The written word is a critical part of modern communications. We’ve moved from face-to-face communication to the telephone, but today text messages, social media posts, and blog content rule the internet. While video communication is also on the increase, your insurance employees still need to build strong written communication skills so that they can succeed in their insurance jobs. As an employer, what can you do to strengthen your employees’ written communication skills?
Be Clear About Your Message
Your employees can’t write well if they don’t know what they’re supposed to be writing about. As a team, be clear on your mission and on your insurance marketing goals. If you are creating a piece of writing, know why you are writing it before you assign it to a team member.
Understand Your Audience
Strong writers have insight into their various audiences. They understand the audience’s motivation and they know how to address the audience’s needs. As an insurance agency, your job is to understand your audience and to convey that information to all of your employees, no matter whether they are writing about your organization or not. Any marketing, verbal, or written communication should exist within an atmosphere of understanding your insurance leads.
Write From Your Areas of Competency
Be sure that your employees feel confident writing about the subject that you ask them to explore. They will feel more competent when they are writing in a subject area that is highly familiar to them. If you are blogging, your goal is to become a trusted resource to your community. Ask your employees to lend their expertise to your insurance customers. This makes the writing less intimidating.
Give Your Employees Enough Time
Do you need some content for a marketing campaign completed yesterday? This is not the time to give your less-seasoned employees an opportunity to explore and expand their writing skills. Give employees a deadline, but give them enough time to create their copy and return to polish it. The New Zealand Writer’s College suggests that writers complete their writing and “come back to it later with a fresh mind.”
Coach Your Employees
Give your employees enough time to work with other, more seasoned employees at your insurance agency. If you can implement a coaching approach to writing development, then you can cultivate new writers at your agency over time. Ask your writing coaches to give your employees advice such as:
- Write in the active voice, such as “the tree fell on the building” instead of “the building was damaged by a tree.” This makes writing clear and lively.
- Use headings, lists, images, infographics, and video when writing online, to provide variety for your website visitors.
- Always check your spelling and grammar to be sure that there are no errors, however minor they might be.
- Use a variety of sentence structures. Write in short sentences and paragraphs if the text is going online.
Encourage your employees to sign up for a writing course that focuses on your business’s area of interest, such as blogging or creating marketing materials. This continuing education will benefit the employee’s professional development and benefit your business as a whole.
At American Agents Alliance, we’re dedicated to helping your insurance business grow. That’s why we offer so many membership benefits and knowledge-building opportunities such as our annual Alliance Convention. Insurance jobs and marketing are complicated. You need an ally in the field. As you work to support your employees’ growth, we work to support your business growth. Contact us today.
