Content is a powerful marketing tool. In fact, it was Bill Gates that once famously said “content is king”. Although he said that in an essay in 1996, it still rings true to this day.
While some industries have more direct routes and connections to different types of content, that doesn’t mean that others shouldn’t have their own content strategies in place. After all, content allows a brand to communicate value, reinforce trust, and establish a connection with its audience.
Consumer duty and content marketing
With the rise of the FCA’s Consumer Duty regulations, consumer understanding has become a critical focus for financial services. It’s no longer enough to create content that simply informs; the content must actively support consumers in making confident and informed decisions. This aligns closely with the principles of EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), which are crucial for content to rank highly in search engines and resonate with readers. You can find out more about the power of content in financial services here: Why should you do Content Marketing?
In one of our latest webinars, we explored how financial services can build trust by following the EEAT guidelines here.
In this piece, we talk about the power of content in the insurance sector, while divulging some insurance content marketing ideas to try.
Content marketing for insurance companies
If you’re stuck for ideas, here are some initial avenues to explore at an insurance company. These will help you develop a fully fleshed-out content strategy.
Educating your audience
To the average consumer, insurance can be complicated. Remember, not everyone can decipher their risks from their losses, so a core part of insurance content should revolve around education and information.
Guides, how-tos, explainers – this sort of content is like gold dust for readers. Use this format to provide the additional details and information that users aren’t already aware of and help them make a more informed decision around their policies.
Storytelling and case studies
Trust is highly important in most sectors, but even more so in the financial industry. Insurance is no stranger to this, and what better way to build trust than to reference past successes and experience?
Case studies and customer success stories are excellent for building trust in insurance. They can be used to discuss issues you’ve solved while highlighting unique selling points.
Interactive content
While trust and information are crucial in a complex sector such as insurance, content also needs to cross the fourth wall of engagement.
With the use of embedded tools such as calculators, maps, and quizzes, another dimension can be added to your content that is mostly unattainable with the standard blog article format. Tools like this provide a layer of personalisation that enables readers to connect much closer with a brand and its content.
This vs. That comparisons
When shopping for insurance, customers spend a lot of time in the evaluation phase of the marketing funnel. Price comparison sites play a pivotal role at this stage, as do ‘this vs that’ comparison-style content pieces.
Providing such guides for policies, terminologies, and packages makes a brand that much easier to interact and connect with, while continually reinforcing a sense of trust. This lines up with the ‘Messy-Middle’, a study from Google that showed that if you show up during this phase of the funnel, the likelihood of you winning their business skyrockets. Read our full blog here.
Bottom page copy
One commonly overlooked part of website content is bottom page copy. While not all users will navigate to the depths of a site’s landing pages, bottom page copy serves an important, SEO-specific purpose: keyword optimisation.
Using this otherwise wasted space allows content to tap into a much wider range of keyword opportunities directly on landing pages, all without taking up vital screen real estate towards the more immediately viewable portions of a page.
If you’re looking for a starting point with this, we’d recommend using frequently asked questions relating to the page topic. Conduct some research around what users typically ask about a given product and answer them directly on the page itself. Cross-referencing these questions with search engines is another good idea – doing this can allow you to track your website’s ranking positions for said questions.
Building in time for compliance checks
In regulated industries like insurance, compliance can often feel like a bottleneck in the content creation process. To streamline this, it’s important to build time for compliance checks into your content production schedule. A proactive approach involves agreeing on clear guardrails for content – for example, pre-approved terminology, tone guidelines, and a list of no-go areas. By defining these parameters early on, you can reduce back-and-forth with compliance teams and speed up approvals.
Original content and AI recommendations
Strong, original content doesn’t just help your business rank well on Google – it can also position your brand for success in AI-driven recommendations. As tools like AI-powered snippets on SERPs become more frequent, they favour content that demonstrates originality, authority, and clear consumer value. We covered this topic in depth with SimilarWeb in our latest webinar which you can watch here.
How to tell if your content is successful
One thing to avoid in a content strategy is the desire to create content just for the sake of it. We believe that, when properly executed, content can be a powerful strategic tool for enhancing online marketing efforts. So, how do you tell if your content is working?
Landing page entries
The first way to test the efficacy of content is to assess how many users are starting their journeys because of reading a piece of content. If you have an information hub, for example, you’d want to start seeing an increased number of users starting their sessions via a page sitting within your blog or content hub’s URL structure.
Information like this can be gleaned from Google Analytics 4’s landing page report. This is a built-in report that’s found underneath the “Engagement” section. Navigate there, type in the blog/content hub’s URL slug as a search term, and you’ll see exactly how many sessions began by someone landing on those pages.
You can even go one step further with this by applying an organic filter. This will display all of the landing page sessions that have begun from someone using a search engine. We call these “organic landing page entries”.
Keyword visibility
In a way, keyword/search visibility is intrinsically linked to organic landing page entries. After all, an increase in organic landing page sessions must have something to do with enhanced visibility in search results.
To truly answer this question, you should spend some time tracking the keywords that your new content is targeting. This will enable you to not only report on an increased amount of traffic but also the keywords that are directly responsible for said traffic.
User funnelling
While a major goal of content marketing is to encourage user visits to your site, we believe that it also serves a more strategic purpose of directing users towards various other pages of your site.
With proper internal linking, your content can not only attract new users to your site, but it can also send those new users to your high-value landing pages. Considering this demand early on in the creation process can make your content more targeted, relevant, and aligned with your wider digital marketing goals.
