Content Marketing in the Insurance Industry

Why Is Content Marketing Important?
Why Insurance Companies Struggle With It?
What Does Strong Insurance Content Look Like?
Types of Content That Drive Results
What Should Content Be About?
Optimization & Distribution
How to Measure Performance

There’s a reason why the big insurance companies bombard network television with commercials and fill radio stations with ad spots:

Broadcast media ads work.

But as effective as they may be, such marketing efforts also require a continuing, expensive investment that most small and new players in the industry can’t afford. Content marketing helps level the playing field by offering a cost-effective way to market your business, no matter who you are.

Whether you’re an independent agent, a regional provider, or a national brand looking to increase market share and boost lead generation, here’s why content marketing is a must for every insurance business.

Why Is Content Marketing an Important Tool for Insurance Agencies?

Traditional marketing channels like print advertising and broadcast media can be highly effective, but they only work as long as you’re paying for them.

In contrast, content marketing costs a minimal investment and promotes ongoing visibility for your business long after you’ve created and published the content.

Unlike traditional channels, content marketing:

Offers long-term visibility: When you post digital content online, it lives there forever (or until you decide to remove it). Great content, no matter how long ago it was published, can continue to pay off for years ahead.
Attracts customers during the research phase: Most customers don’t buy insurance willy-nilly. High-quality digital content gives potential customers access to valuable information when they’re in the critical research phase.
Builds trust: Create content that provides valuable information about the importance of insurance to help influence purchasing decisions.
Works in tandem with other marketing efforts: Content doesn’t stand alone as an independent segment of your marketing strategy – it can be repurposed for use in email newsletters, social media posts, and other digital marketing channels.
Helps achieve multiple business goals at the same time: Depending on your business goals, a great piece of content can help drive sales, build authority within the industry, and more, all at the same time.

These advantages make content marketing one of the most cost-effective ways to grow an insurance business sustainably.

Why Do Insurance Companies Struggle with Content Marketing?

There are many reasons why insurance agencies and insurance providers struggle with content marketing:

Product perception challenges: Insurance isn’t something that people are excited to buy. In fact, most people buy it hoping they never have to use it.
Industry skepticism: Many people feel skepticism about the insurance industry, making it harder to build trust through content.
Complex product nature: The complex nature of policies creates confusion around premiums, deductibles, and coverage details.
Regulatory compliance requirements: Remaining in compliance with federal and state regulations adds yet another level of complexity to content creation.
Google YMYL standards: You must adhere to Google YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) standards if you want to appear in Google search rankings, which sets a higher bar for content quality and expertise.

It’s no wonder content marketing for an insurance business is challenging for even the most seasoned insurance marketing professionals.

That said, insurance content marketing is easy to do for those who know how to do it.

What Does a Strong Insurance Content Marketing Strategy Look Like?

When developing a content marketing strategy for an insurance business, thinking about SEO is crucial. Read our insurance SEO guide for more info on that.

But a strong marketing strategy can’t focus solely on driving website traffic. You need a strategy in place that supports larger business outcomes and drives long-term ROI.

The key is to develop content that accomplishes some (or all) of the following:

Influences purchasing decisions
Drives email sign-ups
Educates customers during the product research phase
Builds brand authority in the industry
Supports other marketing channels
Converts potential customers to policyholders

Unlike other industries, where a quick Google search of a product may lead to an immediate purchase, insurance agents and providers should expect their content marketing efforts to have a longer nurturing timeline.

For example, someone might submit a ‘Get a Quote’ form today but take weeks or even months to do more research and compare prices.

No matter what your content strategy looks like, support it with email targeting to stay connected with customers who haven’t yet purchased a policy.

What Types of Content Drive Results for Insurance Companies?

Insurance businesses can benefit from three main types of content:

Awareness Content
Sales Centric Content
Thought Leadership Content

Each of these types of content serves a different purpose.

