Here’s one thing I know: Hundreds of our customers have used our insurance client newsletters year after year after year — some of them for more than twenty years now — because their clients and prospects read the articles. It’s as simple as that. They read the articles, so they trust the agency that provides the articles, so they do business with the agency.
How do I know this? I know that the agency owners and marketers who buy our services are smart, intelligent people and that they don’t spend their hard-earned money foolishly. But do I know this empirically? No, I don’t. I don’t even know if any of our customers have scientifically tested this assumption. If you ask them, they usually say they know newsletters work because they do.
One of the great things about the Internet is that it gives us the ability to test the scientific validity of things we “know” in our gut. This leads to actual knowledge we can use to improve our marketing.
There’s a social media marketing guy I follow, Marcus Sheridan, who writes a blog called The Sales Lion. Marcus, who also owns a pool-building business, wrote a blog about his epiphany several years back when he realized after reviewing leads obtained from his website that the difference between leads who bought a pool from him and those who didn’t was that the pool buyers were leads who had viewed more than 30 pages on his website. There is a tipping point for making a pool sale, he discovered, which is getting people to view at least 30 pages of his content.
The challenge for Marcus was to get more visitors to read more content. So he started writing more and more content related to buying and building pools.
I suspect there is a content tipping point for insurance marketers as well, whether that content is delivered to visitors via paper or email newsletters, social media or websites. I wonder what it is? I challenge any of you insurance marketers to discover that tipping point. Delve into your analytics and see if you can discover how many pages of content a visitor who has converted from prospect to customer has read. I know there is a tipping point for my business — providing marketing tools to insurance agents. I’m trying to nail it down. I’ll let you know when I do.
Meanwhile, above all, keep providing fresh, new content. Even if you can’t always measure it, as Marcus Sheridan has discovered, there is a tipping point for every business. And the more content of value that you provide, the more likely your prospects will reach it — and become customers.
Leave a Reply