Brand Journalist & Marketing Consultant, Phoebe Chongchua, shares three tips to increase insurance sales by becoming an online authority in your industry. Learn how new media marketing builds trust with consumers and helps close deals. Learn more at MarkMiletello.com.   Guest: Phoebe Chongchua Phoebe Chongchua is a multimedia Brand Journalist, Consultant & Marketing Strategist who makes brands Remarkable. Using her skills as TV News Journalist, she connects brands and consumers through powerful storytelling. Companies gain a competitive advantage when they learn to "Be the Media." Phoebe is a "Top 50 Podcaster to Follow." Listen to "The Brand Journalism Advantage" podcast in iTunes or at ThinkLikeAJournalist.com     Note: "Where The Insurance Pros Meet" is an audio podcast and is meant for the ear. A transcript of the audio is provided for referencing a particular section or for you to follow along. Listen to the episode to get the most out of our show. We use both speech recognition software and human transcribers to create the transcripts so they may contain errors. If you're going to quote us in print, please be sure to check the corresponding audio.

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TRANSCRIPT

 

Mark Miletello:

Welcome back to the show. I'm excited; we have a special show lined up today. We have one of the world's greatest minds in marketing and media and journalism. Our guest is a brand journalist and consultant who teaches businesses how to think like a journalist and be the media. I'm going to dive into that because I want to know what does that mean to us, how to think like a journalist, and how do we be the media. It's awesome. She launched the brand Journalism Advantage Podcast in the fall of 2014, and within nine months she was named a top 50 podcaster by Cision for shows on public relations, marketing, and social media. She also made the list of 35 outstanding podcast picks by entrepreneurs on Inc.com. She's an award-winning former TV news journalist from right here in San Diego who loves the pursuit of a good story. Welcome our special guest Phoebe Chongchua to the show.

Phoebe Chongchua:

Hey Mark, how are you?

Mark Miletello:

I have to step up my game. I'm doing great, but I don't even know, how many shows do you have live out there that you produced?

Phoebe Chongchua:

For the brand Journalism Advantage we have about 400+ episodes to date. You know that is no easy feat, right?

Mark Miletello:

It's not an easy feat. For the listeners, Phoebe is the inspiration behind and really my mentor in launching one of the first and greatest, I believe, platforms for our industry. What's so unique about you, Phoebe is that you've been around our industry now for at least nine to ten years. With your background, and now you know a lot of our background, it's just going to be an unbelievable show too, so thank you for joining us. It's an honor and a privilege.

Phoebe Chongchua:

You know what, Mark? I think that what you are doing truly is an inspiration and should be listened to by many agents because this is what it's all about, getting your voice out there, being heard and giving valuable information to the agents so that they can thrive in the industry. There aren't a lot of people out there doing this.

Mark Miletello:

We're jumping right into this, and I love it, but you know our industry. I feel like our industry is way behind on a lot of the social, maybe it's a lot of industries Phoebe. You work with very, very large corporations, some of the world's largest corporations. You've worked with Mom & Pop shops, you've worked with anyone in between. Is it me or is our industry way behind online marketing, social media, things like that, or is it really everyone struggles in that area?

Phoebe Chongchua:

I think a lot of brands and large corporations are definitely excelling in this space, but then there are a lot of brands that just don't get it, and they're really creating these streams of broadcasts where they get on a platform, and they think, "I've just got to hit it with marketing," and that's where they're going wrong. They're really not telling a story; they're not sharing their real reason for why they are doing what they're doing in the industry and how it's going to help people. That's what's most important, and that's kind of where this whole think like a journalist mentality comes in. When you think like a journalist, your number one rule is to find the story and make it a value to the end user. Who's the end user? When it's media, it's your viewing audience, or radio, it's your listener-ship. In the cases of brands, if they can think like a journalist and craft stories that are valuable to their end users, their core audience, their future customers, their current customers, they're really engaging them and bringing that story to them to help them through the buyer journey and that cycle of making decisions to choose their company, their product, their service.

Mark Miletello:

We're going to dive into this because I'm going to extract everything I can in this short amount of time we have together because you have so much to offer any industry, especially where the insurance pros meet the insurance industry. I definitely want to just pause and say thank you for inspiring me to launch this, coaching me. I don't want to use the phrase that I'd like to use, but you've polished me, and there's a lot of work to go, but I'm getting better. I've got to tell you, I've interviewed some of the greatest in our industry, and you're one of the greatest in your industry, but also knowing that you're one of the television's and online and podcast, you're one of the great interviewers out there, I'm a little bit intimidated.

Phoebe Chongchua:

Oh no. You know what I like about the podcasting platform? You take up space on someone's prized possession, their smartphone, their iPhone. You own space on that, and you're plugged into their ears, and they're listening while they're walking or running. You can be as real as ever. You don't have to be that broadcast journalist to get into this. What you have to do is have a message, care about it, Mark, as you do, and then drill down. Get the information out of each guest, make it valuable to your listener-ship and they'll keep coming back.

Mark Miletello:

Well, thanks for the confidence. I needed that right off the bat. Phoebe, let's jump into this. Let's talk about what you do and how you have become one of the greatest in your industry and how you can help our industry. This is where the insurance professionals meet; you are a professional in the media space, give us a professional tip right off the bat, something, a piece of technology, something, a tip that can transform our business.

Phoebe Chongchua:

This is probably one your industry, at least the agents, haven't heard of, and they might do a, "Huh," scratch their head and might have to hit the 30 second back button when I say it, but trust me. If you do any blogging, if you do any writing for the web, I'm going to give you a tool that is incredibly valuable. I actually got this from a guest on one of my podcast shows because I ask a similar question about a resource or tool that they can use, but I'll tell you what, it's really worth its weight in gold. This is called a headline analyzer. I'm sure in your show notes, Mark, you'll put a link to it, but it's basically from the Advanced Marketing Institute. What's a headline analyzer? This is a little bit crazy, when I got into TV, we wrote headlines, that bait that draws you in to watch those, what we call, teases so that you'll watch the 5 o'clock news or the 6:30 newscast. A headline analyzer takes your headline that you think it's so awesome and then tells you whether it really is awesome or not. It tells you if it's awesome not just for people, meaning the actual humans, on the web we write for the robots too. We write for the algorithms and all the bots that are searching the web, so you have to make your headline work for two things. When I first started writing on the web a long, long time ago, I thought it was really cool to be clever, that clever journalist like I was on TV. I realized clever doesn't pay, you have to be straightforward, you've got to be hard-hitting, and you've got to make your point, and that's what's going to make a good headline. Why am I telling you this? As an insurance agent, you may or may not have a blog, you may or may not write on LinkedIn. If you are not, you're making a huge, huge mistake and I'm sure we're going to get into that as we go through this episode. The headline analyzer will tell you things like is this hitting emotionally at the level you want? Is it hitting intellectually? Guess what, in the insurance industry, there's a lot of space for writing about things that are both going to hit intellectually and emotionally. I'm sure when you guys go on sales calls you guys are hitting on both levels, the intellectual and emotional. What's going to happen if you don't have life insurance, for instance, and your husband passes away? How will your wife be taken care of? That's emotional. If you're writing about stuff like that, but your headline doesn't match the content of your writing and doesn't work for the search engines and doesn't work at an impactful level for humans, then your writing isn't going to go anywhere and isn't going to be seen. That's why I recommend this. It's very easy to use, you just type in the headline, and it'll tell you whether you're writ