In the digital era that we live in today, marketing tactics have adapted to the shrinking attention spans of consumers. Conversely, the amount of time that a person spends interacting with technology on a daily basis is steadily increasing. While many people are often reluctant to embrace change, these consumer trends bring to light an advertising opportunity for insurance agents. What is that opportunity you might ask? Videos! Video marketing has hit the insurance scene as a powerful and effective tool, allowing agents to reach more potential clients, all while increasing their online brand awareness.
Using videos to your advantage is also a great idea since it allows you to explain sometimes confusing concepts in a more digestible fashion. But like anything that’s worthwhile, creating a successful video campaign takes sufficient planning, attention to detail, the proper content, and constant adjustments. From writing scripts, to distribution and everything in between, we will show you all the keys to successfully harness the power of videos, so you’ll be on your way to more customer interactions, and user engagement!
Preparation is Key
Everyone always wants to get the fun part, which is filming, but before you can do that you need to have a plan set in place. To make an enticing video that grabs your audience, there are some simple preliminary tips that you’ll want to follow.
Set Goals & Pinpoint Your Audience
The first step of the entire process focuses on identifying and setting the clear and specific goal(s) that you want to achieve. Maybe you want to increase your online presence to generate client leads. Maybe you simply want to educate your audience about a variety of insurance options. Perhaps you could be trying to establish yourself as a trusted expert among other insurance industry members. No matter what you’re looking to actually get out of the video, setting concrete goals will help set the tone for the rest of your planning, filming and distribution methods.
On a similar note, it’s also crucial to identify the target audience whom you wish to reach. Knowing specific details about this group such as preferences, and key demographic information will enable you to customize your videos for the group at hand, giving them an in-depth understanding of topics.
Create Your Content Strategy
With your goals and target market in place, now comes time to focus on the content. The type of content that you create could be the difference between a video being successful or not, so it’s important to spend ample time on this step. To get started, you’ll want to start brainstorming. While keeping your overall goals and audience in mind, try to come up with as many relevant video ideas that you can. There are an abundance of great insurance-related video ideas that you could try out, but to get you started, here are a few ideas:
- Highlight a customer success story
- Answer common insurance questions
- Explain complex insurance topics
- Take a tour through your agency
- Show “the day in the life” of an insurance agent
No matter what you focus your video on, make sure that the information aligns with your created goals. Additionally, as you start to create more videos, it’s important to diversify your content so that it is engaging and never dull. No one likes to see the same topics explained over and over again!
Choose Your Concept
With the brainstorming behind you, now it’s time to turn one of your ideas into an effective concept. Once you pick the idea that you’re going to use, start thinking about your future video in small sections, and overall as a whole, then try to create a narrative that is impactful to your audience. When getting into detail about the narrative, it’s important that you make the opening seconds of the video grab the attention of your viewers. Since attention spans are so short, it’s during these first few seconds that a consumer will decide to keep watching or not.
Write a Script 
The last part of the preparation stage is meant to take all of your planning and formalize it into a script. Your script should be easy for others to follow, outlining the key points of the video. While dialogue is important and worth spending sufficient time on, when practicing, try not to read directly from the script as it will make you sound unauthentic. Instead mark up the dialogue you wrote out with a pen or highlighter, indicating the most important parts. The script should be a guide of sorts that helps keep you on track.
It will benefit you to break your script into smaller sections like the introduction, main story, call-to-action, and anything else that you see fit. While each section should differ from the next, they should all be connected, creating a compelling narrative. The intro should focus on bringing the topic to light and explaining its importance. The main story section will focus on the essential idea, and the call to action will tell the viewers what action they should take next.
Content Tips
Depending on what outcome you’re trying to achieve, there are many different content ideas that you can focus your video on. These are a few thing to focus on that will help you to increase your videos views:
Include Storytelling
One content idea that will help keep your viewer interested is to create a compelling story. Try using personal anecdotes or experiences from your past that effectively get across key insurance concepts. For example, you could tell a story about a family who experienced an injury and was financially saved by their health policy. Painting a picture that people can visualize and relate will leave them with a memorable impression.
Use Educational Content
By including educational content in your video, you can easily establish credibility as an insurance expert. The insurance sector is the perfect place for this type of content too, as there are many topics that confuse the average consumer. Some ideas to include: breaking down coverage types, offering tips to lower costs, or explaining insurance-related jargon. Educational content will make users want to reach out to you for more information and will also help you grow your online brand.
