Getting good content is a challenge in any industry. Add in the complex issues and legalities of a niche, technical field like insurance—not to mention the wealth of players in the game—and effective content marketing can seem impossible.
Needless to say, insurance isn’t known for being the most fascinating of topics. How do you create content that engages readers AND is factually accurate, legally compliant, and targeted to your particular audience? Now, how do you do that over and over again, on a weekly or monthly basis?
If this struggle sounds all-too familiar, know you’re not alone. To get a clearer sense of the unique challenges facing content creation in the insurance industry, we talked with experts in the field. Read on for insight on some of the biggest problems—and a few potential solutions!—for anyone tasked with creating content for an insurance company.
1: Standing Out
“The biggest challenge for me is information overload. There’s a lot of information already out there in the insurance industry. It’s often hard to break through the clutter and have your voice heard if you don’t have something new to add. To overcome this challenge, I’ve started taking a deeper look into the problems my clients’ customers are having. I always try to offer a different perspective, an easier explanation, or a fresh approach to every topic.”
“The challenges with creating content for insurance is by far the range and depth of content that can be written, which can be overwhelming when starting a content strategy. Not only do insurance clients have a huge amount of business competition, there is a lot of competition around the subjects written about in insurance. We’ve found that straying away from a strict strategy has often helped us—we’ve often used breaking news stories or trending topics to also create new pieces of content that have performed particularly well, and set us out amongst our competitors.”
“The biggest problem with the content is two-fold. Number 1, life insurance in and of itself is a boring subject so trying to keep articles interesting and also informative is hard. Also, there are hundreds of life insurance blogs out there so trying to make my blog stand out and be different that all the others is challenging. I have found that focusing on a certain niche of the life insurance industry (special risk coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions, high risk hobbies, etc.) has been a way to make my blog stand out and provide a service for those who don’t know where to go to find the most affordable coverage for those with these conditions.”
2: Finding Writers Who Can Produce Knowledgeable & Accurate Content
“One of the biggest challenges we face when creating content for clients in the insurance, finance, and medical spaces while using freelance writers is finding a freelance writer that can perform the necessary research, digest it, understand it, and then create compelling content. The search for a writer like this can often take weeks, even though we have previous relationships those writers can move on and take full-time jobs or be filled with new work when we have another project. This can slow down projects, delay launches, and upset our clients.”
Joe Youngblood—Founder of Joe Youngblood SEO & Digital Marketing Consulting
“When it comes to content production for our customers, we use a range of in-house writers, freelancers, and 3rd party vendors.
The resource we assign to a particular topic usually depends on the expertise and background of the person writing it. For articles related to the field of finance and insurance, it is absolutely critical to select a resource that has the authority and knowledge to accurately discuss the topic. Readers have gotten very good at sniffing out overly fluffy and vague articles that never really get to the point.
As an SEO agency, our number one goal when creating content is to adhere to the E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) principle. It’s a constant challenge, especially with a large pool of writing resources with varying backgrounds at our disposal.”
“The main challenge that we had in getting content published was getting the content past compliance. It’s never compliance’s first priority, and publishing content that isn’t up to standard can have greater consequences in insurance than in most most other industries.
Our solution was to bring writers into an internal content team, and get them their insurance licenses. This helped develop cultivate expertise, and get our compliance team familiar with the people publishing content.
Investing in industry certifications and licensing for a content team is costly up front, but is more than worth it when you consider the SEO gains that come from improved content quality and frequency, the reduced time required from compliance departments, and the stability and happiness of the team.”
Grafton Robinson—Founder of SafariGrowth
3: Coming Up with New, Consistent Content
“In my experience, the biggest challenge faced by someone in my position when creating content is consistently generating unique material that potential customers will be interested in. For example, it is difficult to think of new content for a constantly evolving platform such as Twitter on a daily basis, especially because insurance, and more particularly car insurance, can be a very niche subject and existing content is limited. Equally, this is the problem faced when creating weekly blog posts.
In the insurance industry, generating a quarterly newsletter can prove difficult because once the service has been provided; it is questionable whether or not there is enough interest amongst new clients to be contacted 4X a year to keep up to date with the latest insurance news to warrant the investment in time and money needed. The challenge therefore lies in producing material which is appealing and engages a wide audience. We are combatting this by providing an interactive experience for the reader, including competitions and other activities. We hope that this will help us to overcome the initial challenges.”
“One challenge in creating consistent content is the industry is always changing and coming out with new things to cover as well as changing rules, so creating content on a consistent basis and staying on top of everything new can be challenging.”
