Insurance Thought Leadership: Write for the Broker, Not the Buyer

Most insurance thought leadership fails for a reason that has nothing to do with what it says. It is aimed at the wrong person.

I'm Raphael Presberg, Founder and CEO of Moriah. We are a LinkedIn marketing agency and a LinkedIn Certified Marketing Partner, and insurance is the sector where I watch this mistake cost the most. A carrier, a managing general agent or a program administrator publishes a careful piece about risk trends, then waits. The piece is accurate. The author is genuinely qualified. And nothing happens, because the people who decide whether that firm grows were never the intended readers.

In most of this sector, the policy gets written because a broker thought of you. An independent producer had a risk on their desk, went to two or three markets, recommended one. If your content persuaded the insured and left the producer cold, you did not get the submission. You will also never see a line item for business that never arrived.

So the first question isn't "what is our point of view." It's "who are we trying to move, and what do they not already know."

One note on the search term, since it trips people up. There is also a trade publication called Insurance Thought Leadership, so some of what turns up under this phrase is a specific outlet rather than guidance. This piece is about building the program.

Insurance thought leadership has a distribution problem, not an audience-size problem

Here is the structural fact worth sitting with. Your route to market runs through people who do not work for you and owe you nothing. An independent broker is not contractually loyal, and it would be odd to expect them to be. Risk by risk, they are choosing between you and three other markets they know about as well. What tips the choice is familiarity with your appetite, confidence that you will not waste their time, and whether the person on your end has been a visible presence or just a name on a rate sheet.

That is a content problem, and a fixable one. It is also almost entirely unaddressed by the thought leadership most insurance firms publish, which tends to read as if the end customer were the one holding it.

Compliance comes up every time this conversation starts, and it is a real constraint. Review processes slow a program down and shape how claims and pricing get discussed, so plan for them. But compliance is not what makes most insurance content commercially useless. Plenty of fully-approved content fails because it was aimed at a reader who was never going to place a risk with you.

What the broker is actually deciding when they read you

A producer reading your content is working through a short list of operational questions. None of them are about your brand.

• Will this market take the class of risk sitting on my desk right now?
• If I put this submission in, what are my odds, and how long will I wait?
• When something goes wrong at claim time, am I going to be defending this decision to my client?
• Who do I call, and will that person pick up?
• Is this an easy market to work with, or does every submission turn into three rounds of questions?

Underwriters triaging submissions weigh three questions: whether the submission is complete, whether it fits appetite, and whether it came from a broker they know. The producer is running the mirror image of that calculation on you. Content that answers it earns a submission. Content that does not gets a scroll.

And the answers keep moving. Appetite tightens and loosens on shorter cycles than it used to, so a class that was binding in the first quarter can be a decline by the third. That churn is an opening. The firm that keeps its distribution network current on where it actually stands becomes the easiest market in the room to work with.

The subject matter changes completely when you write for the intermediary

Once the reader is the producer rather than the insured, the topic list looks unrecognizable.

Underwriting appetite, stated plainly

The most valuable thing an insurance executive can publish is a clear account of what they will and will not write. Classes you want. Classes you have exited, and why. Limits you are comfortable with. The risks you will look at if a broker calls first instead of submitting cold.

Most firms treat appetite as something that lives in a PDF a broker has to go and request. Publishing it in plain language, from a named underwriter, where producers already read, is about as straightforward an advantage as this sector offers. Almost nobody takes it.

The declination explanation

An underrated format: explain why submissions in a given class keep getting declined, and what would change the answer. Brokers do not resent declinations. They resent unexplained ones, and they resent burning two weeks on a submission that was never going to work. A post that saves a producer that two weeks buys more goodwill than any brand campaign. It also quietly improves the quality of what arrives.

Submission quality and what makes a risk easy to place

Describe what a complete submission looks like for your team. Which documents, which detail, how much loss history, where the common gaps are. This is the least glamorous content you will ever publish and among the most read.

