Life-Event Marketing: Time to Sow Seeds

Posted on January 20, 2012
Filed Under Content Marketing, Financial Planning, Marketing Collateral, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Shrink the Life Insurance Coverage Gap!

Posted on December 20, 2011
Filed Under Life Insurance, Sales | Leave a Comment

Prudential Financial has published a white paper calling for renewed efforts to increase the percentage of American’s who own life insurance. Entitled “The Life Insurance Coverage Gap,” the paper reminds financial professionals that life insurance ownership is at a 50-year low, with only 59% of U.S. adjults owning either individual or group coverage. This translates into a stunning 40 percent of Americans without life protection of any kind.

The well-documented paper proposes three reasons for the gap:

First, consumers have a limited view of the purpose of life insurance. More (63%) view it as a short-term method of covering funeral and other final expenses. Only 53% see it as a long-term strategy for replacing lost income, presumably to protect their family’s lifestyle and to educate their children.

Second, consumers recoil from buying large face-amount policies, instead opting for coverage equaling only to two to three times annual income. Since the media U.S. salary is $50,000, this produces only $100,000 to $150,000 in death benefits, way too little to provide long-term financial protection.

Third, consumers believe they already have enough life insurance at work or have the ability to self-insure. Problem is, both of those strategies are unlikely to hold up over the long haul.

To combat these perceptions, Prudential argues that the industry needs to persuade consumers to assign a higher priority to buying life insurance and to help them work through their cost and complexity objections. Among the strategies it recommends:

Agents need to reach out more aggressively to clients and prospects. Yes, that sounds obvious, but in the case of life insurance, a back-to-basics approach makes a lot of sense.

Agents also need to help consumers think more broadly about life insurance, largely by helping them envision the financial challenges their survivors will face. For example, will a $100,000 policy really provide enough income to pay for a family’s mortgage while simultaneously educating several children?

Highlighting the emotional appeal of buying life insurance is another important strategy. Since consumers won’t be around to see their life insurance benefits in action, the most powerful reason to buy it is to express their love for their families.

Finally, helping consumers properly assess the risks of alternate strategies such as relying on employer-based life insurance or assuming a spouse can return to work. For many reasons, these strategies are unlikely to be sustainable long-term. Only individual life insurance can provide the securities consumers want for their families.

Although the life insurance coverage gap isn’t new, it’s great to see a major life insurer address the issue. With insecurity so rampant in every corner of American life, particularly among the middle class, buying life insurance may well be the last financial vehicle left that can provide long-term security—guaranteed! If you’re not writing about this and helping your agents make the arguments cited in the paper, what are you waiting for?

Content Rock Star: MassMutual’s RetireSmart Initiative

Posted on November 30, 2011
Filed Under Content Development, Content Marketing, Retirement, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

MassMutual’s new RetireSMART communications program is really smart. It knows that most people are clueless about retirement. But it doesn’t make them feel guilty or anxious about it. Instead, it makes a strong case for taking small steps today toward greater security tomorrow.

The centerpiece of the program, found on MassMutual’s RetireSMART microsite, Facebook page, and YouTube channel, are 10 videos featuring Farnoosh Torabi, a personal finance author and contributor to Yahoo Finance’s “Financially Fit” video series and to the NBC Today Show. The videos are just a couple minutes long and feature people-on-the-street interviews. Topics covered include keeping tabs on your credit score, understanding mutual funds, forming a retirement strategy, envisioning your retirement, among others.

Watching these interviews reminded me that even in New York City, a place where people need a lot of income and assets to survive, lack of financial savvy is endemic. All the more reason for consumers to check out MassMutual’s RetireSMART web site. It does a great job of providing sensible guidance about saving for retirement, dealing with life events, and entering retirement. But it does so without overwhelming people with brain-numbing detail.

For consumers who’d rather be entertained than worry about retirement, the company provides several Facebook games. “Your Future Moves” asks several humorous questions before showing  where in the future you will land in life (and using your actual photo). A series of zany questions with an outlandish outcome, it’s only mildly diverting. There’s also “Save! The Game,” where people run, jump, and dodge their way through a fantastic world, collecting virtual money before the clock runs out.

With any luck, consumers will spend less time on these diversions and more on MassMutual’s retirement- education content. Nothing wrong with playing games, but we’ve all got a lot to learn about retiring smart!

Content Marketing for a Brighter Life

Posted on November 9, 2011
Filed Under Content Marketing, Retirement, Social Media, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Who doesn’t want a better life?  Sun Life’s new content-marketing web site appeals directly to that desire. Launched several months ago, the site—brighterlife.ca—is an appealing mix of content across five topic areas: money, health, family, working life, and retirement. It features helpful articles, columnists, financial calculators, and a glossary, all designed to gently engage its audience.

