3 Mistakes Agents Make When Using Content Marketing

Are you a content creator? If so, I want to talk to you today about the three mistakes that most agents make when trying to use a content marketing strategy.

Content marketing, digital marketing, social media marketing, whatever you call it, we know the concept.  So many agents and agencies out there right now want to get on the web and be known. And they want to do that to drive leads, which ultimately drives revenue and makes everybody happy. I want to make sure that I caution you though, there’s a way that you have to go about this. And there are three major mistakes that I see agents making all the time, and I want to make sure you’re aware of them so that you don’t.

Agents Have the Wrong Intent

The first one is they enter content marketing, and they publish content with the wrong intent.  Listen, if your end game is to drive revenue, that’s great. It is a marketing concept. But you can’t put your marketing out there as if you’re trying to drive revenue. You have to go in with the intent of educating your audience and allowing each person to come to the decision that you’re a subject matter expert and someone they should do business with, and they will reach out to you. I have been blogging for literally 15 years. Some of my best deals have come through educational content that I put out on the internet. You hear me talk all the time about evergreen content that never goes bad. Basic questions that people ask, and you answer on your blog or your videos or your podcast or whatever you’re doing. But you never go into content marketing thinking:  I’m going to make some money doing this. It would be the equivalent of walking in to do a marketing drop as a cold call and immediately blurt out, “I’m here to sell you, blah, blah, blah.”  Nobody wants to buy from you then. You still have to romance them. Let them get to know you. You get to know them. And then you can begin to have those conversations. Get your head in your heart right when you go into this, and you’re going to do very, very well.

Agents aren’t Consistent

The second mistake that I see people make all the time is that they’re not consistent. You have to consistently put your content out to gain and keep an audience. If you’re not putting content out regularly, they don’t know what to expect from you. Even worse, if you’re inconsistent with your content production and somebody started following you, they may think that’s how you run the rest of your business, and you lose an opportunity that you didn’t even know that you had. So when you go down this road, be consistent in your content marketing.

You want to make sure that you schedule your time to do that, make it a priority, get it on your calendar, get it done every day. Worse things have happened in the world than you building up a backlog of content to push to the internet. I try to stay weeks, if not months, ahead in my publishing just because I know that life happens. I have a business to run. I have new accounts to produce. I can’t fool around with content marketing 24/7. So, I have to schedule it. And I do every single day, and that’s how I get stuff like this right here done.

Agents Aren’t Patient

The third one is probably, honestly, the most important, and it’s the hardest, but agents that engage in content marketing aren’t patient. People, this is a marathon, not a sprint.  It’s like I tell my team and the cold-blooded killers in Killing Commercial all the time, you have to slow down to speed up. Don’t expect to get an immediate sale from your first blog. Don’t expect to get a deal from your first 10 YouTube videos. You’re in this for the long haul. And the phenomenon that I have seen that is so interesting is, agents dump content marketing right before they hit the tipping point. So many times throughout my career, I’ve seen it. I’ve worked in agencies where producers have religiously put out content once or twice a week. They’ve done it for four or five months, and at the six-month mark, they’re out. They don’t want anything to do with it anymore. They’ve given up.

And guess what? In one case, the guy left the agency. Do you want to know what happened? Three weeks after he left, we wrote four accounts off of content he had put out and wasn’t patient enough to wait around for the results. If you’re going into this strategy, you’ve got to have your head in your heart right. You have to go in with the right intent. You have to go in and be consistent, and you have to have patience to do it. Assassins don’t have itchy, trigger fingers. They wait, and they wait, and they wait for the kill shot. If you want to be an assassin and kill it in commercial insurance, follow these three things, don’t ever make these mistakes.

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