David vs Goliath Marketing Strategies

How to market your business is an extensively covered topic, but despite how much information is out there, putting it into practice often feels like spinning your wheels in the sand. This is especially true when you are competing with much larger competitors with massive marketing budgets. Whether you are an insurtech, a local or regional brokerage, or an MGA working on carving out your own niche, it can feel impossible to market your business when facing down the behemoths of the industry. 

The good news is that you don’t need a full marketing department or prime time commercials featuring NFL quarterbacks to compete. While I was running marketing for Highwing, we needed a marketing strategy that would allow us to compete in the market with multi billion dollar players. 

This post was originally the first of a five part series outlining the blueprint we used to do just that. Given the ever growing need for smarter, more cost effective marketing strategies, I have decided to update the series to reflect some additional learning since originally writing the series. 

Positioning Yourself as a Thought Leader 

Creating thought leadership; educational content around your business, industry, and customers is incredibly powerful in building both a brand personally and for your business. If there is anything the creator economy has taught us, it’s that content creation has a low barrier to entry and can build remarkably valuable audiences. 

As a smaller shop, you have the advantage over your competitors of being more agile and authentic, which can be leveraged to build more engaged, dedicated audiences. Customers relate less to content and advertisements that are redlined and approved by corporate legal teams; a hurdle to authenticity you do not have. Being more authentic and less polished can highlight your brand in ways unique to you, helping build a more engaged audience. This can be done without spending much on marketing at all.

Choosing your medium

For the insurance industry, the most common mediums used for thought leadership are video, podcasts, and written content. To choose the right medium for you and your business, think about who your ideal audience is and where they are most likely to engage. While video and podcast content is highly engaging and very shareable, the lift of production is substantial, and the costs associated with it are more substantial than the costs of writing a newsletter.

While we produced written content, videos, and podcasts at Highwing, I found written content to be my favorite. It’s great for driving website traffic, can be easily distributed through Linkedin or via your email list, and with low production costs, you can be extremely consistent with your output. For those interested in producing more written content, consider publishing through a blog on your website, directly via Linkedin, or through a newsletter management service like Substack. At Insurance Nerds, we have had a ton of success with publishing content on our website and distributing it through LinkedIn Newsletters and posts. 

Aside from where your audience is most likely to engage, the other important consideration is finding a sustainable cadence. Of course it would be nice to constantly put tons of content out, but consistency over time is the name of the game. Decide how much time you can realistically allocate to creating thought leadership and stick to it. Slow and steady wins the race.

Creating great content

To create effective thought leadership, the first task is to define your business’ unique narrative. What distinguishes your business within the insurance industry? Are there stories of success from your team, clients, or partners that resonate with the message of your brand? These stories are the bedrock of your content, anchoring the expertise that defines your voice in the market.

You should also consider the questions and needs of your prospective clients and partners. By aligning your content with the things that are top of mind for your audience, you position your company not just as a source of information, but as a trusted advisor in a field of many voices. Think about what topic areas you can speak to in a unique way and why that would matter to your audience. Sharing insights that bring value to your audience will bring value to you in return.

Lastly, the channels through which your insights flow are as critical as the content itself. Social media platforms offer easy access to your network and beyond. Emails can carry your words directly into personal inboxes. Your website can stand as a home base for your knowledge.

Triple Your Output, Not Your Input.

In a perfect world, you would create content native to each platform and post regularly, but we’re looking to be efficient here. To run a successful social media content campaign while staying lean, organizations need to focus on optimizing how much content is produced per unit of input. Sounds like a word salad, so let’s break it down: 

The Spoke and Wheel Strategy

As marketers, we want to keep messaging consistent while also maximizing the amount of content we can put out. To do this, we will use the spoke and wheel method. 

The spoke and wheel method is a content marketing strategy that relies on the creation of one or more centralized “hubs” that are supported by “spokes”. The hubs are long form, primary themes of our content, and the spokes are shorter, more specific bits of content that support the messaging of the main theme. For example, to write a marketing eBook, I will start by publishing a number of much shorter blog posts around running lean marketing teams (my spokes) that I was then able to combine, revise, and expand upon to form a more comprehensive piece of content.

Yes, you are currently reading a spoke to a larger hub. 

This will allow me to put out more frequent posts to begin with, put out shorter quotes from each blog post to keep my network engaged (and engage with those who don't want to click a link and read a full post) and then compile my insights into a larger piece of content that I can share via email and offer on our website. It basically gives me 3X the amount of valuable content for the amount of work I’ve put into creating it. Not bad for a time strapped marketer. 

To use this method, start with asking why a customer might initially discover you, and why they might be interested in your product or service as a solution. Answer these questions to define your pillar content, or hubs, and build from there with blog posts, podcasts or videos. Here’s a few examples of how this might look in practice:

Record a long form video podcast: 

• Break it down into short clips for social and use quotes from the podcast to write blog posts

Write short blog posts:

• Keep them on theme and eventually combine the major insights from the posts into an ebook or piece of long form content.

What makes this strategy so effective is not only the increased volume of content, but what the content accomplishes. An hour long video podcast might only get a few hundred views, but of those few hundred, there are likely more decision makers and leaders, as they probably want content with deeper insights. On the other hand, short form videos will gather many more views and impressions, helping drive brand recognition and pushing traffic to your socials and website. 

This sounds simple and obvious, but let’s consider for a second what a high functioning marketing funnel looks like. Smaller bits of content will form the top of your funnel, as there will be more posts that generate more impressions. The long form content provides more detailed information and highlights your expertise, moving audience members down the funnel. When you consider this, using the spoke and wheel strategy is not only a way to create more content with similar efforts, but is also critical for establishing a high functioning marketing engine.

By using this method, you can put out exponentially more content, engage audience members with different preferences, have unique content on different platforms, and stay on brand with all of your messaging. 

With thought leadership being created, the next step is to focus on distribution and consistency. The following posts in this series will cover distribution in more depth, that is – building your audience, retaining it, and reaching new people.

Check out Part 2 of this series here, where we cover media and PR strategy.