The 2018 Life Insurance Awareness Month (LIAM) campaign is almost here! Each September, Life Happens creates and coordinates this national consumer awareness campaign to help your clients and prospects get the life insurance they need.

We’re excited to have professional athlete and entrepreneur Danica Patrick as our celebrity LIAM spokesperson again. To understand how great Patrick has been as our spokesperson for the importance of life insurance, you need only look at the results of her life insurance public service announcement. Over the past two and a half years, it’s been seen on TV or heard on the radio more than 1 billion times.

It’s about the financial journey
For Danica 3.0, we’ve built on the very successful and well- received financial-fitness theme from last year, creating a new theme: “A Journey to Financial Fitness.” Here’s the essence of the message: “Step by step. Goal by goal. Do that next good thing by putting financial protection in place with life insurance. Then, no matter what happens in your financial—or life—journey, your loved ones will be OK financially.”

Danica is the perfect person to talk about this, as she herself is on a personal and professional journey. Although she finished her racing career this year with the Daytona 500 and the Indy 500, she is now appearing on every media outlet imaginable. She knows the importance of financial fitness and lives it daily. She has diversified into writing books, running a winery, heading a sportswear company, and continuing her health and fitness lifestyle empire.

Life Happens made a great video in which Danica articulates her journey, along with why she believes life insurance is so important. Watch her here and be sure to share with your clients and prospects: www.lifehappens.org/danica.

Getting started
This video is just one of dozens of resources that Life Happens has created for LIAM, including digital flyers, email templates, social-media graphics and prewritten posts, social-media engagement ideas, videos and much more. You can check them all out at www.lifehappens.org/liam.

Here’s how to get started:

*Get the free LIAM marketing tactics document. Go to www.lifehappens.org and download the document, which has tips to get your LIAM campaign off the ground.
*Leverage social media—it’s easier than you think. If you’re new to social-media or are fairly inexperienced, the easiest way to start a solid social-media presence is to follow Life Happens on its social channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram (for links, go to www.lifehappens.org/socialmedia).

Once established with your own account, when you see a post you like, you can share it with your followers! Easy and free. If you’d like to take it one step further, use the popular six-week LIAM calendar of prewritten social-media posts, which can be used as-is or modified. (It’s available via the LIAM resources at www.lifehappens.org/liam.)

The resources are enduring. This goes back to the title of this article. Once you get your LIAM marketing campaign in place, you can continue your outreach well past LIAM. We all know that helping people get life insurance is a 365-day-a year exercise! All the evergreen resources Life Happens creates can be used now and well into the future. Also, as a bonus, all of Danica’s resources can be used through Dec. 31, 2018.

Life Happens wants to hear from you and wants to help. If we don’t know about roadblocks you may have when using our resources, there’s no way we can help. Please reach out at any time to support@lifehappens.org.

Your Own Personal Marketing Department

Life Happens’ powerful online marketing platform, Life Happens Pro, is what agents are using to access hundreds of marketing resources, including videos, social-media posts, flyers, email templates and more.

Life Happens Pro Premium also allows you to brand and personalize your resources. In addition, there are drip email campaign capabilities and social-media scheduling. I encourage you to try it out with a 14-day free trial.

And as a NAIFA member benefit, you get 15% off a subscription by entering the code NAIFA15. Learn more at www.LifeHappensPro.org and reach out to support@lifehappens.org with any questions.

Robert N. Garneau, CLU, ChFC, is chair of Life Happens. A Life and Qualifying member of MDRT, he is in his 41st year in the life insurance Industry. He has served as state president of NAIFA-New Hampshire and the New Hampshire Society of Financial Services Professionals. He resides in Manchester, New Hampshire.