How important is marketing for insurance businesses? Can it significantly boost your sales? What is the value of in-house or external marketing content writers and creators? In this episode of the Insurance Broker Podcast, we’re thrilled to be speaking with the brilliant Lucy Mowatt, founder of bespoke agency Method Marketing. In conversation with Boston Tullis’ Sarah Myerscough, she explains why marketing is generally undervalued in regulated industries like insurance, and highlights five key challenges to marketing insurance products. She emphasises the personal element of marketing content as a potentially powerful means of humanising your brand, and how a combined marketing and sales strategy can create a significant impact in your business.   Quote of the Episode “[In many insurance businesses] there is not necessarily a strategy from the top-down. So, marketing is more of a reactive activity rather than a proactive activity. There's no consistency with what's happening. Then things happen at the last minute, so it really does feel like there is not enough time to get everything done, because it's not in the plan or there's no time set aside for it.” Lucy identifies a key problem with the marketing practices of many insurance businesses; that being that there is often a lack of an instructive strategy. It is often left to the last minute, reacting to changes in customer behaviours or broader industry trends, rather than remaining a step ahead. Hence, she argues that marketing must become more cohesively integrated into how insurance businesses conduct sales, and that the results of doing so are often highly fruitful.   Key Takeaways Both Lucy and Sarah suggest that marketing and sales can hugely complement each other, if done well. However, marketing is arguably often undervalued and under-prioritised in insurance businesses, as it can be considered somewhat wishy-washy, while sales has a direct impact on the business’ bottom line. This is a significant underestimation of the value of marketing, but it must be done well in order to have a sizeable impact. It needs to be consistent, be it through social media posts on a regular basis, blogs uploaded to your website, or e-shot material. You cannot simply send out the same emails or upload the same posts and expect improved sales results. Conversely, your business needs to be constantly trying to expand who is receiving your message, and reiterating and re-expressing that message in new and interesting ways to maintain high engagement and thereby facilitating consistent or improved sales. Is there a value to content writers? Or is AI-generated content such as that produced by ChatGPT and similar software the future? For Lucy, content writers aren’t going anywhere. The need for well-informed research and editing remains paramount. In a regulated industry, you need to know your sources and to be very careful with the information you put across. ChatGPT, by contrast, uses Wikipedia and other untrustworthy sources to generate ostensibly factual information, which in a regulated sector can be dangerous. Furthermore, the content it produces is collated from blogs, articles and posts that are already in the online ether. As such, it cannot provide any new takes, or offer any original insights or opinions. The human element to good marketing is key – it can be the difference between making and missing a sale. Lucy highlights five key challenges to marketing insurance: Finding time – for your marketing to make a significant impact, it needs to be a priority within your business, and integrated into your broader sales strategy. Tech integration vs legacy data – CRM data analysis can be hugely beneficial to creating targeted marketing content, but many insurance businesses rely on old technology, and retain huge banks of legacy data. Transitioning to the use of this new software and streamlining your data can facilitate smoother client communications, and enable your market