Creating an insurance blog can be one of the best ways to improve your marketing. Whether you’re looking to generate new leads, form stronger ties with existing ones or simply elevate your brand to unlock future opportunities, blogging can help. Plus, writing down your ideas can help you in other sales and marketing situations, such as formulating a client proposal.
Best of all, blogging is a relatively free or low-cost marketing idea. Once you have a place to host your blog, such as on your website, all you have to do is choose a topic and start writing.
Some insurance agents do not want to blog, however, due to its time-consuming nature. Others struggle to write. But that doesn’t have to prevent you from blogging. Insurance agents can start a blog by sharing their ideas with freelance writers or marketing agencies who can help them create content.
In this guide, we’ll dive into blogging 101 for insurance agents, including how to start an insurance blog, setting goals for your insurance blog, how to create great content and how to create value from your blog.
Why Create an Insurance Blog?
Even if you’re not an active writer or blog reader, that doesn’t mean others won’t find value in what you have to share. Blogging is unlikely to be a quick ticket to success, but by writing about issues clients may face and sharing your best practices, you can develop more leads long-term.
“It’s much better to build trust with your audience over time through educational blog posts than to make some bold sales pitch, which they will see right through.”
CoSchedule
Specifically, when insurance agents blog, they can:
- Pull in new prospects via search engines
- Build customer loyalty and trust by creating content clients find informative and helpful
- Improve industry reputation to help form strong partnerships with other insurance agents and business leaders
- Strengthen writing and communication skills to improve in related areas like email marketing
A blog is a great way to generate leads. To better understand how to generate leads using your blog, you should have a basic understanding of how a search engine works.
Search engines are designed to crawl the internet and catalogue it. When someone types a query into a search engine it triggers a search of the catalogue and returns an answer. Consistently adding articles to your blog communicates to search engines they should crawl your site, increasing their catalogue of information.
By providing content that answers the searchers query (e.g., a searcher clicks on your link), the search engine will rank your website. The more value you are able to provide to searchers (e.g., the more searchers click through to your site), the higher you will be ranked in the search results.
In general, your blogs, or articles, should have two goals.
- Provide value to the reader
- Attract your ideal customers
Since search engines are designed to return results that best match the searchers query. Creating blog posts that solve a problem or answer a question your ideal customer may have is key. Plus, creating blog posts now gives you assets that you can leverage in different ways over time. At first, you might send an article to a few close clients to help them solve an issue they’re facing. Then you might pull some snippets from a blog to share on social media. A little later, you may include a link to that article in your newsletter. And a year later, a new lead might stumble across your firm by finding one of your blog posts online.
Providing valuable content to your readers will attract your ideal customers overtime. The more blogs, or articles you publish, the more value you are providing. The more value, the more trust you will build and the more traffic your site will receive. Once someone is on your site, you can create opportunities for them to learn more about what products or services you provide.
How to Start an Insurance Blog
The first step toward starting an insurance blog is figuring out where to host your writing. Some of the places where you can post blog content include:
Your website:
Arguably the best place to blog is your website. That way, your blog can easily drive traffic to other areas of your website, such as your contact page or a page that explains your insurance offerings in more detail. With Wheelhouse, an InsurTech platform by Talage, you could also direct traffic to a customized landing page where they can generate automatic, bindable quotes.
Many website hosting platforms and content management systems, like WordPress and Squarespace, have integrated blog features that make it easy to post. If you’re unsure where or how to start writing a blog on your website, contact your web developer or website host.
LinkedIn:
Another great place to blog is on LinkedIn, though articles here may serve a different purpose. Since readers won’t be visiting your own website when reading your LinkedIn blogs (unless they click-through on a link), articles here would likely be less promotional. But you do gain the advantage of having a built-in audience among your LinkedIn connections.
In addition, blogging on LinkedIn can help you establish yourself as a leader in your industry. Doing so could help you gain more referrals from other types of insurance agents or other business professionals.
Medium:
Writing on Medium can be an easy way to start an insurance blog. The site has an intuitive layout and can provide you with a built-in audience of readers. Like with LinkedIn, however, blogging on Medium does not give you the control you have on your own website.
Readers on Medium might find your blog content enjoyable but they may not take the extra steps to then find out more about your offerings. In contrast, if they were already reading a blog on your website, they will have an easier time navigating to other pages to find more information about you.
Wherever you choose to start your insurance blog, keep in mind that you generally should not cross-post on multiple platforms. Doing so could hurt your search engine optimization (SEO), as search engines may penalize sites that have duplicate content. If you do want to post on multiple platforms, consider altering your content for each site, such as posting in-depth, informational articles about topics like “why your business needs liability insurance” on your website. Then, on LinkedIn, where your audience might be casually scrolling on their phones, you could post a short blog reacting to a recent news story.
Setting Goals for Your Insurance Blog
As you determine how to start writing a blog, it’s important to set goals. If you’re focused on attracting new leads directly from your writing, you would likely want to post on your own website and focus on strategies like SEO. If you’re focused on keeping your current customers informed so that renewals are easier, you might be more comfortable blogging on LinkedIn in a non-promotional way.