Awareness Content

Awareness content is exactly what it sounds like: content crafted to increase brand awareness and teach potential customers about who you are and what you have to offer. This type of content drives traffic from prospects in the research phase, searching for more information to guide their decision.

Awareness content is strategically crafted around search terms and keywords that people interested in your products search for. Insurance-related keywords can be very competitive, so smaller agencies and providers often target longer-tail keywords that they can realistically rank for.

Examples of long-tail keywords include:

“How much does homeowners’ insurance cost?”
“Best auto insurance companies in Atlanta”
“Term life insurance vs. whole life insurance policies”

Performing keyword research is an early step in the awareness content creation process, but identifying the best search terms takes time and effort.

If you don’t have the expertise or resources to identify key search terms and create the content yourself, consider hiring an agency to do it for you.

Sales-Centric Content

Sales-centric content is content designed to drive leads and purchases.

This type of content is best when targeted at potential new customers who are ready to buy, but it can also get traffic from customers nearing the end of the insurance policy research phase.

Effective sales-centric content can increase conversion rates in two ways: by driving traffic directly to your site and by educating customers about your products.

Insurance policy terms and pricing tiers are often technical and can be confusing to the public, but you can use content formats such as case studies and buyer’s guides that focus on real-world scenarios and make complex, abstract insurance concepts easier to understand.

Thought Leadership Content

Thought leadership content allows you to earn the audience’s trust and establish yourself as an authority in the insurance industry. It can come in the form of articles that explain in-depth insurance strategies, detailed data surveys, or insightful advice from experts and industry leaders.

Thought leadership content isn’t intended to drive sales (though it can). Instead, it’s designed to improve the perception of your brand, which can garner your website valuable backlinks that support SEO and bring more visibility to your business.

Note: Not all content falls into just one category. Some blog articles function as dual-purpose content that serves multiple purposes at the same time.

Insurance Business Content Creation: What Should Your Content Be About?

One of the first steps toward building an insurance content marketing strategy is to decide what that content should be about.

Here are some questions to ask when selecting content topics:

What Are Your Customers’ Pain Points?

Rather than trying to come up with content ideas that might interest your target audience, think about the concerns your potential customers already have.

Are they worried about leaving life insurance to their children? Are they looking to protect their home or apartment with homeowner’s insurance or renter’s insurance? Are they confused about premiums, benefits, and deductibles?

Reflect on your sales calls and identify a dozen questions that come up repeatedly. By publishing content that answers commonly asked customer questions, you can drive traffic and convert leads into sales.

Which Topics Require Click-Through?

Avoid topics based on questions that can be answered in a brief sentence or two. Instead, create content that requires readers to click through to find the answers to their questions.

Side-by-side comparisons work particularly well for insurance providers, as they’re an effective way to provide customers with data comparing premiums, deductibles, plan benefits, costs by age of the policyholder, term periods, and other insurance policy variables.

How Closely Related Are Your Products and Services?

A general rule of thumb in content marketing is to write about topics that are no more than one degree removed from your product. That way, the content makes natural, logical sense for your target audience.

For example, an insurance company that sells life insurance might publish articles like Can You Have More Than One Life Insurance Policy? or Do Single People Need Life Insurance? Related topics like these demonstrate your expertise, provide valuable information to potential customers, and make a sensible connection to the life insurance policies you offer.

Without a digital marketing agency to research and choose topics for you, selecting content topics can be challenging. If you choose to do it yourself, an easy place to start is to research competitors’ sites to see what topics they’re writing about.

Insurance Business Content Optimization and Distribution

Your marketing efforts don’t stop at creating great content — you also have to distribute it. For content to have the greatest impact on your business, you’ll want to optimize for various channels, including Google search engines, AI search engines, and social media platforms.