Although there are plenty of linkages between content and potential sales opportunities, the site never goes for the sales jugular. Instead, it simply helps its visitors enhance their lives, building loyalty in the process. And it provides plenty of opportunities for readers to engage with the content, either on the site or on brighterlife-branded social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.) The site also provides a “find an advisor” feature to allow readers to consult with a financial professional should they desire.

I was consistenly impressed with the quality of the content. It’s topical, useful, and fun to read. Plus it projects a warm, friendly, engaging personality, totally in synch with the site’s apparent mission. Most of the articles appear to be generated in-house, except for the three columnists.

Other features include a life insurance-specific glossary, many useful calculators, and multiple ways to subscribe to the content, either through granular RSS feeds, via e-mail, or on social media.

Not surprisingly, the Sun Life branding is very subtle, consistent with the low-key, content marketing approach. As a result, one avoids that “deer in the headlight” feeling. However, brighterlife.ca does provide generic financial education on its YouTube site.

So it’s a brighter day in Canada thanks to Sun Life’s brighterlife.ca. This excellent consumer resource may well be the paradigm for effective financial content marketing.

Content Engagement: Fact Lovers Are Hot for Tablets

Posted on October 27, 2011
Filed Under Apps, Content, Content Development, Distributors | Leave a Comment

I’m a late entrant into tablet computing, buying an an Apple iPad 2 just a month ago. But it hasn’t taken long for me to fall in love. Reason: I’m a news and information geek, and the Ipad is an amazingly attractive platform for slaking my passion.

Like many others, I’ve succumbed to Flipboard, a sleek iPad app that aggregates social and news feeds into a magazine-like browsing experience. I’ve also played with several Flipboard competitors, including Zite, Pulse News, AOL’s Editions, and News360. But none of these provides the ease of use, customizability, and graphic allure that Flipboard does.

As soon as I start tapping and swiping through Flipboard, I swoon big time. The same thing happened to me when news sites appeared on the nascent Web in the Nineties. But this time around, the dopamine love is even more intense. I now spend more time reading on my iPad than on any other platform (electronic or analogue). Is this an innocent infatuation or a serious relationship? Only time will tell.

A new study from Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism confirms my experience. According to Pew, 11% of adult Americans now have a tablet. Of those, 77% use one daily, and 53% read news on it. On average, tablet users spend an average of 1 hour and 35 minutes each day in the embrace of their device.

Pew also found that people who use Tablets are heavy news consumers and are really into the written word, including long-form journalism. Compared with the general population, tablets are more likely to follow news all the time (68% vs. 56%) and more likely to prefer reading or listening to the news than watching it (71% vs. 45%).

What’s more, users are now getting news on their tablet who used to get it from a desktop or laptop PC (79%), a print newspaper or magazine (59%) or television (57%).  In short, tablets are beginning to catch hold as venues for scoring hot data.

So what does this mean for financial services content developers? It means the need to write for attention-deprived audiences is likely to increase. Although I do read long articles on my iPad, I find that the ease of flipping through various feeds encourages even more scanning than I typically do on the Web. I think it will also enhance the importance of absolutely top-shelf publication design. The iPad (and I assume other tablets) are great showcases for ooh-la-la page design, infographics, and video. If your publication falls short, it will lose out to its come-hither competitors.

Finally, I suspect tablets will eventually become a powerful channel for delivering company and product news to financial distributors. If the goal is engaging with advisors and conveying information, then tablets may well be the most effective platform currently available. The downside: Advisors may prefer reading on their tablets to talking to their prospects and clients. There’s a fine line between content engagement and romantic entanglement.

Curation vs. Creation: Finding the Right Content Balance

Posted on October 20, 2011
Filed Under Content Marketing, Social Media | Leave a Comment

If you’re posting for your company on social media, should you mainly talk about your own content, with links back to your site? Or should you share third-party content, with links to outside sites? Or both approaches?

The arguments are spirited on either side. The “created” faction is proud of the content it develops and wants the most people to read it. Plus they’re concerned about losing eyeballs to third-party sites. The “curated” faction believes talking too much about yourself goes against the ethos of the Internet. Too much “self talk” is boring and ultimately repulsive to people on the social web.

For those that believe in both strategies, the debate centers on answering the question, “How much of each type is appropriate?” Well, now there’s a fascinating study that purports to answer that question, making the “either/or” debate irrelevant.

Conducted by Tristan Handy, director of operations for Argyle Social, the study looked at 150,000 social media posts on the major platforms. Its goal: to determine the appropriate mix of created vs. curated content.