Many insurance agents’ blogs have multiple goals, but it’s important to prioritize so you can focus on what moves the needle the most for your agency. Specifically, think about goals for your insurance blog, such as the following:
Driving traffic to your website:
An insurance agent’s blog may have great information, but if you’re not doing anything to draw attention to your posts, you may not gain any additional traffic to your website. Focusing on areas like SEO and sharing your blog posts on social media can help you increase website traffic.
“Barring any of your promotional social media posts going viral, organic searches will result in the majority of the traffic headed to your site. This is especially true if you don’t plan on spending any money marketing your blog with paid ads.”
Bluehost
SEO efforts can then help you gain new customers, such as if readers then sign up for a policy on your website. Ideally, you can make it easy for readers to navigate from your blog to ultimately purchasing a policy. Using Wheelhouse, an InsurTech platform powered by Talage technology can allow prospects to easily gain bindable quotes from your website.
Educating customers and prospects:
If you mainly want to educate customers and prospects, such as to build customer loyalty and trust, that can affect your content strategy. Your insurance blog posts may be less promotional and more about helping customers navigate challenges, some of which may not directly be related to insurance.
For example, blogging about how to hire efficiently and effectively could be valuable to startup clients. That may not prompt them to purchase an insurance policy right away, but it can help improve your reputation. Then, when they’re ready, readers may be more inclined to work with you.
Becoming a thought leader:
If much of your business comes from referrals, you may want to put more emphasis on becoming a thought leader. That means writing compelling blog posts that others in your industry or related sectors find valuable. Doing so can help propel you to the top of these other professionals’ minds. For example, if another insurance agent sees you as a thought leader, and that agent needs to make a referral to another agent with expertise in a certain area, they may be more inclined to refer clients to you.
With any of these goals, it’s important to remember that an insurance blog isn’t a quick ticket to success. The more ambitious the goal, like positioning yourself as an expert in your field, the more time it can take.
“Naturally, it can take time (years, not months or weeks) for people in your niche to familiarize themselves with your work” before considering you to be a thought leader, explains Microsoft. “If you don’t see results in the short-term, don’t be discouraged. Keep on learning and delivering the best content you can with the time you have available to you.”
How to Create Great Content for Your Insurance Blog
Once you know where you want to publish your blog posts and what you want to accomplish with them, you can start creating great content. Whether you write your blog posts yourself or work with a professional writer, you should still dedicate time to content planning. You know your clients best, so you should lead the direction of the topics for your blog posts.
To find great topics for your insurance blog, you should:
Consider customer challenges:
What have clients been asking you about recently? Are they struggling with budget issues? Do they need help understanding the differences between policies? If your customers have challenges, you can help them solve these issues by creating blog content that addresses these problems.
Research keywords:
Use free or low-cost SEO research tools like Ubersuggest or Moz to find what your audience would likely be searching for, especially if you’re trying to attract new visitors to your site. Research terms you think potential clients might be searching for, such as “how to buy business insurance,” or “cost of liability insurance.”
These research platforms will then enable you to see how often people search for these terms, as well as information like how hard it is to rank for these keywords. From there, you can plan out topics around keywords that you think will resonate with your audience.
Keep it simple:
The beauty of blogging is that it’s open-ended. You don’t have to overthink every aspect of your insurance blog. If you don’t know what to write, keep it simple and just share what you know and what you care about.
For example, you might not be confident in your ability to write about complex business issues like new regulations. But maybe you’re comfortable sharing your views on what it’s like to be a salesperson. Others could find value in your experiences, so write simple stories that can help other business professionals going through their own challenges.
How to Get Value from Your Insurance Blog
The good news is you don’t need to spend a ton of time to create an insurance blog. While you want to post regularly, you can get by with spending a few hours per week to create a weekly or twice-per-month blog. If you do have more time, however, posting more frequently can help, especially when you’re getting started and want to establish a library of content.
But you don’t want to just post your content and hope for the best. Aside from incorporating SEO practices to attract new leads, you should:
Share your work:
Let your social media audience and email subscribers know about your new blog posts. You can also direct clients to specific posts if they want more information on a certain topic you’ve addressed in an article.
Partner with other bloggers:
Consider partnering with other insurance agents who blog, as well as bloggers outside your industry. If you share their work and they share yours, you can both expand your reach.
A great article idea is to interview another blogger and turn that into a Q&A article. Then you can each share that content through your own marketing channels, giving you exposure to each other’s audiences.
Have a call to action (CTA):
If you want to ultimately increase your sales, your blog posts should have clear CTAs. For example, if you write about how to improve your budgeting, your CTA might be a sentence on how signing up for an insurance policy can help you limit unexpected costs. That sentence could then link to a sales page.
Using Wheelhouse can help you get more value from your insurance blog. The platform provides you with a custom URL you can use as a link within your blog, such as in your CTA. Then, that URL can drive readers to a landing page where they can instantly access bindable quotes.
Request a demo today to see how Wheelhouse can help you ultimately get more out of your blogging efforts.