In advance of the annual Life Insurance Awareness Month (LIAM) campaign, I encourage you to support the nonprofit organization Life Happens that coordinates LIAM each September. Life Happens is joined in this educational initiative by more than 140 of the nation’s leading insurance companies, financial services organizations and industry groups to make sure Americans are reminded of the need to include life insurance in their financial plans. The organization further supports the insurance industry by providing marketing tools and resources through its Life Happens Pro platform.
This year Life Happens is partnering with well-known actress Brooke Shields to help drive home the importance of life insurance as a financial priority to U.S. consumers. As part of the partnership, Brooke will serve as the national spokesperson for Life Insurance Awareness Month and her story will be shared through a national TV and radio public service announcement (PSA) program that will begin broadcasting this summer and continue until the end of the year. The PSAs will be available on the Life Happens website, along with educational information and interactive tools such as Life Happens’ Life Insurance Needs Calculator to help consumers evaluate their own life insurance needs and get the protection they need.
Life Happens has a multitude of resources through the Life Happens Pro platform for agents to utilize to either engage prospects in the life insurance discussion or revisit clients for coverage reviews and needs analysis. (Also on the Life Happens menu are resources for disability income and long term care sales.)
Agent resources available from Life Happens include:
- Access to their library of hundreds of flyers, brochures, and graphics you can use to show potential clients how insurance can protect their families and businesses. Able to be personalized with your contact info and branding if you choose, Life Happens asserts there is a story, flyer, brochure or graphic to fit any client situation, from new parents to small-business succession planning.
- An easy to use tool that turns social media into a source of new prospects and a way to build your relationship with existing customers. You are able to pick and choose from hundreds of attention-grabbing social-media graphics and posts that you can share directly from the platform with just a few clicks of a button. Plus, these posts have proven potential to go viral, letting you reach and even wider audience.
- Perhaps the most well known Life Happens offering is the Real Life Stories video series. With Life Happens Pro, you can use all of these high-production value videos, plus dozens more that are social-media ready. Embed them directly on your website with customizable options or use them to enhance your social-media posts and email campaigns.
- Having people “do their own math” to see how much life insurance they need is a powerful tool. The Life Happens Life Insurance Needs Calculator can be placed right onto your website (it’s fully customizable to match your site design). Then you can send prospects and clients to your site to come up with their own life insurance needs.
- The Life Happens insurance planner tool makes starting a conversation with clients and prospects easier. It presents the user with two simple questions and helps them come to their own conclusions about their insurance needs—while they are on your website. It takes just minutes to get it up on your site and is fully customizable. You decide where the customer goes after they use the tool—and you can even match it to your site’s color scheme and design.
And they are offering agents a free trial—just in time for LIAM. Just visit www.lifehappens.org, click on the “Company and agent resources” tab, click “Continue” under “I’m an Agent/Advisor” and click “Start Your Free Trial.”
Life Happens also partnered with LIMRA (www.limra.com) to produce the 2019 Insurance Barometer Study, packed with statistics on consumer information gathering preferences and purchasing attitudes as well as analysis of the uninsured and coverage shortfalls. Another tremendously useful LIMRA resource, anticipated this month and drawing from several LIMRA life insurance consumer studies, is the annual Facts About Life fact sheet produced specifically for LIAM.
As anyone who serves the life insurance industry should readily admit, every day should be Life Insurance Awareness Day—there are countless grieving, financially terrified spouses and unfulfilled college dreams every day. As for Life Insurance Awareness Month, let the ask be that you check out Life Happens, support their great work, and make use of the fine tools they offer. Further, I would wish that this September you step out of your comfort zone and tithe some of your time actively seeking to help some of the frequently overlooked that make our industry’s un- and underinsured statistics so damning.[SPH]
