Power of the Inbox - Creating Content

Business of Insurance Podcast

EP 50 - WHAT TO WRITE ABOUT

This episode is for those of you who are business owners, marketing and sales.

This is the continuation of the series that started with episode 45 on marketing. This episode takes a deeper dive into email marketing, specifically about creating content.

What will you write about?

It’s one of the most asked questions

If you are just getting started, have your staff go through their outbox and write down the topic of the last 10 emails they sent to clients. What was the topic?

On the P&C side, they were probably on certificates of insurance, changing vehicles, adding jewelry, claims, and during the pandemic, what’s covered and not covered.

Right there you have 6 topics that are insurance related. But do you want your email to be focused on insurance? Do you want your email to be focused on business or the community?

There’s no wrong here.

Your content needs to be valuable and relevant to your audience, based on your location, your niche, your agency goals.

This is where planning is essential.

What do you want your brand to represent.

For some of you in rural communities, talking about what is going on in the community could be essential. Or creating your own events could be the focus of your emails.

Maybe you mix it up a little and one campaign is about insurance and one is about the community.

If you are focused on the business market, maybe you feature one of your business clients - interview them

If you are focused on the marine market, maybe you write about new trends in the industry.

Maybe you just send out email campaigns based on the holiday of the month. There’s a lot from donut day to peach pie day with some of the better known holidays as well.

Here’s where you start

Create a content calendar.

This is as simple as taking a piece of paper and dividing it into 2 column with 12 boxes. This is assuming you are sending one email campaign a month, but even with this strategy, you could send more per month., and I’ll show you that in a minute.

In the left column, write each month of the year.

In the right column, you write down the topic you’ll write about.

You could pick 12 insurance topics from the list I recommended you create a minute ago from sent emails.

Another idea is to pick the holidays - you can google yearly holidays and you’ll see many lists of different holidays during the year. You can pick one a month and then create a calendar around that.

Here’s an example of doing something not related to insurance at all but something that might be of interest to many of your clients and prospects. And if you are creative, you can probably incorporate some insurance into some of these as well.

Jan

National Hug Day, National Milk Day, National Bird Day, National Hot Chocolate Day

Feb

World Cancer Day, National Cheddar Day, Presidents Day, National Pizza Day

Mar

International Women’s Day, National Napping Day, World Kidney Day, Spring Equinox

April

Bicycle Day, Denim Day, National High Five Day, National Siblings Day

If you used National Hot Chocolate day, you could offer hot chocolate at your office for the day to anyone that comes by, get a stand in a local park and serve it or at a polar plunge event. You could send out one or two announcements about the event, write an article about the history of hot chocolate, offer different recipes for making hot chocolate, create a contest about who likes it with marshmallows and without. So many opportunities to touch the community and meet new people that could potentially be prospects and clients for you!

If you are targeting homeowners, young families and life insurance, maybe you pick bicycle day. What if you raffled off a bicycle, maybe you have a bicycle clinic at your office and invite members of the community to bring their bikes by for a check-up and hire a local bicycle shop to help out. Maybe you have a helmet awareness day on bicycle day to help kids understand how to properly wear them and make sure they are properly fitted.

Now here’s something for those of you focused on business. Start with a theme of the month - then see what other activities you can create around the theme as part of your marketing.

Jan

Budgeting - Interview a CPA, a money manager and provide a list of resources for creating a budget. Talk about the benefits of a budget and maybe create a contest for people to create a budget in January and submit to you for a prize drawing in February.

Feb

Legal - interview a business attorney - what do business owners need to address in contracts - contracts with employees, with vendors, with subcontractors. Consider having a virtual session where your clients can ask questions. You could also bring in an attorney with a niche, maybe an employment law attorney or a bankruptcy attorney for Q&A.

Mar

Strategic Partnerships - most businesses grow on referrals. Yes, there is a lot of business that comes from online advertising, but if you were to survey most service businesses, they’ll tell you they get a large portion of their business from referrals. So turn that into a theme. Talk about strategies, networking opportunities, using linked for creating partnerships and paying vs. not paying for referrals.

April

Content Marketing - just like I’m sharing my knowledge with you about email marketing, you can do the same with your clients. There’s so much you can talk about with content marketing from email to blogging, podcasting to creating videos. You could have a different topic each week. Bring on a different expert for each topic.

If you want to do more than just creating email campaigns using a content calendar, you can expand this to a monthly theme of marketing ideas just based on one topic. For example, let’s take budgeting. That works for both individuals and businesses. In addition to making it part of your email marketing, create a few graphics for social media, Do a FB live or two with different experts on budgeting. When it’s safe to be in groups after the pandemic, offer workshops where people can come in and work on a budget as a group.

Now, you might be thinking, we are an insurance agency, not an event planning organization. That’s true, but remember, marketing is about providing valuable information, using an email campaign to promote is a way to find new prospects.

I understand expanding past sending an email campaign might not be right for your agency, but it’s something to consider.

This type of content might not be valuable to everyone, but it will be to most, particularly if you have your list segmented and target the right audience. If you really feel like your agency has to focus on insurance, look up claims around hot chocolate! I’ll bet there’s something out there!

What I've done here is provided you with a very simple way to create a calendar. One topic a month one email campaign a month. That’s ok if that’s what your agency decides. Maybe for the first year you send one a month, track the results then decide if you want to add more in year 2.

Can you see how creating the calendar also helps to create a theme?

So your task for this episode is to create your content calendar. Start with the month after you are listening to this podcast and find a theme for 12 months. Build it out, decide who will write the content, what it will include, the deadlines for each campaign and then get it scheduled. Who will follow up to keep the project on task? The more you identify this up front, the more success you will see.

If no one on your team is marketing for you, hire someone to create your email campaigns. If you need recommendations, reach out to me and I’ll connect you.

That wraps up this episode. If you like what you’ve heard, please go to iTunes and leave a review. If you know someone that should hear this content, please share the episode with them.

If you want to learn more about marketing, join the FB group called the Business of Insurance. I’ll link to it in the show notes and I look forward to meeting you there!

If you want to connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, mention you heard the podcast in your request. It helps me identify the spammers from the listeners!

Until next time, keep creating opportunities..

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ABOUT THE HOST

This episode of the Business of Insurance podcast is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA - an entrepreneurer, business advisor, insurance professional and content creator. Her goal is to inspire you to think differently and explore ideas that disrupt the status quo.

Debbie has an extensive business and marketing background with a focus of helping insurance professionals be more successful.

She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and produces three other podcasts, Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed and Seniors We Love.

Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.