Content Marketing: Or How to Explain the Sun to a Blind Person

Posted on February 23, 2012
Filed Under Content Marketing, Sales | Leave a Comment

Have you ever explained the sun to a blind person? I recently did. No, not the actual sun and no, not to a real blind person. But rather the importance of content marketing to someone who’d never heard the term before. The person was a small-business owner with many years of experience. He was very much into traditional sales and marketing—direct mail, telemarketing, cold calls, networking groups, etc.—but never really thought about how content could accelerate his sales process.

Here’s how I defined the difference between conventional marketing communications and content marketing:

• With conventional marketing, you push out messages primarily with advertising.

• With content marketing, you lure prospects in with content.

• With conventional marketing, you develop copy that delivers features, benefits, and proof points.

• With content marketing, you deliver information that informs, educates, and entices.

• With conventional marketing, the focus is internal. Companies talk a lot (too much!) about themselves and their products and services.

• With content marketing, the focus is external. Companies provide answers to a prospect’s problems.

• With conventional marketing, the goal is transactional: to sell a product at a single point in time.

• With content marketing, the goal is relational: to engage prospects in a continuous conversation that may bear fruit at many points in the future.

I’m not sure my business owner really saw the light. But attempting to explain content marketing to someone who was totally in the dark helped me see things in a new light.

Retirement Content: Ready or Not?

Posted on February 14, 2012
Filed Under Content Development, Retirement | Leave a Comment

Have you seen the new retirement preparedness study out of New York City? The study paints a shocking picture of the ability of NYC workers to retire. Produced by the city comptroller’s office and the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at The New School, the study revealed that more than one-third of city households with a head near retirement age (55 to 64) has less than $10,000 in retirement savings. The study also found that between 2000 and and 2008, the percentage of employees with an employer-sponsored retirement plan fell from 48% to 40%.

This study sounds the drumbeat of America’s retirement unreadiness. But so many other studies are keeping this beat that they lull us into complacency. However, here’s something to think about:  Does too much retirement education content overlook the fundamental challenge of helping employees find discretionary cash? If employees have worked a lifetime only to have $10,000 to show for it, shouldn’t we write more about:

• ramping up earnings during the retirement countdown years?
• adding part-time jobs and sideline businesses to boost income?
• learning basic budgeting skills?
• getting better at managing cash and expenses?
• becoming smarter users of debt?

Instead, so much retirement content focuses on how to assess risk and select funds. That’s all great stuff, but the issue is not so much where to invest, but rather having more money to invest.

Problem is, writing about basic topics such as budgeting and debt management is not as cool as writing about investment strategies. But it should be, because without cash to fund a retirement-income plan, there will be no plan to execute.

So as you contemplate the content you plan to create this year, remember one thing.  A lot of pre-retirees only have $10,000 or less to their names. They’re not ready to retire yet. But your content should be ready to help them.

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?

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