of pieces that educate and/or entertain prospects are gold.

The keynote presenter at LeadsCon Las Vegas 2015 Marcus Sheriden talked about how content marketing saved his pool company. What does that have to do with selling insurance? Everything. The short version is that by simply putting up an article answering the question "how much does a pool cost" he was able to get a phenomenal amount of traffic to his website through organic search traffic. More important than how the traffic arrived was the conversion rate. Instead of having users simply shopping on price, they were engaging in a thoughtful discussion about what impacts price and why it matters. It may seem that in 2015 everyone is shopping on price, but the pendulum is swinging back towards value from price.

So why does this matter to you? Even if you don't have a professional website (or any website at all), if you can put together pieces of content that people find useful or interesting it can help you spread your brand as well as build credibility. If you start a small blog with a post a week or even a few facebook posts a month relevant to what you're doing that folks would find interesting, it's only a matter of time until that starts to generate sales for you.

 

[lrixford]

All day, every day. For ITC, and our customers.

It works. Period.

LeadsCon was a lot of fun, I did not know any Insurance Forums people were there.

 

[Josh]

I've been to the last three and registered for the one in NY. I tend to have more fun at Vegas, but they've both been good shows.

 

[jaygreen002]

As what most internet marketers says, Content is king!

 

[EMCRick]

Josh

I couldn't agree more. I've seen so many agents waste time and money on websites that do nothing to attract their Ideal Client and provide value. The agent is actually doing more harm than good to themselves and their brand in these instances.

A blog, newsletter etc, with the right kind of content can be a huge in attracting clients and building one's business. if you don't have disposal income to do a website the right way, than this is the way to go.

Thanks Josh for your post and advice

 

[DFW]

Hey Josh,

Great post. Question for everyone. If you sell term, disability and final expense..do you think its best to have one blog to load up content or better to break it up and have a blog specific to each product?

 

[Josh]

Hey Josh,

Great post. Question for everyone. If you sell term, disability and final expense..do you think its best to have one blog to load up content or better to break it up and have a blog specific to each product?

Not quite sure what you mean, but this might answer the question.

If you have a good sized blog post (500-1,000 words) it will be weighted differently than a few sentences, so in any post you're making you're going to want to make it cover some ground. Each post is treated as a separate search result so the more posts you can do the more pages you'll have with a chance to rank. To the extent it makes sense, you're better off putting more posts on a single site vs multiple sites. If you sell disability insurance as well as car parts, probably two different sites. If they're all insurance products, you probably would do just fine with them all on the same site.

Does that help?

 

[DFW]

that helps thanks. its just that i have a website with term life being a big part of the domain name. so was curious if i would be better off getting another site for disability or just put another tab/page on the term life site and start blogging about disability insurance too on that site.

 

[Glen Shelton]

In 2015 people are increasingly likely to go to the internet to find answers to their questions about a product. The internet searches are hammered with affiliate sites, carrier sites, and extremely expensive PPC ads, so how can independent agents and agencies use the internet to generate the highest quality leads if they lack an SEO guru or an expensive AdWords budget? Content marketing is key! What is content marketing? Simply put, it's a way of using content to get in front of potential customers. "Click here for a free report" or "click here to find out why our product is so great" or "10 things you didn't know about X", those types of pieces that educate and/or entertain prospects are gold. The keynote presenter at LeadsCon Las Vegas 2015 Marcus Sheriden talked about how content marketing saved his pool company. What does that have to do with selling insurance? Everything. The short version is that by simply putting up an article answering the question "how much does a pool cost" he was able to get a phenomenal amount of traffic to his website through organic search traffic. More important than how the traffic arrived was the conversion rate. Instead of having users simply shopping on price, they were engaging in a thoughtful discussion about what impacts price and why it matters. It may seem that in 2015 everyone is shopping on price, but the pendulum is swinging back towards value from price. So why does this matter to you? Even if you don't have a professional website (or any website at all), if you can put together pieces of content that people find useful or interesting it can help you spread your brand as well as build credibility. If you start a small blog with a post a week or even a few facebook posts a month relevant to what you're doing that folks would find interesting, it's only a matter of time until that starts to generate sales for you.

I searched Medicare cold calling scripts and your web site was the first one I looked at. Content marketing for the win.

 

[scagnt83]

that helps thanks. its just that i have a website with term life being a big part of the domain name. so was curious if i would be better off getting another site for disability or just put another tab/page on the term life site and start blogging about disability insurance too on that site.

I would suggest the use of Categories. If you use Wordpress this will be very easy to do.

You can classify a blog post as being in a certain Category. For your situation have a Term, FE, DI Category. Then you can create pages on your site that only show blog posts from one specific Category. That way your site can have a Term posts page, FE posts page, & DI posts page.

Also, search engines take Categories into account when sorting search results. So it will help with your search rankings to use Categories.

So if it were me, I would keep it all on the existing domain and just sort it on different pages using the Categories.