insurance thought leadership

Insurance Thought Leadership, Inc. insurancethoughtleadership.com | March 5, 2015

PUBLICATION OF ARTICLES

You join our nearly 400 authors and are, thus, branded as a Thought Leader. Your ideas are validated by an objective third party as potentially game-changing.

You gain access to our community of more than 340,000 users. You retain the copyright for your articles,

and there is no charge to publish them with us.

We exist to serve our Thought Leaders. We want to help you find the biggest audience for your

breakthrough ideas that we can.


STRATEGY CONSULTING

We draw on two main assets• Our Team. We have a team of veteran journalists and consultants,

including content marketing experts and former CXOs of major insurance companies, whose background in thought leadership and strategy may be unmatched. For example, our editor-in-chief is Paul Carroll, who spent 17 years as an editor and reporter at the Wall Street Journal, which twice nominated him for the Pulitzer Prize. He founded and edited a thought-leadership magazine that helped put a start-up consulting firm on the map. The magazine was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for General Excellence, the industry’s highest honor. He has written five highly regarded books on innovation.

• Our Insight. We have been publishing for almost four years, have nearly 1,200 articles on the site, have nearly 400 thought leaders and are used by more than 340,000 people. So we know what gets attention and what doesn’t. We also have unusual insights into emerging issues that our Thought Leaders could own.

Many companies don’t have fully articulated thought-leadership strategies -- or have multiple strategies owned by different parts of the organization. We use a

formal process to facilitate the development of a detailed strategy that begins by identifying the audiences you want to reach and works backward to understand

the ideas, authors and channels that will reach them.


execution

We pull together an editorial calendar, help Thought Leaders execute against it, and promote their articles.

That typically means planning sessions to generate ideas, followed by assistance that can range from simple copy-editing up to ghost-writing.

We promote the articles to our list (which has quickly grown from about 600 to more than 20,000 and will keep increasing rapidly) through email newsletters and other means.

We also can do email campaigns that will target your lists with your articles – if you send the articles, they come across as promotions; if we send them, they come across as impartial thought leadership.


analytics

Act-on and Lead Forensics

Through Act-on and Lead Forensics, we can provide exceptionally detailed information about not only how many people have read a piece but who they are, how long they spent on the article, what else they read, who else in their business read the piece and so on – we can often even give you a phone number to call.

This information not only lets you track the success of your thought-leadership marketing campaign but can be used in your business-development organization to develop leads.


Premium Access

We have a unique arrangement through which we provide insurance content to the world’s fastest-growing network of professionals in the office of the CFO. This gives certain of our Thought Leaders exposure to a very active community of approximately 1.2 million visitors annually and more than 60,000 registered members. We can help you shape your content and give you access to that network of potential buyers.

access to cfos


BRANDING PAGE

Let us set you up!

We can set up a page for you that will highlight all your thought leadership on the ITL site, not only including the articles you publish with us but also white papers, video, webinars, podcasts and so on.

That way, when someone searches about a topic on our site and finds something one of your thought leaders has written, the person not only sees that article but has access to the full array of your resources. This dynamic, highly curated page is designed to communicate your brand message by highlighting the breadth and depth of your ideas.


webinars

Engage your Audience

We can promote webinars, host them for you or conduct co-branded webinars that would let you tap into our audience, as well as yours.


ADVERTISING + SPONSORSHIPSThere are, of course, opportunities to advertise with us and sponsor

specific content or various topics or portions of our website.

Specific Content SponsorshipYou can sponsor specific content, whether you

produced it or whether it’s generated by ITL (for example, ITL’s Thought Leader in Action profile).

Advertising Naturally, there are traditional advertising opportunities at any number of locations throughout the ITL website.

Discussion Forums(Public and Private Communities)The opportunity is to sponsor collaborative discussions held in communities that will drive market change.

Six ThingsThis is a weekly newsletter sent to all of our subscribers highlighting what our editor-in-chief views as the most compelling content published on the ITL site.

Conference SponsorshipsWe will be conducting a range of conferences, ranging from intimate gatherings of CEOs of major companies to larger meetings addressing specific topics.

Topic Page SponsorshipThe opportunity is for your company to be viewed as

the sponsor of an entire topic and the market leader in the industry concerning that topic.

CASE STUDIES


STRATEGY consulting

absolutely worthy of coverage and encouraged the thought leader to write about it. That became the first article to appear on the ITL platform and marked the kickoff of the firm’s thought-leadership strategy. The piece has been read by several thousand people and has been shared hundreds of times on social media. The author reports that, after years of trying and failing to get a speaking slot at a particular conference, organizers called him and asked him to fill a prominent spot on the agenda. Carroll provided a suggested editorial calendar for the firm’s articles. He also generated rough outlines for some of the pieces, although the firm has good enough writing resources that it didn’t need a lot of help there. Carroll edited all of the pieces and has begun publishing them on ITL. ITL promotes the pieces through its growing social media channels, as does the firm.

The initial efforts have become a steady stream of articles. The firm, which initially signed up for a six-month engagement in 2014, has renewed the agreement for the full year of 2015.

ITL worked with the CEO, the CMO and the director of PR at a medium-sized firm to help it form its thought-leadership strategy. We started with a discussion of the firm’s intended targets for business development and worked backward to identify the sorts of articles and media channels that would best reach them. ITL’s editor-in-chief, Paul Carroll, then spent two days at the firm, meeting with 10 potential thought leaders to discuss ideas. Drawing both on his personal background and on the analytics available to ITL about what resonates with audiences on the ITL platform, on social media and in ITL’s email campaigns, he helped each prospective thought leader identify two to six articles to write.

In many cases, the thought leaders came in with the ideas, but there were also many times when Carroll suggested areas to explore and topics that were in demand. Ideas also sprang from the interaction. For instance, one thought leader joked about a topic he really wanted to cover but was staying away from because he worried his colleagues would think he was a quack, fretting about everything. Carroll said the topic was


Execution: email campaign

ITL worked with a medium-sized insurer to promote thought leaders via a sophisticated email marketing campaign, managed through Act-on. The campaign helped one piece, for instance, be read by more than 15,000 people in 2014 and drove traffic to the numerous articles that the thought leaders published on ITL. The campaign also drove signups for a webinar that is one of the insurer’s biggest marketing events each year. More than 900 signed up for the latest webinar, which was more than double the prior year’s attendance.

Through Google Analytics, Act-on and Lead Forensics, ITL provided detailed metrics on who was reading articles, how long they were spending on the articles, how many at a firm were reading a particular article, etc., to help the insurer identify warm leads. Each new client typically brings more than $500,000 in commissions.


EXECUTION: THIRD-PARTY VALIDATION

A startup approached ITL in 2013, looking for help validating a service that it felt could make a significant impact on workers’ comp, saving money for employers while improving treatment for injured workers. The firm had produced brochures and articles that read like brochures but needed validation by a third party. ITL helped the firm recast its brochures as articles on ITL and generate a steady flow of articles that kept up a presence on the platform. ITL promoted the articles to its list of subscribers and provided copies that carried the ITL logo, which branded the firm’s materials as thought leadership, not advertising. The firm has thrived and credits ITL with a significant portion of its success.

insurance thought leadership

Business

insurance thought leadership

thoughtleadership magazine

impartial thought leadership

publication of articles

strategy consulting

detailed strategy

breakthrough ideas

lead forensics