Insurance Content Marketing: How to Get Started
If you’re doing research on content marketing in the insurance space, you’re probably:
Trying to understand whether content marketing is a marketing strategy you want to invest more in.
Wanting to know how content marketing for insurance companies is different from other verticals.
Looking to understand how to get the best results and do content marketing for insurance.
We’re a content marketing agency that specializes in helping financial services companies acquire customers with content marketing, and we’ve worked with a wide range of companies in the insurance space, including health insurance companies and price comparison websites that focus on insurance – in fact we worked with one of the biggest in the UK, Confused.com.
In this article, we’ll be sharing what we’ve found works in the insurance space, specifically:
What’s unique about content marketing in insurance
How to get started with content marketing in the insurance industry
An example of how this insurance company generated quotes with content marketing
Note: looking for support with your content marketing efforts? Reach out to us to learn more about how we can help you.
What’s unique about content marketing in the insurance industry?
The main thing that’s unique about content marketing in the insurance space is that incorrect insurance content can seriously negatively affect a reader’s life. For example, if the customer gets the wrong type of life insurance, their family might not have enough to live on when they pass away.
This is why Google calls industries like these – financial services, insurance, health – “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) industries, because incorrect content has serious consequences.
Keeping this into account, here’s what’s different about content marketing in insurance:
It’s even more important that your content is factually correct and trustworthy
Similar to financial services, consumers do a lot of research when it comes to anything insurance related. Buying an insurance plan is not like buying furniture or opening a social media account – it’s a type of purchase that can have a big impact on the customer’s life.
Insurance is important, and yet it’s a topic that’s not well understood. Should they get life insurance? What type of health insurance should they get? Do they qualify for any free coverage? The insurance industry is complex to navigate, which means readers need even more guidance than they might need when buying a different type of product. Which means they’re going to spend a lot of time doing research online – and that’s where your content marketing comes into play.
If you’re going to create content with the objective of ranking on Google online, your content will be subjected to higher standards. As per Google’s recent core updates, YMYL content ideally should be:
Written by or reviewed by an expert
Come from a place of authority
That means that as a marketer working in the insurance industry, you need to be careful with:
Using AI to create content
Outsourcing your content to an external agency and freelance writers without expertise or access to an expert
Because of the industry you’re working in, your content will be held to a higher standard. If you want to rank on Google and acquire customers, then it’s even more important that your content is high quality, is based on expertise and comes from a place of authority. We’ll explain how to do this in practice and across your entire insurance marketing strategy down below.
You may have to spend more resources on compliance
As with most regulated industries, compliance will play a big role in your marketing ideas and marketing plan. This is to ensure the consumer is protected and your company adheres to the regulations.
As a marketer, it’s incredibly important to involve your compliance team in your marketing. If not, this can lead to marketing campaigns being pulled down, internal disagreements and delays in creating content. We have a lot of experience collaborating with compliance teams, and here are a few tips on what we’ve found works over that time:
Get your compliance team involved in the research process. This allows you to ensure that the topics you cover are compliant and you won’t have to take a piece of content down.
Stay in constant touch with your compliance team. That could be a monthly or bi-weekly meeting with your compliance team where you make sure everyone is up to date on key topics.
Keep a working document with guidance on phrases to use. This could be a simple list of words you can and cannot use, along with guidance on how to explain certain concepts.
Make life for your compliance team easy. Compliance professionals are very busy people, so to make sure you actually publish the content and achieve what you’re aiming for, you want to use their formats and make it easy for you to help them.
The key thing to understand about working with compliance is it’s all about trust: when you and your compliance team trust each other, it’s a lot easier to create the right type of content.
You can learn more about how to work with compliance teams here: How to Navigate Compliance and Content Creation as a Marketer
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be quite competitive (but there is a lot of opportunity)
Since insurance is a complex topic, a lot of people go online to Google to find answers to their questions. This has led to many websites solely focusing on answering searchers’ questions, and then monetising via ads (typically called “content” or “affiliate” websites).
This is similar to the world of personal finance, where websites like NerdWallet and Forbes dominate the search rankings for all the big keywords like “budgeting” and “get bank account”.
However, what is different from financial services, is that there is a lot more opportunity in SEO and content marketing. That’s because there are fewer dominant players in the insurance space (the large insurers like AXA, Cigna, etc and insurance agencies), and the dominant players are large conglomerates that don’t invest a lot in content marketing.
