Marketers are responsible for more than just campaigns: all of the content that provides consumers their first (and second… and continuous) impression of your company is managed by the marketing department. That means social media, commercials, content, which funnels down to the website and applications you manage. A marketer’s secret weapon isn’t just their beautiful website - it’s the technology that powers it that ensures agility and change as swift as today’s landscape.
IN THIS ARTICLE:
What an Updated Insurance Website Can Accomplish for Insurance Agencies
So, what exactly is a content management system?
Types of CMS Available to Insurance Companies
What Are the Benefits of a Headless CMS for Insurance?
CMS Checklist for the Insurance Industry
What an Updated Insurance Website Can Accomplish for Insurance Agencies
Maybe your website is awesome, but you can’t launch campaigns quickly. Making sure your website checks these off your list (or revamping to make sure you hit these key points) will be key in driving more traffic and increasing conversions:
Ranking First. SEO is key to insurance companies. A site with excellent SEO will not only be properly indexed by Google, it will rank higher to increase opportunity to be found when prospects are searching for products like yours online. The technology that lies underneath the site is more important to SEO than many think.Read this article to learn how we redesigned our website and actually increased our SEO rankings.
Target Your Micro-Markets. It’s important to produce content on the site that speaks to your target demographics and niches. Whether that is by physical location, unique products, or both, your technology should be allowing you to easily create content specific to your markets around those topics.
Local Search. Deeper than ranking high is ranking specifically for local markets. Capturing these micro-markets is key to growing your company. So many prospects are looking for coverage specific to them or representatives that may be close by, so enhancing local search will help drive those clients to find you over the competition.
Build Credibility. Sites need to be fast and accessible because prospects expect their insurance company to be accessible anytime, anywhere. Make sure that your website is not only speed optimized, but also highly available wherever you serve content. This instills confidence in prospects that your business is trustworthy and reliable, a top consideration when looking to switch insurance providers.
At the end of the day, there are three dynamics surrounding the keyword strategy-nucleus. Your website, people searching, and your competition. Don’t let such a significant portion of your digital strategy go unchecked for months (or even years) at a time.
So, what exactly is a content management system?
A content management system (CMS) is the platform that powers your website and content. Every CMS is different. In its core, a CMS is a software platform that lets its users create, edit, archive, collaborate, report, publish, distribute and inform. Traditionally, CMSes have been used to manage content on websites.
A CMS that still is used primarily to build and power websites, such as WordPress or Drupal, are considered legacy systems. The CMS market has developed significantly in the past 5-10 years. Now, CMSes are much more powerful, and can be used to manage content on websites, applications, advertisements, in smart devices, and more. This is a powerful tool for modern marketing teams who have increased responsibility to produce and manage content in loads of other places than just the website.
A legacy CMS can be summed up as a software to manage content that needs to be installed, updated, secured, and maintained indefinitely on a server. The content the software manages is tied directly to the “presentation layer,” or the website/template. A modern hybrid CMS is a SaaS platform that does not require ongoing maintenance and can be hosted on premise or cloud, depending on the business requirements. Content that is edited on the modern CMS is not tied to a “presentation layer;” rather, this content can be pushed to any presentation, such as web or mobile applications, smart devices, websites, and more.
To read more, check out The Ultimate Guide on Content Management Systems.
Types of CMS Available to Insurance Companies
Legacy
A legacy CMS can be summed up as a software to manage content that needs to be installed, updated, secured, and maintained indefinitely on a server. The content the software manages is tied directly to the “presentation layer,” or the website/template.
These are referred to as “legacy” because in most cases, there are other systems that are a better fit for business. Legacy CMSes don’t provide marketing agility, allow teams to manage multiple content destinations, and ultimately are just a way to build a static site. Many legacy CMSes also perpetuate dependencies on the development team, rather than allowing marketers to make and push changes as needed.
Headless CMS
A headless CMSis any CMS that separates the content from the presentation layer. In many ways, this is great because it allows for content to be distributed to a website, application, multiple websites, and more.
However, there are some downsides to a headless CMS in practice: because it’s a developer tool, there are many headless CMSes that don’t have a suite of tools for marketers, like previewing content or SEO tools, which puts businesses who rely on a headless CMS at a disadvantage because they still have to rely on development teams to make and publish changes.