The market appears to be moving the same way. In the 2026 Insurance Agency-Carrier Connectivity Trends survey from Ivans, which polled more than 700 independent agents, commercial submission automation was the capability agents most wanted from carriers, named by 79% of respondents. Friction in the submission process is a competitive issue now, not an administrative one.

Claims behavior, described by what you actually did

Claims is where a broker's reputation gets spent, which makes it the place they pay closest attention and trust you least.

What works here is specific and retrospective. How a contested claim type in your book actually resolved. Your reserving philosophy and what it means at first notice. Typical turnaround on a line, stated as a number you will be held to. Who makes the call on a coverage question, and how fast.

There is real ground to take. Canadian Underwriter's 2026 National Broker Survey put broker satisfaction with carrier communication and transparency at 47%, down from 56% in 2024, and satisfaction with the speed and efficiency of the claims process at 41%. Describe your claims communication honestly, in public, and you differentiate on the exact axis the market is unhappy about.

Service reality

Turnaround times. Who answers the phone. What happens at renewal, and how early. What your underwriters do when a broker calls with a half-formed risk at four in the afternoon.

If you think of thought leadership as big ideas, this reads as unambitious. To a producer deciding where the next submission goes, it is the most decision-relevant thing you can hand them.

The topics brokers quietly ignore

Here is what tends to get published instead, and skipped:

• Macro commentary with no decision attached. "The hard market continues" is not news to anyone in this sector. If a trend observation does not end in something the reader can do differently, it is throat-clearing.
• Internal digital transformation. Your core system migration matters to a broker only where it changes their submission experience, and then only in that form.
• Culture, values and office news. New office, award win, anniversary. A broker is happy for you and is not reading it.
• New-hire announcements with no territory. "Welcome to the team" is ignorable. "Mark has joined to underwrite habitational risk in the Southeast, here is what he will look at" is useful.
• Rate commentary with no appetite implication. Brokers get rate commentary from a dozen sources. Your position is the part they cannot get elsewhere.

The pattern is simple enough. Content that describes you gets ignored. Content that helps the reader do their job gets read, and they remember who wrote it the next time a risk lands.

The second audience: the insured, and what they need is different

The end client is not irrelevant. They are the second audience, and they have a genuinely separate job to do.

When a broker recommends you, the client often goes looking. What they need in that moment is reassurance that the recommendation is safe: that you are financially solid, that you have handled claims in their sector, that you understand their business. They are not evaluating your appetite. They have no reason to know what appetite means.

So the content that serves them is sector familiarity, claims credibility, stability, and evidence that firms like theirs are already on your books. Different subject matter, different register, often a different author.

A way to hold the distinction that I keep coming back to: the broker needs to know you are easy to place business with, and the client needs to know you are safe to be placed with.

Why one program aimed at both persuades neither

This is where most insurance thought leadership actually comes apart, and it is a harder error to spot than a wrong topic.

Take appetite detail and write it so the insured can follow along, and it stops being useful to the broker. Hedge the specifics, soften the classes you have exited, strip out the declination reasoning, and what is left is a brochure. The producer reads two lines and leaves.

Run it the other way and the failure looks different. Reassurance content aimed at a producer who already knows your brand reads as marketing. Worse, discussing declinations, exits and reserve philosophy openly in front of an end client can read as instability to someone without the context to interpret it. The operational candor that makes you attractive to a broker may be the same thing that makes a client nervous.

So the audiences need separate streams:

1. Separate the authors. Appetite, submission and claims-process content belongs to named underwriters and the head of distribution. Sector credibility and stability belongs to the chief executive or line leader.
2. Separate the register. One stream assumes the reader knows the business. The other explains.
3. Decide which audience each piece serves before it is written, and accept that it will not serve the other.
4. Do not resolve the tension by averaging. The averaged version is the vague version, and vagueness gets ignored.

A good point of view still does not move submissions on its own

The part usually left out of advice on this topic: publishing is not a growth plan.

Thought leadership in insurance also runs through channels we have nothing to do with. Trade press placement, conference panels, industry white papers, broker roadshows. Those are real, and sometimes they are the right answer. Moriah does not run them. We do not do public relations, events, trade media or content marketing beyond one platform.

