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?

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?

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!

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!

It’s amazing how quickly words become toxic. Given everything that’s happened in the economy recently, you better be careful uttering the words “bailout” or “bonus.”

Another untouchable term is “free lunch seminar.” Remember those? Until last year’s regulatory offensive, financial advisors touted such seminars as a way for pre-retirees and retirees to learn about retirement planning, among other things, while enjoying a  free meal. But now that FINRA, NASAA, and AARP have targeted such seminars, it appears that the industry is banishing the term from its vocabulary.

Which leads me to ponder what’s next. One local financial planner may have stumbled on the answer:  hold town hall meetings. These are primarily question-and-answer sessions similar to what politicians hold during election time. They’re fairly unscripted and heavy on speaker/audience interaction. And their main goal is to let people speak their mind and get answers, while allowing advisors to demonstrate their expertise.

I think the concept might have legs. Not only does it greatly minimize the potential for abuse, it also is perfect for the times. Consumers are angry about their portfolios imploding. They have lots of questions about what’s likely to happen next. They want guidance, dammit!  Plus they want to vent. A town hall seminar will give people what they want now—advice and support—in a no-hype setting. Plus, it will convey the notion that advisors are there to listen, not to explicitly sell.

So maybe we should test out this idea further. Wouldn’t it great if advisors could get exposure, consumers could get guidance, and regulators could stop worrying about predatious seminar presenters? Talk about a game winner! But would Compliance mind the absence of a script? Not sure, but given the alternative, I think we should give it a shot.

The breadth of the site is amazing. It ranges from home and family issues, financial matters, and health and fitness to volunteering, travel, and entertainment. This is truly a “kitchen sink” site for consumers looking to enhance their retirement lifestyle.

The site not only connects consumers with helpful information, it also provides concierge services that may save people a lot of time.

The content focus isn’t just financial, although finance is a strength, as you’d imagine coming from Axa. But it also aims to add value across a reader’s entire life . . . an ambitious goal, to say the least.

The site wants to entertain people, as well as provide information. That’s different—and laudable—coming from a financial services company. To this end, the site provides access to movie and book reviews, links to a service where you can buy event tickets, and even provides games and brainteasers.

There is a genuine attempt to help people improve themselves through education, with hooks to ITunes U and another service called Classes USA.

The financial section is really robust, with lots of articles from Kiplinger and homegrown Axa brochures and calculators.

But everything isn’t sweetness and light. Because its aspirations are so lofty and content providers so extensive, site navigation can be tricky. Part of the problem is there’s navigational inconsistency across the various content silos. Plus sometimes the site teases you with the promise of help (example: the Caring for Elderly Loved Ones page), but then doesn’t deliver.

I also think the site’s horizontal content strategy—lots of content sweep, but not a lot of depth—is a problem. If I were looking for information on, say, caregiving, I’d just head to AARP or some other specialized site.

Also, to gain full access to the site, Axa requires you to complete a detailed registration form, not just provide an e-mail address and password. If you do comply, you get to specify how you want both the site and Axa to contact you in the future or you can specify no contact. But I suspect this requirement might scare off a lot of people, particularly those who don’t want to be hounded by an Axa gorilla . . . er, agent.

Finally, I may be dense here, but I don’t get the name of the site. Since the focus isn’t shopping, why call it “MyRetirementShop.com”?

Having said this, I really appreciate Axa’s innovation and willingness to build a content-rich site. I even registered and plan to return to explore ways to improve my life. But where to begin?

This comes as little surprise, of course. But what’s really interesting is that almost half (46%) of the 1,443 women surveyed turned to the Internet first for financial-planning information. That compared with 34% who approached family members; 30%, financial advisors; 26%, banks; and 22%, friends.

But when Allianz asked women which information source was most effective, the Internet plummeted to twelfth place. The most effective sources, they said, were those involving human contact.

It’s no wonder women were more positive about human contact. The study found that 44% of the women said financial-planning information is overwhelming and too hard to sort through, 36% said it was complicated or hard to understand, and 32% said financial materials are really boring and dry.

Allianz said one of its key take-aways is the need to deliver more content through human contact (read: distributors). That may explain why their U.S. web site doesn’t provide any financial-education web content explicitly for women. However, given the company’s desire to better communicate with them, this may be shortsighted. A competitor, Prudential Financial, has a similar women’s research project going, and has created a robust companion web site.

If you’re thinking about targeting the female market, the Prudential site is a great exemplar. It engages women with informative content about how to manage the financial impact of family relationships, plan for key financial goals, and learn about investment and insurance products . The site is also replete with life-stage and planing checklists, calculators, and interactive guides.

Women may prefer human sources of information, but that may be because many insurance company web sites haven’t gotten their content act together. If that’s the case, what are you doing to set your company apart as a provider of financial products and advice for women? Publishing overwhelming, complicated, and boring materials is no way to engage with women. And it doesn’t work too well with men, either.

Making the case for long-term care insurance has just gotten easier. That’s because the government has released new life-expectancy data, along with a new warning that Social Security does not pay for long-term care expenses.

According to the National Center for Health Statistics, age-adjusted death rates dropped sharply between 2005 and 2006, and life expectancy reached new heights. Result: overall life expectancy at birth set a new record in 2006 of 78.1 years. The data broken out by sex and race also set new records:

• For white females: 81 years

• For black females: 76.9 years

• For white males: 76 years

• For black males: 70 years

Meanwhile, The Social Security Administration revised its annual consumer statement to make abundantly clear that Americans are on their own nickel when it comes to paying for nursing home care. Says the statement, mailed to millions of Americans older than 25, “Medicare does not pay for long term care, so you may want to consider options for private insurance.”

OK, communicators, our mandate is as clear as an azure sky in summer. Americans are living longer than ever and the longer they live, the more likely they will need long-term care. This care is expensive, and Social Security won’t cover it. So what are you doing to drive home this message to the public? And how are you helping producers better make the case for long-term care so their clients can protect their assets from one of life’s most devastating financial risks?

If your job (or one of your many jobs) is to attract your company’s distributors, then you’ve probably noticed something by now: They are independent “cats.” By this I mean, much as real cats do, they do things on their own schedule and for their own reasons. How to attract them? By abandoning dog-like appeals (”Come here, boy?”) and learning to think, cajole, and entice like a fellow “cat.”

The first step in this process is to shift your attitude. Here are some “cat” beliefs you should adopt today if you haven’t already:

• Remember that producers don’t owe you or your company anything. However, you owe them your job.

• Make your communication programs and content about them, not about you.

• Focus on helping them grow their business or serve their clients better.

• Avoid over promising and under delivering.

• Treat producers as strategic business partners, not as fellow employees.

• Be respectful of their time, since the time they spend with you is lost to their business.

Finally, make sure your programs and content pass the “WIIT” test (”What’s In It for Them?”). If they’re not WIIT-compliant, sprinkle them with a heavy dose of catnip.

“Since the beginning,” the ad continues, “the tides have marked the passage of time, rising and falling with a steady cadence. It’s with that same assurance that you can depend on John Hancock.”

The ad also mentions that the company has paid over $1 billion in LTC claims to 1 million policyholders over the last 20 years.

Simple, timeless, reassuring. Just the message boomers and retirees want to hear about long-term care insurance. Well done, JH!