Hybrid CMS
A modern hybrid CMS is a SaaS platform that does not require ongoing maintenance and can be hosted on premise or cloud, depending on the business requirements. Content that is edited on the modern CMS is not tied to a “presentation layer;” rather, this content can be pushed to any presentation, such as web or mobile applications, smart devices, websites, and more.
Typically, this is the best fit for businesses such as those in the insurance industry. These CMSes provide all of the development flexibility such as APIs and endpoints, while also providing marketing tools such as SEO insights and a friendly interface to make changes that automatically push to their destinations without relying on development teams.
What Are the Benefits of a Headless CMS for Insurance?
There are several benefits to choosing a headless or hybrid CMS for insurance companies. Mainly, these softwares are going to provide you a number of increased efficiencies over legacy CMS:
Software management. A headless or hybrid CMS can be a SaaS product. A SaaS (software as a service) product will generally decrease overall costs and headache. SaaS platforms handle the software hosting, availability, security, and updates, so you (and your development team) don’t have to.
Developer dependency. A headless or hybrid CMS can increase or decrease developer productivity. We generally recommend you choose a system that decreases developer dependencies so that they can focus on building the product rather than building and maintaining endpoints and websites for the marketing team. This allows better division of responsibilities so they can focus on what they need to do, and the marketing team is empowered to do what they need to do: create and publish content.
Marketing agility. A headless or hybrid CMS is in most cases going to facilitate marketing agility. These tools make it easier to create landing pages, build campaigns, and send content to multiple destinations so that teams can coordinate their omnichannel marketing efforts better and see increased traffic and conversions.
Increased SEO. Hybrid CMSes have much more to offer than a headless CMS in terms of SEO - in fact, purely headless CMSes can be detrimental to SEO. A hybrid CMS can increase content efficiency and delivery so that search engines rank pages higher.
Easier omnichannel marketing management. Both tools will facilitate omnichannel marketing management. Teams that have multiple websites, iOS and Android apps, web applications, smartwatch applications, have a lot of content to manage. Having a single source of truth rather than managing content in several platforms drastically increases both developer and marketing teams’ efficiency.
Cost savings. This depends more on the system and the use case, but generally speaking a hybrid CMS is going to offer more cost savings than a headless CMS. A headless CMS may increase costs because there may be maintenance costs associated with the software, as well as increased developer time and resources to get the most out of the software. A hybrid CMS manages the software and provides marketing teams and businesses agility, requires less development resources, and provides the best of both worlds, all in one platform.
Which is right for you: headless or hybrid?
| Question | Is it in Headless? | Is it in Hybrid? |
| Do you need to push content to various devices and platforms? | ✅ | ✅ |
| Do you have a workflow where you’re looking to decrease developer dependencies? | ❌ | ✅ |
| Are you looking to increase development efficiency so new campaigns can be launched sooner? | ✅ | ✅ |
| Are you looking for automated content delivery, scalability, and provisioning? | ❌ | ✅ |
| Do you need to preview content before it gets pushed to a website? | ❌ | ✅ |
| Do you want to increase the security of your platform and overall marketing websites? | ✅ | ✅ |
| Do you want to have a single source of truth for your content so you don’t have to manage it in multiple platforms? | ✅ | ✅ |
| Are you looking to maintain or increase the SEO of your websites? | ❌ | ✅ |
| Are you looking to switch to a CMS that will provide cost savings (licensing costs, maintenance costs, developer time and resources)? | ❌ | ✅ |
To find out if a headless or hybrid (decoupled) CMS is right for you, check out our extensive guide on headless vs hybrid CMS.
CMS Checklist for the Insurance Industry
CCPA and/or GDPR Compliance
Although there are some exemptions with CCPA when it comes to insurance companies, the marketing site is not one of them. The website does still need to explicitly state what data is being collected and how it is being used.
What is the difference between GDPR and CCPA, and do you need to be compliant for one, the other, or both? Our CCPA vs GDPR guide offers insight on how these regulations affect your industry.