What we do is LinkedIn, run properly. That matters here because LinkedIn is where producers, underwriters, distribution leaders and risk managers all actually are, under their own names, reachable. For a sector whose growth depends on being remembered by specific people at unpredictable moments, that is the useful property.

And it only works as three pillars running together, which is the whole concept of how we operate:

• Personal branding. Named underwriters and distribution leaders publishing appetite, claims and service detail on a steady cadence, usually one to three posts a week. Content from a personal profile performs roughly five to ten times better than the same content from a company page, which here is the difference between your appetite being known and your appetite being filed.
• Targeted outreach. Around 200 messages a week to the specific producers at the agencies you want submissions from. This turns visibility into conversation, and it is a different conversation per audience: operational with the producer, reassuring with the risk manager.
• LinkedIn Ads. Used when it serves the objective, typically to stay in view across a renewal cycle that is eleven months of silence and one month of decision.

All three run against one objective, because that is how the channel performs. A firm that publishes and activates nothing around it gets no business. A firm that runs targeted outreach with no visibility behind it gets no business either. I have watched both happen, more than once. The pillars only produce outcomes as one engine, and they are not sold separately.

The work is done in-house, pricing in the United States is $4,000 per month covering all three pillars, and there is no commitment, no minimum term and no lock-in.

Frequently asked questions

What is insurance thought leadership? Insurance thought leadership is publishing an experience-based point of view to build credibility with the people who decide where business goes. In most of the sector that means brokers, agents and intermediaries rather than the insured, because they control which carrier or product gets recommended.

Who should insurance thought leadership be written for? Usually the intermediary. If your firm reaches the market through brokers, agents or wholesalers, the producer choosing between markets is the reader whose decision you can change. The insured is a real second audience, but what they need is reassurance, not operational detail.

What topics do brokers actually read? Underwriting appetite stated plainly, why submissions in a class get declined and what would change that, what a complete submission looks like, claims behavior described by what you actually did, and service realities like turnaround and who answers the phone.

What insurance content do brokers ignore? Macro commentary with no decision attached, internal systems news, culture and award posts, new-hire announcements with no territory, and rate commentary carrying no appetite implication. Content describing your firm gets skipped. Content helping the reader does not.

Can one program serve brokers and policyholders at the same time? Not well. Appetite detail written for a general audience loses the specifics that made it useful, and candor about declinations or reserves can read as instability to a client without the context. Separate the streams by author and register.

Is compliance the main obstacle to insurance thought leadership? It is a real constraint, not the main one. Review processes slow publication down and shape how pricing and claims get discussed. But plenty of fully-approved content fails commercially because it was written for the wrong reader.

Who should hold the byline? Appetite, submission and claims-process content belongs to named underwriters and whoever runs distribution, because the credibility there is operational. Sector credibility and client-facing reassurance belongs to the chief executive or line leader.

How long before insurance thought leadership produces submissions? Longer than most marketing, and not on a timetable you control. A producer only acts when a matching risk appears, and that is unannounced, so the content has to already be running when the moment arrives. Early on, the honest measure is whether the producers you want are reading you, not submission count.

Does insurance thought leadership have to be on LinkedIn? No. Trade press, conference panels and industry white papers are legitimate routes, and Moriah does not provide them. LinkedIn is where producers, underwriters and risk managers are individually reachable under their own names, which is why it is where we work.

Does publishing alone generate business? No, and this is the most common failure. Visibility without activation produces an audience and no pipeline. Content has to run alongside targeted outreach to the producers you want submissions from, with paid amplification where it serves the objective.

The short version

If your business reaches the market through intermediaries, write for the intermediary. Tell brokers what you will write, why you decline what you decline, what a clean submission looks like, and how you behave at claim time. Give the insured a separate stream built on sector credibility and stability. Do not merge them.

Then activate it, because a point of view nobody activates produces nothing. If you want to see what that looks like pointed at your own distribution network, book a call.