Remember SEO
To make sure your videos benefit from search engine optimization (SEO), you’ll want to optimize the titles, descriptions, and video tags with keywords that relate to the video and your overall brand. This tip is very important as it can have a huge impact on how often your video appears in the search results.
Posting and Engagement
With your video ready to go, it’s now time to post it to a platform or multiple platforms, engage with your audience, and monitor the results.
Use the Right Platform
All video and social media platforms are different and should be used for different videos. While Instagram and TikTok are great for shorter videos, LinkedIn will serve you better for a more professional video. Additionally, places like Vimeo, Facebook and Youtube, are the best places to post longer educational content. It’s important when choosing a platform to look at the user-base and the tone of the site and match your video accordingly.
Engage With Your Videos
After you post your video, be sure that you are encouraging engagement and create conversation around your video. A good way to do this is to leave and respond to comments, set up polls and ask questions. When interacting with other users, be sure to respond quickly and professionally. If the video gets a lot of traction, you could even hold a live video session to answer questions.
Adjust Based on Performance
The majority of video platforms have analytic tools that help you track the progress and interactions with your videos. After your video has been posted for a couple weeks, check in on these metrics, and optimize accordingly. It will benefit you to pay extra attention to your views, engagement rate and click-through rate.
Post Videos Consistently
In order to build a loyal following, you need to make sure to post videos on a consistent basis. Create a video posting schedule and stick to it! Depending on your workload, you could post every week or every month, but what’s important is that you don’t stop posting. By putting out content regularly, you’ll be able to expand upon your brand and reach new viewers.
Filming Tips
Even with a great idea, and script, a video can still fail if the proper techniques are not taken into account while filming the video. The following tips will help the process run more smoothly:
Aim for Visual Excellence
While the content is probably the most important aspect of a successful video, the visual quality is a close second. If aspects of the video appear clunky such as the sound being unclear, or the video being blurry, viewers will not likely watch the whole thing. To avoid these issues, invest in the proper equipment such as a good quality tripod, camera, microphone, and lighting (if necessary). Additionally, it’s important to have a solid understanding of how the equipment works and how to use it properly.
Don’t Make it Too Long
One mistake that many marketers make when creating video content is thinking that the more information they include, the more of an expert they will seem like. While it’s great to include helpful information, when videos or too lengthy viewers will get bored and start to do something else. The actual length of your video should depend on the topic at hand, but in general you’ll want to keep it below 5 minutes. If you’re confident that you can clearly explain your content in around 3 minutes, that’s even better! To help shorten videos, take a look at all your footage, and cut out anything that seems extra or unnecessary.
Remember to Be Yourself
Depending on your target audience, the tone in which you present the information in your video may differ from video to video. With that said, no matter who you’re targeting, it’s important to show off your own personality. This will not only feel more authentic to the viewers, but it will also allow you to more easily establish a personal connection with them. Whether you’re acting funny, excited, or happy, your genuine emotions will make the videos more relatable.
Final Thoughts
Video marketing can serve insurance agents as an extremely useful tool. Having a well-thought out video plan and making it a reality will help you to reach new audiences, increase brand awareness and establish yourself as an industry expert. It may take time and hard work, but the payoff is well worth it. While filming your content may be the most fun part of the experience, it’s vital that you spend sufficient time in the planning stage.
Having a structured goal and idea will make things much easier down the road. You always want to keep the viewer in mind and create a story or narrative that is not only engaging, but also educational. With that said, don’t be afraid to be yourself! When it comes time to post, make sure to utilize the proper video platform, and never forget to engage with your audience and stay consistent. It may seem like a lot to remember, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll wish you had invested in video marketing a long time ago.
If you’re an insurance agent who’s looking for ways to increase your base of clients and grow your business, look no further. At Benepath we serve agents and agencies of all sizes, with our exclusive lead generation services. We sell both data leads and inbound phone calls, all of which are produced in real-time and vetted for quality in the following verticals: individual health, group health, Medicare, life and commercial insurance. If you’re interested in seeing what our leads can do for you, or simply want to learn more, fill out a form today or give us a call at 888-684-3121.