To see for yourself, type into your own web browser the phrase “health insurance + [state]”. You probably won’t find very high quality content and the landing pages won’t be very comprehensive.
If SEO plays a large part of your content marketing strategy, then you’ll likely find a lot of opportunities to acquire customers in the insurance sector.
For example, in 2023 we worked with international health insurance company William Russell on generating more quotes with their content marketing. We found a lot of opportunities with localized content. Although large conglomerates were ranking for keywords like “philippines health insurance” or “malaysia health insurance”, the quality was so low that it was very easy to outrank them. Today, William Russell ranks on the top positions for many of these keywords that are bringing in a lot of quotes.
With our Price Comparison Website client, Confused.com, there was a lot of opportunity targeting B2B keyphrases, such as “gipp insurance” or “vehicle telematics”.
Again, since the insurance industry is dominated by a few key players, there is less competition (or the competition is bad quality), which opens up a lot of opportunities for insurance businesses to invest in content marketing and SEO.
How to get started with content marketing in the insurance industry
So how can you take advantage of this opportunity and get the best results with content marketing?
Content marketing is about building trust. It’s about showing up for the keywords that your target audience is searching for, creating content that educates them and converting someone who is close to buying, into a new customer.
In this section, we’ll specifically be talking about how to generate quotes/leads/customers with content marketing and SEO. This is a tried and tested methodology which we have implemented across many of our clients, helping them thousands of customers with content.
1. Create a content strategy that starts with the Bottom of the Funnel
Although content marketing helps with brand awareness and building brand, we advocate for starting with the Bottom of the Funnel when it comes to content – in other words, start by targeting people who are already close to converting.
Most marketers start their content marketing strategy with higher level type content, targeting people who are just at the beginning of their buyer journey. This is what we typically call “Top of the Funnel” content, and it’s content like “What is health insurance?” or even “Top beach towns to go on holiday”.
Although this type of content might help raise awareness, it won’t help so much with business results. It’s also often a losing game, since bigger companies with much bigger budgets will be able to target those in-demand, high volume keyphrases.
This is why we advocate for starting with the Bottom of the Funnel – content targeting people who are already aware they have a problem and are actively looking for a solution. For example, “best health insurance for traveling abroad” or “pet health insurance in [city]”.
That way, you can generate quotes and customers first, and then work your way up the funnel to creating content that is more focused on brand awareness.
To start with Bottom of the Funnel, you want to start off by first spending some time understanding who your best customers are and what phrases they are using to find solutions to their problems online. Our favorite way to do that is to sit down with the people on the team who are in constant contact with customers (your salespeople, customer service reps) and ask questions like:
Who are our best customers?
What are their pain points?
What are our key value propositions when compared to others?
What are the most common use cases for using our product?
Based on that research, you can then use an SEO tool to do keyword research and find out which specific keywords people use, and that forms the basis of your content strategy.
You can read more about how this works here: What is BOFU (Bottom of the Funnel) Content and Why Is it Important?
2. Create content that is written for their knowledge
Another mistake we see marketers make in the insurance and financial services industry is creating content that is targeting “everyone who might be interested”. This might make sense if you’re creating pure brand awareness content like “top city beaches in Europe”, but if you’re creating content that is designed to bring in leads and customers, then you need to write for their level of knowledge. This is also even more true if you’re targeting someone in the B2B sector.
For example, for the B2B content we helped Confused.com create, we made sure the content is written for other professionals in the insurance industry. That means using the appropriate jargon, using examples people would understand and not shying away from getting technical.
You can see below two examples of B2B insurance content: one is written for an advanced reader, and one isn’t. If you’re targeting potential customers who are advanced readers, which do you think would be more compelling?
The first article starts with the phrase “The technological landscape changes, and so do the industries. Today a worldwide variety of insurance exists.” Which clearly signals this is far too basic (and perhaps even, written with AI). If you’re writing for an advanced audience, then make sure it’s at their reading level.
The other key thing to note is that BOFU content typically requires going into detail about your product. Someone who is doing research on “best health insurance for traveling abroad” is interested in learning about how the insurance policy works, the various features and whether it’s a good fit for them. Make sure your content is including the right information for someone who’s at that buying stage.
We’ve gone into more detail on how to do this here: How to Write About Your Product In Your Content [And Increase Conversions]
3. Create content based on interviews with experts
One way to ensure the content you create is advanced, and as mentioned earlier, based on expertise, is to base your content on interviews with experts.
