A while back we ran a series on making good use of social media for your insurance brokerage. Today we’d like to take a look at another way of improving your online presence – press releases. Our sister blog recently asked the question; “Why aren’t there more positive stories about the insurance industry?” that’s because we think there’s a huge amount of missed opportunity in this area.
Approaching Press Releases
In order to get press coverage – you need to write a press release. These releases can then be sent to companies that distribute them widely to different media in order for them to use your material.
The trouble with this is that most companies waste their opportunity and investment when it comes to writing a press release. The reason for this is that they focus on marketing. Marketing in itself is not newsworthy. A discount on a product is not front page material, in fact it’s rarely even something that will receive a nod anywhere on someone else’s website and it will almost never appear in print.
Press Releases are for News
News is something exciting. It’s also something current. If you’ve just hired a new CEO – that’s news. If you’ve developed a product that solves a specific market need – that’s news too. If you’ve got a story of how your brokerage has gone the extra mile to help a customer – that can be news as well.
It’s not that press releases aren’t for marketing. They are but the marketing aspect is different. Press releases are a chance to position your company as newsworthy and thus establish additional credibility with your clients. The good thing about online releases is that if other websites run them – they also create backlinks to your website which increases your Google rankings.
We’ll be covering how to write press releases on the SchemeServe blog in the next few weeks if you need help with this but the key point is to remember you need to have something interesting to say before you compile a release.
Distributing Press Releases
Some insurance brokerages may have their own PR teams. If you do then they probably have a list of contacts to distribute releases too. Many others don’t and it can be a real struggle for a small marketing team to develop their own list as it takes time (and money) to develop a list. However, you don’t need to develop a list if you take advantage of a distribution service.
There are a lot of free online press distribution services one of the best known is the one provided through Ezine Articles a company that focuses on article marketing for websites. There are also cheap distribution services like SBWire that allow you to send out dozens of releases a month for a small fee. However, we don’t recommend these services. Why not? Mainly because they’re used by every low-rent internet marketer – high quality media doesn’t take them seriously. These services release thousands (or even tens of thousands) of press releases a day – no-one has the time to go through them all. So they don’t.
PRWeb on the other hand is a much better service. Releases aren’t cheap but they are much more effective if you’ve got a genuinely newsworthy item to share. They offer a targeted database of press leads to mail out to and they even offer industry specific titles to share your PR with. It’s this kind of reach that you’re paying for and a well-crafted press release distributed on PRWeb can bring real dividends to your insurance brokerage. In essence they enable you to position yourselves as genuine experts in the field with a level of thought leadership. Potential clients are likely to see these releases in quality media and associate your offering with that level of quality.
Insurance brokerages looking to improve their profile with clients and get a better ROI on their marketing spend should check out PRWeb and see how they can improve their marketing reach. You could be the first out of the gate and first past the post given the low levels of competition in this area at the moment.
