If you’re a commercial brokerage specialist focusing on a niche industry, you might find it difficult to attract clients with traditional advertising. Your clients are businesses with special risks. Contractors, nursing homes, restaurants, and daycare centers, to name a few. These businesses need coverage for unusual circumstances, and they want to buy it from someone who understands them. Your insurance marketing strategies should complement that goal.
So how can you break through the noise and build a reputation as an expert in your clients’ problems? The answer is content marketing.
Simply put, content marketing is producing articles, newsletters, videos, e-books, or any other valuable content. Good content is authoritative and free. It showcases your expertise on a particular topic so that clients think of you as the go-to authority.
Think about it from your clients’ point of view. Say you run a daycare center, and you have two options for insurance brokers. Broker A has a website full of tips for child safety, online courses in first aid, and helpful explanations of daycare regulations. Broker B has a couple of ads on Facebook. Which broker would you trust with your business?
What should you write about?
If you want some content ideas, think about the issues that are important to your clients.
Let’s look at the daycare center example again. You could write a blog post on the most common child injuries based on insurance claims. Or produce a checklist of the best methods for ensuring workplace safety.
Do you have a lot of clients who run criminal background checks on their employees? Produce a toolkit to help them navigate the process. Do your clients buy commercial vehicle liability insurance? Make a video of fun songs and games that teach kids to be safe on the bus.
Essentially, you want to ask yourself, “What information do my clients need?” And then give them that information.
How to make it interesting.
Regardless of how useful your information might be, no one will read your content if it’s boring. You want people to enjoy your content, find it relevant to their business, and maybe even share it with their colleagues. In other words, you want to produce content that’s engaging.
Here are a few tips for writing interesting, engaging content:
- Write the way that you talk. Most people expect online content to sound conversational. If it helps, you can start with a voice to text tool, then edit your article in a word processor.
- Tell a story. People like stories. They help to relate the information to the reader’s own life. Whenever you can illustrate your message with a story, go for it.
- Ask for comments. Sometimes, the simplest answer is the best one. And the easiest way to get customers to engage with your content is to ask them to. So at the end of your blog post on workplace safety tips, ask the reader to share some tips of their own. Engaged readers are a lot more likely to come back for more, helping you to seal your reputation as an authority.
- Use your Zywave tools. We know that our partners don’t always have time to produce your own content. That’s why we have so many content pieces ready for their branding in Broker Briefcase. Take a look at our “Promote My Agency” section. It includes plenty of email campaigns, promotional videos, website strategies, and more.
What content marketing strategies do you use in your business? Let us know in the comments! (See what we did there?