7 Steps to Improve Insurance Lead Generation with Content Marketing
To get more insurance leads, financial advisors need to drive more traffic to their website using content marketing.
This is everything you need to know to fill your marketing funnel with potential clients.
In a recent post, I briefly touched on the 4 phases of inbound marketing. In this post, I’ll be taking a deeper dive into the main pillar of the attract phase — content marketing.
The first step in the four phases of inbound marketing is to drive targeted traffic to your website. Here’s where we are now:
How does content actually help us get more leads?
Everything starts with blogging. Let me say that again, everything starts with blogging.
A blog is the single best way to attract new visitors to your website. Create helpful content that is relevant and answers your prospects’ questions.
This is how you become a valuable resource to your prospects and clients.
Now that you know how important it is, how do you get started? Follow these steps I used to create lead generating blog posts.
Step 1) Make a list of topics that are relevant to your audience
The best way to do this is by thinking of the questions that your existing clients are asking most often.
If they are asking you, then there are likely tons of people looking for the same answers online.
You can probably think of a few dozen of these right off the top of your head, especially if you’ve been in the business for some time.
Start with the “low hanging fruit”. These are the basic topics that you can quickly crank out that are relevant to a majority of your audience.
Some great ideas to get your thought processes going:
- The difference between term and permanent insurance
- How much life insurance do I need?
- Best companies for auto insurance
- How to plan for retirement
These are all topics I’ve seen written about extensively by top advisors.
Step 2) Choose a focus keyword for each post
For this step, it helps to understand a little bit about search engine optimization, or SEO.
Here’s a simple definition from Webopedia:
SEO helps to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be found by the search engine.
By choosing a focus keyword (or phrase), you are telling the search engines what the post is about.
It also helps you to focus on one idea or theme, which improves readability.
Step 3) Find at least 1 resource for each post
As a general rule, any time you make a claim, back it up by linking to its source. This lends credibility to your writing. It can also create some good will amongst the sites you are linking to.
For example, if I link to a Forbes article, I can reach out to @Forbes on Twitter to let them know I mentioned them.
It might even earn a share on their social media accounts, driving more traffic back to my post.
Step 4) Outline your article
It’s amazing how much time this can save. It’ll also help you to structure your articles in the most intuitive and readable manner.
By setting up your posts before writing, you’ll be able to “fill in the blanks.” This makes the writing process much easier.
Step 5) Start Writing
This is where the rubber meets the road. It’s time to put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard). You have to find your own writing process.
For me, I go to the same couple of coffee shops at the same times each week to do my writing. This helps me get in my writing zone.
Step 6) Edit using Hemingway
The editing step is so important. Ideally, you’d have someone else edit your posts for spelling and grammar. But whether you have that or not, plug your text into the Hemingway App.
This web application breaks your post down by several factors. These let you know how readable your article will be. I use it for editing all my blog posts.
Step 7) Just Hit ‘Publish’
This last step is what keeps a lot of people from publishing regularly. We tend to overthink every little word.
There’s always something we can edit, something we can improve.
This is a trap!
You can over-analyze something to death. Sometimes, you just have to hit ‘publish’. If you’ve completed all these steps, with practice, your writing will be just fine.
Don’t try to make it perfect.
These simple steps will get your content marketing machine up and running. That machine will fill your marketing funnel with targeted traffic that will turn into qualified leads.
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This post originally appeared on the Advisors2Inbound blog