Stacy Caprio—Deals Scoop
4: Getting Content to Rank
“The three biggest challenges we’ve faced with creating insurance content are around making it interesting, making it unique and getting it to rank. Most of our content is around business insurance, which honestly there is not a whole lot to say about.
Most companies offer nearly identical coverage. Moreover, there is very little long tail search volume
beyond the head term. For example, ‘professional indemnity insurance’ gets searched around 16,000 times a month in the UK, ‘what is professional indemnity insurance’ gets searched 1/10th that amount and ‘professional indemnity insurance uk’ only gets searched 700 times a month. So basically everyone is chasing the same search terms with the very similar content which makes it very difficult to rank when competing against big insurance brands.”
5: Getting the Client’s Expertise
“One of the biggest challenges I’ve had on the agency side is having qualified experts being able to speak about a given topic. While we’ve had very competent copywriters on our staff, the real challenge is getting the expertise from the client to ensure we’re striking the right tone and delivering the right advice. This is especially important in a regulated industry such as insurance or finance.
One way that we solved this problem was to generate an audio recording of the client’s expertise. Our team would identify a range of topics through keyword research that fit the needs of the audience. From those topics, we would have a handful approved by the client for further development. Our team would create a rough outline and email it over to the client then schedule the client for a recorded interview. We transcribed the interview via trint.com and that gave us the expert voice and angle needed for our content. Further, we found we could often get multiple blogs, social posts and landing page ideas out of a single transcribed interview. After completing the development, we would send back to the client for a final compliance review and then we were off to the races. This process enabled us to increase the quality and quantity of our content output while also decreasing the time required from the client to consistently have to edit or rewrite content that wasn’t quite right.”
“Imagine knowing everything about SEO, how to write content that drives traffic, and how to generate sales. The only problem is, you know next to nothing about the subject matter. Missing that fundamental expertise is all too common when our writers create content for insurance clients.
It’s truly difficult for them to write with authority. Our writers don’t know insurance terms, acronyms, and
policies. To overcome this challenge, we do the keyword research and write an outline by filling in as many details as possible. Then we have the client edit the content to add specifics. After all of that, we optimize the blog post for search. It’s not ideal. Though it’s the best we can do when our trained writers aren’t insurance experts.
And because we’re often publishing 2,000-word articles twice a week, this is a lot of time required from clients. Often they’re hesitant to engage this often when they have a business to run. However, you’ll never get what you want if you don’t ask. So we continue to ask and promise that their efforts will pay off for business growth in the long run.”
“I used to work at an agency and we had three or four insurance companies as clients back in the day. The biggest problem that we had was that the content was never perfect. We had some really good writers but no matter what they wrote, someone from the insurance company always had some comments about how it’s not up to industry standard or that it could use some improvements to sound more professional.
In the end, we really wondered why they just didn’t write the content themselves. However, we continued cooperating because we knew how to write for the web and they knew the ins and outs of the insurance industry. Eventually, we figured out the subject matter and we started writing content that required minimal edits from the clients.”
6: Knowing Who—And What—To Target
“The trustworthy piece of content that does not appear on search results and does not reach the target audience, loses its value. In such a situation, the most essential thing to consider is optimized content. The primary point of optimization is the right chosen keyword with high search volume and low difficulty and competition.
Following these metrics, some people forget about the keyword relevance and use words that have nothing to do with their pages. If readers arrive to your website with a keyword that is not related to the page content, they tend to immediately leave.
So, we see that the optimized content isn’t all about keywords. Usually, keyword stuffed texts seem artificial and confuse readers. So, the critical factor is that the keywords should be related to the content so that their usage be logical and express meaning.”
Vera Mirzoyan—SEO Specialist at AIST Global
“Another issue we have is the number of people (with very different search intents!) we need to target through our content. Using data analytics, we have broken down lists and lists of target audiences into core audience categories, which we have then created specific content for on a schedule.”
Olivia Royce—Digital PR and Content Manager at Novos
Looking for a Simple Solution? Verblio Can Help
If these struggles had you nodding along in shared frustration, Verblio is here to help. Just think of us as your knight in shining, fully insured armor: niche, technical industries are kind of our thing, and our community includes 95 writers with professional experience in the insurance field. We have both the subject matter expertise and the writing ability to craft professional and engaging insurance content that targets your particular audience, whenever you need it.
Forget the hassle of trying to hire a freelance writer or building an in-house content team. Whether you need content for your own business or a client, Verblio can help you avoid the pitfalls mentioned above and get your marketing back on track with quality, consistent content on all things insurance-related.
Want proof? Check out our sample post on accounting, life insurance and home insurance. If you like what you see (and we think you will!) get in touch to learn more about our process.
