Leverage Your Passion to Grow Your Niche

I write about beer for an insurance company. As far as I know, this constitutes a unique gig.

It certainly was a fascinating change of pace for me, since I was a travel writer before joining the insurance world. Through posts on the Hoppy Thoughts blog, I meld my passion for travel and love for beer into stories that, hopefully, highlight the best of every brewery I visit.

But how does that sell insurance? Our passion for beer and fascination with brewery culture isn’t for sale, but it has everything to do with our business. Whether a brewery started out of a church basement or draws inspiration from astronomy or a cross-country highway, each has an interesting story itching to be told.

Blogging enables us to tell those stories in an accessible format, while connecting with businesses all over the country for tastings, tours and meals. The passion and story behind the beer matters. Getting to the heart and soul of each brewery is the point.

That’s why blogging is a powerful storytelling tool for agents who want to show their passion for the industries they serve. Stories engage people and draw them in, and everyone has a story to tell. Let’s break it down:

Blogging is a scalable, flexible content platform. Today’s readers and media consumers demand clever, easily digestible content. Short-form, casual writing meets that need.

Compared to video production or contest-based campaigns, setting up a blog provides easy entry into becoming an engaged media creator. Plus, it helps you reach a younger audience on social media.

You can help your clients tell their stories. Whether you write mostly personal lines or you specialize in commercial insurance, every one of your insureds has some sort of interesting background or unique factor. When you dig into that and examine it closely, that’s what’s attractive to readers.

By helping your client tell their story, you show you are invested in it. Plus, for smaller businesses, the extra exposure your blog can provide is particularly valuable.

Stories build connections. Telling your insureds you care about them is one thing; showing them you share their abiding interests and fascinations is another. When you show your passion, insureds are happy to be a part of it.

People want to tell their story, and they’re receptive when you ask them to do so. In that way, the connection extends beyond the storytelling into the relationships necessary to drive your content and engagement on social media.

If your existing marketing content is not connecting with your insureds, storytelling through blogging can help bridge the gap—even for insurance.

Justin Guerra is a content curator for Hoppy Thoughts, a blog from Brewery PAK. Brewery PAK provides insurance for breweries nationwide through local agents, underwriting all lines of coverage on behalf of Great American Insurance Company.