For many insurance businesses, the company website is the primary focus for insurance content marketing campaigns. Providing site visitors with information about your products and services can spur purchasing decisions. This is not the only avenue for sharing information, however; blogs can be powerful tools to build brand awareness and to offer details about your insurance business and what it stands for. In this guide, we will explore three proven ways of beefing up your blog content, helping you to drive business growth through insurance content marketing.
The Power of Blogs
In the digital age, insurance businesses have relied on websites for informing potential customers. While websites are an essential feature of modern digital marketing, blogs can also provide valuable content. Insurance content marketing is the practice of using web-based content to inform, engage, and entertain others.
Blogs represent a powerful inbound marketing tool, giving insurance businesses the creative outlet and flexibility to share information about the company, its products and services, and its core mission. Blogs are typically updated at a far more frequent pace than company websites, allowing agencies to share up-to-date information and to engage with others. Blogs offer several other benefits:
- Blog content enhances search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.
- Blogs help develop authority.
- Blog readers can share links to content, creating backlinks that influence search results rankings for your business.
- Blogs build the insurance brand itself, improving the trust and loyalty crucial in business relationships.
If your agency is not yet leveraging the power of blogs, you are missing out on critical opportunities for growth.
Tip #1: Using Images to Enhance the Information Journey
Blogs have typically used well-written content to engage readers. This content includes targeted keywords to assist with SEO, which then improves rankings in search results. Written information is not the only way to share details with readers; images add value while boosting engagement.
Why are images so important in insurance content marketing? They offer several performance benefits, including:
- Serving as visual breaks to reduce the dull nature of large blocks of text.
- Allowing for a clearer understanding of complex concepts; visual cues in images help to inform readers.
- Adding color and visual style to the blog, improving the user experience.
Images also enhance SEO efforts because they give digital marketers the ability to include descriptive tags and keywords to the “alt text” fields on the blog itself. These tags are evaluated by search engines, and their presence helps to improve rankings in search results. When developing content for your blog, consider image types like:
- Graphic illustrations
- Infographics
- Screenshots of apps or online services
- High-quality photographs
- Tables and charts
Each of these images helps to get your point across. In fact, one study indicated that blog posts with images improve content retention among users, with 65% of study respondents indicating that the included images stand out in their memories.
Tip #2: Tying Blogs to Social Media Marketing
Once blogs are written and enhanced with images, insurance businesses are ready to repurpose this content in other ways. One of the best ways of getting more from your insurance content marketing efforts is to share blogs on social media.
Does your agency have a profile on social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram? If not, you are missing on a cost-effective opportunity to build brand awareness. Blog content developed for in-house blogs is easily shared on these platforms. With a few clicks of a mouse, you can rapidly expand your audience on social media with content you have already written for your blogs. Then, followers can share this content with others. For insurance content marketing purposes, the relationship between blog content and social media marketing cannot be overlooked as a tool to boost brand engagement.
Tip #3: Improving Length, Improving Engagement
In years past, content marketers focused on a steady stream of “short form” blog posts, or posts of no more than 500 words in length. Recent developments in search engine algorithms no longer favor this shorter content, giving longer blog posts an edge.
Long form content has taken center stage in insurance content marketing. According to one study conducted by a prominent digital marketing industry, the average content length of top 10 results in Google searches was around 2400 words. Long form content offers other advantages, including:
- The ability to target multiple keywords and key phrases.
- The ability to add critical details about your agency and its products/services, giving readers more information with which to make purchasing decisions.
- Improved perceptions of authority by search engine algorithms, pushing your search results rankings higher.
Writing long form content can be a challenge for many insurance businesses. These challenges are more than overcome by the concrete benefits longer blogs provide. Insurance content marketing provides robust tactics for helping insurance businesses to grow. With these blogging tips, your agency will be well on its way to bigger audiences, better engagement, and organic business growth.
About Neilson Marketing Services
Since 1988, Neilson Marketing Services has been implementing innovative marketing solutions and strategies for our clients in all areas of marketing. Contact us today at (866) 816-1849 to put our talent, expertise, and vast resources to work for you. Let’s make things happen, together!
