When I was in college I thought I might like a job as a writer. After I graduated I got a job as an insurance underwriter, which is a kind of writer, loosely speaking, but not what I had in mind.
The noun “underwriter” comes from the act of writing your name under a document as a guarantor. The quality of your prose is not a factor.
When I became an insurance agent, I started to see things differently. I began to appreciate how much writing and insurance had in common. Writing an insurance policy, having the pen, using XYZ Insurance Company paper — these phrases use writing only as a metaphor. But in the insurance business, as in any business really, you need to express yourself clearly and concisely in words and speech.
As an insurance agent, I had to develop practical writing skills, something college had not fully prepared me for. Writing essays about disease imagery in Hamlet had stretched me only so far. For example, I had to simplify the language of insurance contracts so I could write to my clients about their coverage.
For the average person, reading and understanding an insurance policy is as easy as licking your elbow. The Flesch-Kincaid readability score for a standard insurance policy is 10; compare that with 82 for consumer ads, 52 for Time magazine and even 43 for Harvard Business Review. Think if the insurance industry hadn’t started “simplifying” them thirty years ago.
I wrote flyers for special programs our agency had created. I wrote policyholder summaries for all my accounts. To build credibility and reach out to prospective clients, I wrote a series of articles for Shopping Center News about risk management. I wrote news releases for the agency and our monthly client newsletter. I regularly submitted articles and letters to the editor to regional and national insurance trade magazines.
Just like bloggers today, I was writing to build my reputation and credibility with the long term goal of getting more insurance clients.
I came to realize that in the insurance business, as in most businesses today, content is king. Just consider how many different kinds of content an insurance agency is responsible for:
TYPES OF INSURANCE AGENCY MARKETING CONTENT
Sales & Marketing
- Email campaigns
- Drip Letters
- Sales calls/Telemarketing
- Press Releases
- Presentations
- “Deliverables”
- Flyers
- Newsletters
- White Papers/Special Reports
- Insurance Company Material
- Testimonials
Customer Service
- Blogs
- Email Transmittals and other correspondence
- Newsletters/News
- White Papers/Special Reports
Websites
- About Us
- Agent Profiles
- How We Help You
- Landing Pages
- Testimonials
- Blogs
- White Papers/Special Reports
Social Media
- Blogs
- Curated Content
Write What You Know
Maybe you were as surprised as I was to learn that being an insurance agent involves so much writing.
But I’m not a writer, you say. I sell insurance. I leave all that to someone else.
That’s only partly true. You write your own emails, don’t you? When you write an email or post something to Facebook or LinkedIn, you’re using the same skill set every writer uses.
Even if you don’t do it often, you sometimes have to write a report or a presentation or a speech. If you think it’s hard to write short pieces about insurance, that’s only because you haven’t learned a system that makes it easy. It can be a lot easier than you think.
Think about this: Every time you write an email to answer a client’s question or explain some policy detail, you have probably just written something that has the makings of an entire article you could post on your blog.
Not everyone understands insurance. A lot of insurance people don’t even understand it. Insurance can be highly technical. In addition to explaining the policy, there may be risk management, regulatory, judicial and legislative considerations you need to bring to a client’s attention. Agents have an important responsibility to communicate clearly.
Even if you’d like to, you can’t always explain everything in a conversation. It’s got to be written down. For one thing, you need to document your file in case there is ever any misunderstanding. You — and your errors and omissions carrier— may be grateful someday.
As an insurance agent you probably do as much writing in a typical day as a professional journalist. You’re just not publishing what you write.
Nor would you want to publish it. At least not the way you wrote it, verbatim. For one thing, you don’t want to compromise your client relationships.
But what if you extracted some nuggets of information and advice from your emails? Could you shape those nuggets into something you can post it on your blog?
“Write what you know,” said Mark Twain.
You know insurance. You write about it every day. Why not use your skill to build your brand and boost your business?
Need more convincing that you should start taking seriously your craft as an insurance writer? I’ll be posting more articles about this soon, including some how-to information that will make writing articles for your blog and social media accounts easier.
Also, we will be publishing an e-book soon, a guide for insurance agents about how to write blogs and articles.
If you think the information in this article is useful, please consider sharing it. Or if you have a different opinion or think I’ve missed something important, let me know in comments! Thanks for visiting us!
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