According to Handy’s study, two-thirds of companies (from a range of industries and sizes) link to outside content more frequently than internal content. However, curated content generates 33% more clicks than created content. But here’s the rub. Handy says if your goal is to drive conversions, then created content has a 54% higher click-to-conversion rate than do posts linking to external sites.

Handy argues that the optimal strategy is to blend both types of content into your social media posts, with a split of around 40% created vs. 60% curated. The reason is companies that link to third-party sites about 50-75% of the time have higher conversion rates than those that focus on curation or creation primarily.

But Handy is cautious about recommending 40% as a hard-and-fast rule. “Beware the law of averages,” he warns. “Just because these numbers are true of (sic) overall does not mean that they are the best numbers for you. Outliers exist.”

This makes a lot of sense. You don’t want to over promote yourself, but you must do a fair amount of it to get people back to your own site where conversions can occur. And to make this happen, you need to have top-shelf content available to draw them in.

Bottom line: building great content is still job one, even with a balanced social media strategy. To attract site visitors, you need (no surprise!) great content. End of debate!

Content the Key to Keeping Clients Happy

Posted on December 17, 2009
Filed Under Clients, Content Marketing, Distributors | Leave a Comment

A recent Accenture survey highlighted the importance of educating purchasers of financial services products. According to the global survey, two thirds of customers were dissatisfied with their life insurers. What’s more, nearly half said they’d switch companies if it made financial sense to do so.

As if that weren’t bad enough, the global survey of 2,500 insurance consumers found that only 34% were satisfied with the customer service they were receiving, and only 25% said they’d recommend their current company to others. When asked if they were thinking about buying more products and services from life insurance companies, only 12% said they were. Not only that, 10% said they were thinking about buying fewer products.

In the coup de grace, the survey reported that only 32% of respondents said their company was trustworthy, and only 28% said it had a “skilled workforce aware of their needs.”

The Accenture survey was conducted in the Spring of 2009, so the Wall Street meltdown may have skewed the results. Still, the data paint a troubling picture.

But there is a silver lining. According to David Shatto, the Accenture life practice leader, “What we’re witnessing today is a shift among carriers from a product-push strategy to a more segmented life-event or life stage-driven demand that will require more educated interactions with buyers.”

This, in my view, will call for a more robust effort at educating producers and consumers. From where I sit, the Accenture survey spells “job security” to those of us who can create and deliver educational content to advisors and their clients. Are you ready to start pounding the keys?

Life Insurance Unawareness Month?

Posted on October 6, 2009
Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

We just finished Life Insurance Awareness Month (LIAM). This laudable campaign has attempted to raise consumer awareness about how life insurance helps families achieve financial security. After spending more than $100 million over the years to educate the public about life insurance, the LIFE Foundation must be disappointed in the findings of a recent New York Life study. Conduced by Ipsos Public Affairs, the study found that 83% of Americans 30 and older agree that the economic crisis has increased their desire to protect their families. However, only one-third of those surveyed identified life insurance as a means to achieve this.

So how would consumers achieve greater security? More than half said they’d rely on their retirement savings, borrowing  from family, or finding another job (yeah right!). Either consumers are in denial about life insurance or they are woefully undereducated or both. In either case, our industry has to try a lot harder to explain the value and function of one of its core products.

As communicators, we can play an important role in this education effort. Since the agent ranks continue to decline, the mantle increasingly falls to us to explain what life insurance does and whom it benefits. Plus we also need to keep communicating the fact that life insurance is still a great value, the recent Wall Street Journal article notwithstanding.

Bottom line: communicating the essential benefits of life insurance is too important to be left to Life Insurance Awareness Month. How about asking yourself every day, “What have I done lately to educate my company’s prospects and clients about life insurance?” If your answer is “not much,” what are you waiting for?

Life Transitions Case Study: A Time to Sell or Educate?

Posted on May 7, 2009
Filed Under Content, Content Marketing, Web Sites | 1 Comment

Since the concept of “content marketing” seems hot these days, here’s a mini case study that illustrates the difference between a content-marketing web approach (educate through content, then sell) and a traditional  approach (sell, then educate, maybe).

I zeroed in on what I call life-transition or life-event content. Insurance companies have for many years published information about major life events, presumably to get consumers to take action on new financial needs (have a child . . . buy first life insurance policy) or to revisit past decisions (get divorced, re-do estate plan). However, companies vary widely in how they write and position their life-event content. The main difference:  whether they see life events as merely an opportunity to sell more products or as an opportunity to create “smarter” consumers who then reward the company with even more sales and long-term loyalty. This distinction is crucial.