SEO for Insurance Content

Search engine optimization remains a critical component for all websites looking to improve rankings in search engine results, and it goes beyond creating great content. For Google to view your site as a valuable resource, you’ll also need to:

Improve technical SEO issues
Improve site architecture
Optimize category pages and individual product pages
Add strong meta titles to your site’s most important pages
Create groups of content around target keywords
Demonstrate that you are adhering to E-E-A-T guidelines (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust)

For insurance agents who service specific regions or cities, incorporating local SEO strategies can be even more effective.

By including your location in a search term (i.e., “car insurance in Philadelphia”), you can tailor your content even more. Local SEO tactics can help you better meet the needs of the local community, show up in “near me” search results, and speak to state or city-specific insurance requirements that are relevant to policyholders in your region.

Optimize Insurance Content for AI Search Engines

It’s not enough to optimize content for traditional search engines like Google anymore. Now, you must optimize for AI search engines, including insurance-specific engines like Andi.

You can get a sense of what AI currently thinks of your business by asking ChatGPT for information about insurance in your area. If you’re not showing up in results, it’s likely because you don’t have enough in-depth content on your site. The more you demonstrate that your products and content solve customer problems, the more likely AI engines are to recommend you to potential customers.

Note that optimizing for AI search engines does NOT mean using AI to generate your content. There are some instances where using AI to create content makes sense, but human-written content is usually the way to go.

Use Email Marketing to Support SEO Insurance Content

Email campaigns can work in collaboration with search-optimized web content: content attracts readers who will sign up for your newsletter. Then you can use your newsletter to promote future content.

Insurance sales have longer sales cycles than many other products and services. Having content readers become subscribers and vice versa helps you build and nurture customer relationships so that they’re still interested in your business when it’s time to make a purchase.

And don’t forget about the customers you already have; your email marketing campaign should also include content to support customer retention. This may include sending reminder emails to renew or extend existing policies and offering new products that current policyholders can bundle for savings.

Optimize Insurance Content for Social Media Channels

No digital marketing campaign is complete without publishing content on social media platforms. Social media marketing helps you establish an online presence and connect with current and future customers where they (likely) spend a lot of time.

You don’t even have to create brand-new content for social media. Posting infographics or snippets of information from your best blog articles is an easy way to ensure that you always have fresh, interesting content to post.

Social media is also a great place to publish user-generated content (UGC) in the form of client testimonials, reviews, and online ratings that help build trust.

Include Paid Ads as Part of Your Overall Strategy

Paid ads can drive traffic to your site and generate sales, but they can also promote sales-centric or thought leadership content that struggles to rank in search engines.

You can include pricing discounts and referral promotions to drive even more traffic, and if you time your ads to coincide with peak periods where high-intent buyers are ready to make a purchase, they can be even more effective.

For example, consider advertising:

Life insurance around the New Year, when people are setting financial goals
Home insurance in the spring and early summer, when most people buy homes and move
Auto insurance in the spring, as many people purchase new vehicles after they receive their tax refunds

Round Out Your Content Strategy with Educational Videos

For insurance agents, creating webinars is an interesting way to guide and educate potential customers on the importance of insurance.

Most people don’t get excited about insurance, but you can educate potential customers, break down complex issues, and answer frequently asked questions with an entertaining and informative webinar.

How to Measure Insurance Content Marketing Performance

Tracking your content’s performance is a critical step toward achieving success. Some of the key metrics to assess include:

Leads generated per page
Revenue generated from each page
Organic traffic sessions to each page
Social shares

Depending on your business goals, some of these metrics may not be relevant to your insurance business. However, analyzing how and why certain types of content perform and how much revenue and leads they generate the better.

This data can then be used to help you troubleshoot performance and generate more content.

Content marketing is an important piece of every overall marketing plan, and for new insurance providers and smaller agencies, it’s one of the best ways to compete against giant providers whose brands, products, and services are already well known.

If you don’t have the expertise or the resources to handle it on your own, you don’t have to. Get in touch with Intergrowth to learn more about how we create content that drives traffic to your site and propels your business forward.

Content Marketing for Insurance Businesses

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