What many companies are not privy to is that their software may be compromising their CCPA readiness. For instance, plugins on your website that collect data are all weak points that compromise your website’s CCPA compliance. You may be doing everything correctly on your website, but if you’re using a plugin that is found in violation of CCPA, you could be found liable. This is a serious breach not only of governmental regulation but also client trust. Ensuring your website software is CCPA compliant is a major key in 2020 for insurance companies.
Team Governance
Providing multiple teams and people with access to managing the content on several applications, websites, and platforms may seem like a can of worms that does not need to be opened. Insurance companies should make sure their CMS has team governance and roles and permissions for each user, so that they are only provided access to what they need.
For instance, an intern should have write-only permission so they cannot send new content live to the web portal, or a VP of Marketing should have access to read, write, and publish all content - but only read the code of a website or endpoint.
Design Freedom
It is 2020 and design is very important to your audience! It’s one of the most important things that can set your brand apart - so why be stuck to a template? Insurance companies need a CMS that doesn’t lock them into a template and allows for complete design freedom so you can have a functional site without compromising style.
Quick and Easy Landing Page Generation
With an ever-changing landscape, it’s more important now than ever before to ensure your marketing team has agility to change and launch campaigns on the fly, all while collecting analytics and being able to gauge performance.
Is Zesty.io the Right CMS for You?
Zesty.io is an enterprise CMS that was built to solve the omnichannel marketing and development challenges companies in highly regulated industries such as insurance face.
Advantages of Zesty.io for Insurance Companies
SaaS Platform: No need to update, install, patch, or plugin ever again. Changing your content is done by simply logging into the platform.
On Premise or Cloud: Depending on your company’s security requirements, Zesty.io can operate on premise or in our cloud.
99.99% SLAs: our extremely secure platform also guarantees uptime, availability, and global delivery in our SLA.
100% Hosted: not only is our platform hosted, we also host all of your websites and endpoints. With our blazing fast CDN and global availability, clients can access your site in under a second*, no matter where they are.
Developer tools: Our platform offers instant read-only endpoints, customizable endpoints in a number of formats (.HTML, .CSS, .JSON, etc.), and extreme flexibility. Our integration with ATOM means developers can edit locally and push to Zesty.io to accommodate their workflow. Developers can build what they need quickly without sacrificing useability. All endpoints are also protected by a Web Application Firewall (WAF) automatically.
Marketing agility: build templates in Zesty.io to launch campaigns faster, change content no matter where it’s delivered instantly, and preview all changes before they go live in our automatically included staging environment.
SEO Benefits: Automate SEO and easily view meta information and make changes to help boost rankings. Publish content quickly and easily without relying on development teams to publish content for you.
Roles and Permissions: Use Zesty.io’s out of the box roles and permissions or build your own custom to your team. Ensure that team members have the access and permissions they need so that governance is automatically managed.
Workflows: Build in approval workflows with Zesty.io. If something needs to be approved by a content or legal team prior to publish, you can manage that workflow within the system.
Multi Site management: Manage multiple websites for your umbrella of brands under one roof without ever having to update the platform or hosting again. View them all at one glance, share content and images across websites, and more.
Application and Portal Content Management: Manage content across websites or applications such as iOS and Android apps, web applications, portals, and more. Content managed in Zesty.io can be syndicated anywhere. Once an application is pulling content from Zesty.io, developers don’t need to be involved to make changes again - the marketing team can seize control.
CCPA Compliance: Because Zesty.io is an enterprise SaaS platform, we’ve considered GDPR and CCPA compliance to ensure our customers are also compliant.
If you'd like more assistance, we're here to help. Chat with a specialist to learn more.
Is Migrating to Zesty.io Difficult?
With our APIs to ingest content from your platform into ours, migrating can be a breeze. Our tema of Solutions Architects will help do a deep dive of your current CMS to help devise the best and most efficient plan for a swift migration. If you need assistance, we also have a vast network of partners across the globe who are ready to help.
Ready to Learn More? Let’s start with an introductory call so we can tailor the perfect demo to your needs.
By Chloe Spilotro
Hooked onto the platform since first using it through the Zesty.io Incubator Program at the University of San Diego. Passionate about all things marketing, IoT, and helping businesses leverage technology to grow and become major players in their industries.