The Pros and Cons of Life Insurance Marketing in the Age of AI

Over the course of the past year, millions of Americans have logged onto OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Twitter’s Grok.  Many of us have collectively experienced the wonders of Large Language Models (LLMs) and artificially intelligent chat.  It is a remarkable advancement that has been used – and abused by marketers, copywriters, students, and everyday social post-ers.  While the responses generated by the current and former iterations of ChatGPT have proven exceptionally useful, they are not without their pitfalls.  This month, let’s talk about the pros and cons of utilizing LLM chat for our marketing and correspondence efforts for Brokerage General Agencies (BGAs), Independent Marketing Organizations (IMOs), and independent life insurance agencies.

A little background about me, chatGPT, and life insurance marketing

Let me qualify my opinion here.  As the marketing director and now business development director for Apis Productions, I have been responsible for countless articles, social posts, and marketing campaigns for BGAs, IMOs, and other life insurance focussed organizations for the past 5 years.  

It has been a time of great change and innovation in both our industry and the world at large.  We saw accelerated underwriting take an enormous leap forward during the pandemic.  We’ve seen product changes that reflect a new class of consumers’ goals in everything from enhanced living benefits policies, hybrid long term care policies, and targeted changes to life insurance employee benefits structures.  I’ve written about all of it for numerous clients.    

I was well aware of AI and the possibilities it brought for expedited marketing pieces, even articles, and I was excited to test its capabilities.  As a former coder, developer, and tech-nerd I also understood a bit of the machine science behind it. So, as an early adopter, I dove in.  I purchased Jasper.ai, I created a chatGPT account, and I began the endless journey to find the perfect prompt that might unlock the literary genius hidden amongst the vector data.  The result?  Not too bad! At first, it even felt amazing, magical.  Then, the whole world noticed.  And then, the whole world started using it.  Again and again. 

If a BGA adds an article to the AI forest will anyone notice?

Over time, thousands upon thousands of articles and social posts generated with chatGPT began appearing across the internet.  I imagine a number of high school assignments and essays appeared in the hands of teachers, courtesy of chatGPT, as well.  This, taken by itself, is not a bad thing.  After all, different people use different prompts to urge the bot to create the information they want to share.  While it may sound incredibly lazy, more information is rarely a bad thing.  However, for all the fear that AI would completely demonetize and socialize the world of copywriting and content creation, I spotted a pattern.  It became clear to me which content had been written using AI and which content was the result of an actual human mind.  In some cases, this became unbearably obvious in social media posts.  

A thousand heroes.  With the same face.

AI excels at well-written, albeit generic-sounding content.  Sure it can dive into the minutia that you ask it to and occasionally write something that a decent writer would find completely acceptable.  But more often than not, there exists a certain sameness to the way it writes.  If you ask it to write with passion, it writes with the same passion for everyone.  If you ask it to write as though it were a professor, it will be the same professor for everyone.  And so on.  

When someone asks it to write a few social posts, it will use little rockets and other emojis to make it ‘feel’ more social post-y.  AI became a content hero.  A hero who wears the same color cape for everyone that prompts it. 

Suddenly, LinkedIn was filled with generic and relatively meaningless social posts (complete with the little rocket emojis) on every business page I went to and all at once it seemed that progress had taken a step backward. 

The internet became flooded with blog posts that spoke in the same tone of voice.  The era of amateur prompting had replaced an age of imaginative content creation.  This all felt like the beginning of the end of imagination.  So, how can you effectively use chatGPT to increase productivity without sacrificing your soul on the altar of convenience?

To succeed in today’s content marketplace, you should use AI, not the other way around

AI is a tool.  A magical tool.  And like any tool designed to make your life easier, its quality lies squarely in the hands of the person who wields it.  Left to do all the work for you, AI will churn out page after page of low-personality, inauthentic copy.  This may be enough to fool Google’s SEO algorithm for now, but it will do very little to excite your audience.  

Instead, focus on leveraging AI to help get you started in your writing.  

• Prompt it to make an outline of what you would like to write about.  
• If you have it write social posts for you, make sure you alter the language to suit your voice.
• If you need a quick-hit bulleted list on a topic, ask AI to build one for you.
• Be sure that anything you post to socials or blogs has at least a partial realness behind it.
• Use AI to get information, but then verify that information elsewhere before using it.

In short, make sure that AI isn’t hijacking your voice and replacing it with a homogenous litany of words.  

The good news is that it will be easier than ever to stand out from the crowd.ai

The silver lining is this: At this point in time, everybody using AI to completely write their content is at a great disadvantage.  They will feel as different from one another as raindrops in a storm.  You, however, have the opportunity to stand out like a lightning bolt against the monochromatic skyscape.  The time to infuse more ‘human’ into your marketing efforts has never been so ripe with opportunity.  That is if you choose to work just a little bit harder than everybody else.