Though social media and blogging are important insurance marketing tactics, many agencies miss out on one highly effective, yet often overlooked component of a successful marketing strategy – the press release.
Press releases are valuable for two reasons:
1. They are effective branding tools. If you operate a local agency, chances are not many people would recognize your agency’s logo or name if they saw it. Getting your name out and into local news sources is one way to improve that.
2. Press releases provide an opportunity to link back to your website. The fact that press releases are often picked up by multiple online publications improves the link profile of your site, which can impact overall SEO in a positive way. What does that mean? It means it can improve the likelihood of people finding your website online.
That’s great! You might be thinking. The trick here is that many insurance agencies struggle with writing press releases. For one, if you use a press release distribution vendor (which you should), you will need to write press releases that have an actual news hook or at least reference a news source in the headline or first paragraph.
That doesn’t sound too difficult, right? Well, in truth it can be challenging. How many times per year does your agency do something news worthy? How often, for example, do you fundraise for a local charity or partner with a local business to create an event or sponsor a community event? If the answer is “often,” that’s amazing! If you’re not writing press releases to promote those activities, your branding and online marketing strategy is really missing out.
If the answer is “not that often,” you may want to consider writing other types of press releases. By “other,” I mean press releases that are related to news events or seasonality. For example, in anticipation of the holiday season, some agencies wrote about how to avoid liquor liability claims when throwing holiday parties. Others wrote about how to avoid home insurance claims due to holiday decorations. The trick to writing these is that they need a news hook. In the first example, the news hook was an actual local news event involving a holiday party and a car accident. In the second example, the news hook involved recent statistics regarding house fires and holiday decorations.
In the next installment, I’ll get into the nitty gritty of how to write a press release that gets results for your insurance agency.