Especially with topics where you need to have authoritative content that is based on expertise, such as a YMYL category, the best way to achieve that is to involve your experts. You could ask your experts to create the content, but they are often the most time-strapped people.
The next best thing is to ask your writers to create content based on interviews with your internal experts. Or, you can ask your experts to write their own content, and then work with a third party to refine it and improve it.
The benefits of creating content based on interviews with your experts are that:
Your content is genuinely original and adds value -- that's the best way to truly position your company as a thought leader.
Your content will be more advanced or technical -- especially important if you're targeting a B2B audience.
You'll be able to easily include specific insurance product features -- ones that make sense to include and don't come across as a hard sell.
You'll be able to easily include use cases and a story -- the expert will give you stories and examples that you can include in your article and help you make it more compelling
As Google attempts to control the barrage of AI content, content that is clearly written from the perspective of an expert will have an easier time ranking and therefore bringing in customers.
4. Track marketing and business metrics
And finally, if your objective is to create content that helps generate quotes and acquire customers, then it’s important to have the right tracking in place. Although it’s good to track digital marketing metrics like traffic, backlinks and Domain Authority, you also want to make sure you’re tracking metrics that are closer to business results.
You can use tools like Google Analytics or Hubspot that will allow you to track the right metrics and report on the return on investment of your content. By setting up first and last click reports on Hubspot, we were able to attribute $1M+ in new business opportunities for one of our financial services clients.
Hubspot is especially useful because you can track first and last click attribution, and if your salespeople are inputting numbers, then you can track against that as well.
You can learn more about how to set up Hubspot here: How to Track the Quality of the Leads Your Content Brings in [With 6 Hubspot Reports]
How we helped a health insurance company generate hundreds of quotes per month with content
The easiest way to see how content marketing can help with customer acquisition and lead generation in practice is to go through an example.
We worked with William Russell, an international health insurance company that specializes in health insurance for expats. They hired us because they wanted to see more insurance quotes from their content and insurance website. Here’s how we proceeded:
1. Content strategy based on research
We started off by interviewing people on their team to get a good understanding of who their best customers were (e.g. the type of expats they wanted as customers).
This allowed us to understand which keyphrases to go after and our interviews with their team alongside our own research allowed us to pick keyphrases that we believed would bring in quotes for them, such as:
best insurance for working abroad
international group life insurance
health insurance in ethiopia
2. Content written for a more advanced buyer
Since we were writing directly for consumers rather than businesses, we didn’t have to spend as much time ensuring the content was technical.
However, since we were creating Bottom of the Funnel content, we had to make sure we were including relevant and useful information. Someone who is looking for “best health insurance provider” is looking to get product information, not a definition of “what is health insurance”. That meant we had to be able to go into more detail about how the William Russell product worked and share valuable information on how to get started.
So in the content we wrote for William Russell, we would go deep into how their product works, for whom it works best and how to get started.
3. Content based on expertise
In order to be able to go into detail about the product, understand the reader’s pain points and what features they’d be interested in, we interviewed key people on the William Russell team.
The level of quality of the content meant we were often outranking large companies like Go Compare and Cigna for quite high converting keyphrases, such as:
Best insurance for working abroad
Health insurance in Mexico for US citizens
They saw an increase in traffic, but most importantly, an increase in quotes by creating high-quality content that was Bottom of the Funnel, with some pages reaching conversion rates of pageview to quote as high as 10%.
You can read examples of those here:
Best Insurance For Working Abroad: Secure Your Global Career
Health Insurance In Mexico For US Citizens: How To Get Coverage
4. Content results that are tracked
We were able to use Google Analytics to track complete quotes, from start to finish. This allowed us to see which blogs were bringing in the highest conversions, and helped direct our strategy.
When we saw that a certain type of content was bringing in a high number of conversions, we would allow that to direct our strategy and invest more resources into creating that type of content. We were able to bring in hundreds of quotes per month by creating highly targeted pieces of content focused on conversions.
Insurance content marketing: a lot of opportunity when done right
Like in other regulated industries, insurance is a sector where content marketing makes a lot of sense: it’s complex, people don’t understand it and making a purchase decision requires a lot of trust. Content marketing helps get in front of potential clients doing research online, educates them and helps them navigate the complex world of insurance. The result is that they trust you more and more likely to buy from you when the time is right.
And since many of the large insurance companies don’t invest a lot in content and digital marketing, there’s a big opportunity for insurance companies, insurance agents and insurance adjacent companies to invest in to acquire customers.