MassMutual and MetLife illustrate the difference perfectly. Both publish and promote extensive life-event information. But only one subscribes to a true content-marketing approach. Can you guess which one?

Let’s consider MassMutual first. The company wins points by evincing a strong content-marketing focus  on its home page, asking  visitors “How can we help you today?” Helping is what content marketing is all about. It then offers four navigation paths into the site: “Browse by Feature,” “Browse by Life Events,” “Business Needs,” and “News Center.”

When you click “Life Events” and then “More” to access the full list of events, you come to two subheads. The first, called “Current Situation,” lists nine discrete life events. These are the standard events we typically see on web sites: children, divorce, new home, etc. The second sub-head is called “General Planning.” The  topics underneath this subhead don’t appear to be geared to specific life events, focusing more on topics such as “Insurance Protection,” “Retirement, and “Ultra High Net Worth.”

Here’s where it gets interesting. Let’s click on the “Marriage Life Event.”

The page starts well with a few lines of stage-setting content. Then it encourages the reader to consider the following options: Disability Income Insurance, Individual Retirement Account, Life Insurance, etc. Now, if you click on DI, you discover you’ve landed on a generic DI product page. It has nothing to do with marriage, even though getting married raises questions about DI coverage. All of the links on the page drill down on various aspects of DI, but again, not from the perspective of getting married.

In navigating this page, it doesn’t take long to realize it’s more about promoting the sale of disability insurance than educating consumers about the financial impact of marriage.

Now let’s back up a level. To be fair, under “Related Information,” a link takes you to a discussion of the “new economic realities facing today’s young couples.” The page is interesting as far as it goes. I just wish there was more of it.

So here’s my beef. I have no problem with promoting sales. Without sales, of course, we’d all be on the street. But why dangle the lure of educational content in front of prospects without actually delivering the goods?

OK, let’s shift the camera over to MetLife. Oddly enough, its home page appears to be very product focused, with a cute picture of a Dad and his child dominating the page, promoting the company’s “Life Insurance Selector.” Other  home page elements are variable annuities, term life and disability, auto insurance, and dental. But this product-centric impression quickly vanishes when you click on the “Life Advice” NAV choice. This takes you to a page that divides “Life Advice” into six sub-categories: Retirement, Finances, Life Transitions, Health, Insurance, and Safety & Security. Each one of these pages takes you to another page with sub-links that drill down on each topic. Very nice.

Clicking on “Life Transitions” illustrates MetLife’s approach.

The sub-categories are really strong, although not all are phrased as transitions, per se. But that’s a fine point. Now let’s click on “Getting Married.”

Unlike MassMutual, MetLife actually delivers on its promise of delivering helpful content to soon-to-be-married  and newlywed consumers. Each of the four sub-choices expands into a robust hunk of useful content. Plus, the “References” and “Helpful Links” page list many other sources of credible information.

So there you have it . . . the distinction between a content marketing approach (educate, then sell) and a conventional sales approach (sell, then educate . . . maybe). In today’s environment of diminished trust, the former approach is a great way to rebuild trust in our companies and ultimately create long-term client relationships. Give it a try!

“Content Marketing” . . . Where Have You Been All My Life?

Posted on April 29, 2009
Filed Under Content, Marketing, Marketing Collateral, Web Sites | Leave a Comment

There’s been a lot of talk lately about “Content Marketing.” So much so that I’ve been wondering whether CM might become just another fad . . . what blogs were before tweets hit the fan.

But I think the CM concept might have wings. That’s because CM rests on some timeless principles:

1. Potential buyers need information before they buy something.
2. The more complex the purchase, the more information they need.
3. The better information provided, the more favorable the consumer response.
4. High-quality information—content—gives web sites magnetic appeal.
5. Buyers seek out information wherever they can find it; if you don’t provide it, they’ll find someone who will.

The more I think about it, the more I realize CM is really just a new label for something I’ve been doing . . . well, forever. I’ve always focused more on educating buyers, rather than hyping them. I enjoy creating long-form, robust communication vehicles (web sites, white papers, training guides) more than short form elements (ads, taglines, etc). And perhaps most important, I love helping customers get smarter, although closing a sale is pretty exciting, too.

I think CM resonates because I’ve always  worked for providers of complex services where buyer education is integral to the sales process. So imagine my delight seeing my modus operandi up in bright lights for the first time.

Incidentally, in case you’ve heard about CM, but aren’t totally sure what it means, check out the ultimate cheat sheet. As the Wikipedia entry says:

“Content Marketing’s agenda is to educate and inform customers and prospects. (Its) slogan is: “Don’t pitch. Don’t sell. Don’t interrupt. Educate, inform, and provide value to customers and pospects. Your business will grow.”

Amen to that!

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