How to Get Genuine Life Insurance Leads Online

Table of Contents

Website Foundation

For your business to generate more genuine life insurance leads online, you’ll want to first set up the best web foundation possible. This begins with a well designed and structured website that provides quality insurance-related content for your prospective customers on a regular basis. Your website will work for you most effectively when the content uniquely caters to the wants and needs of both your prospective and existing customers.

Avoid the use of canned website designs, content, and marketing services. These can hurt the view of your insurance company, like spam communication and content distribution activities. Businesses that take this approach will struggle to engage visitors and rank high enough to get genuine lead-generating clicks from search engine visits, versus the highly optimized and helpful competing sites.

Without investing in a custom website and online marketing efforts, generating quality life insurance leads will be very difficult, low in volume and inconsistent. Competing websites will continue to acquire the larger share of traffic and lead opportunities available by providing the more engaging user experiences.

Utilizing a unique, optimized, and helpful website that’s personalized to your business’s brand, mission, vision, team, accomplishments, news, and insurance-related offerings is vital to your business’s online foundation. Consider these aspects before focusing on the methods below to generate more life insurance leads online.

If you own or run online marketing campaigns for a life insurance company and want to:

Generate more life insurance leads
Achieve new business opportunities
Compete against your competition
Prevent future business risks

then honing in on those aspects and differentiating your company and site online from competitors is an absolute necessity.

Content Marketing & Inbound Marketing

Once your site is in place providing well researched and unique content for your prospective and existing customers, you can start thinking about content marketing and distributing your content. Throughout the lifetime of your insurance company’s website and respective lead generating campaigns, you’ll want to keep both content marketing and inbound marketing methods in mind. This diversified approach will help you achieve long-term success in generating online life insurance leads.

Whereas content marketing focuses more on proactive promotion and distribution of your content across various channels, inbound marketing involves studying the buyer’s journey and experience through these channels and into your life insurance content. For both, you will want to make sure your content’s information and design have a clear purpose geared towards your target audience. Also, in collecting visitor data and related analytical metrics, you can further optimize and align your content for the buyer’s journey based on cross-referencing and studying that data.

While you can start generating life insurance leads online strictly through publishing content on your financial website, the process can be slow and near non-existent without good on-site optimization, great content, and some smart promotional activity. Getting your pages of content indexed into search engines and ranking for keywords can take some time, such as 2-8 months, depending on your website optimization, links, and online publishing activity. The best long-term way to generate life insurance leads is to diversify your online marketing efforts and keep at them consistently.

For maximum impact, test channels beyond search engine optimization, including sharing through social media platforms, submitting detailed local directory and business listings, running PPC and display ads, remarketing ads, and strategically using email as a communication and marketing tool. In doing so, you’ll have valuable content that works together, and diverse networks built across multiple channels that can amplify each other, helping you to win over more prospective life insurance customers.

Through testing the below online marketing methods for collecting life insurance leads, you’ll also obtain a richer set of behavioral data to better learn about your prospective customers, get better insight into the channels producing the most insurance leads, and find out how to most effectively blend these channels together for the best life insurance lead return

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

It’s always a good idea to have someone publishing unique life-insurance-relevant, keyword-optimized content on a regular basis on your website. The traffic-driving search engines, primarily Google and Bing, will crawl, index, and serve your quality content at higher rankings over time if the content is considered more optimized than competing pages.

To get your life insurance site crawled more often by search engines, raise your chance of ranking higher for relevant life insurance keywords, and get more insurance leads online, you can delve further into these on-page and off-page SEO techniques:

On-page and off-page SEO techniques for more life insurance leads:

Creating content that fills topical gaps in your site and supports existing content
Building pages on your site that solve a problem for your target customer
Editing/extending/optimizing your content based on visitor and competitor data
Fine-tuning the frequency, density, and usage of keywords on pages
Diversifying and using keyword-relevant text as links between pages
The structure of your website menus and links
Acquiring more 3rd party website backlinks to your website content
Optimizing images for web search, file size, look good at different screen sizes

Small books can be written on each of these techniques that include step-by-step education on how to implement them to get more life insurance leads. Financial companies that invest in a trained online marketing team or outsource to a top digital marketing company based in Texas that specializes in the use of these techniques for financial companies will be far ahead of many financial competitors who are stuck in more traditional approaches to marketing and generating life insurance leads online.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

PPC or pay-per-click advertising is another online marketing channel that many insurance companies budget in order to generate more life insurance leads online. For example, Google AdWords is one of the most used ad platforms for creating custom ads for promotion in Google Search and other Google products at a cost per click. There were around 4 million advertisers in 2015, the number much larger now. (Business Insider) A close contender is the Facebook PPC platform that offers unique ad formats, price levels, competition, prospect targeting features and ways to get more insurance leads.

Before starting a PPC ad campaign to generate life insurance leads online, you’ll want to consider the following:

Consider the following before starting a life insurance lead generating PPC campaign:

Keywords, CPC, and competition data from the free tools built into Google AdWords. It can be useful to cross-reference AdWords and FB PPC data if utilizing both platforms.
Some initial investment is required to first collect the data necessary to improve conversions, lower cost-per-clicks, and get life insurance leads.
Ads and corresponding landing pages should always be crafted to achieve high-quality scores within the AdWords system (page experience, relevance signals) to achieve higher ad placement positions and lower costs per click.
Allocating landing pages to specific ads and organizing those ads into ad groups with specific keyword sets.
Adjusting bid levels depending on the ads, keywords, locations targeted, and other factors.
How your prospective and existing customers use the platforms, and how competitors are using the ad types.
Your willingness to invest to test. Testing and optimization can be performed quicker to achieve better conversion rates faster when ad spend is higher.

While it’s not the best idea to rely on one channel such as PPC, some of the best life insurance lead generating results can occur through optimized paid ad and landing page campaigns.

Utilizing a combination of all these life insurance lead generating methods as part of an omnichannel campaign that includes inbound and paid ad campaigns can be very powerful with the right use of resources, knowledge, and execution in place.

Business Listings & Profiles

Let insurance shoppers find you and your company easier online by submitting your public insurance business data. Below are some of the benefits of submitting consistent, accurate citations and descriptive info about your company and insurance services to relevant websites.

Benefits of completing insurance business listings and profiles:

Increased brand exposure in front of new audiences
Improved off-page SEO and links back to your site
Quality and Quantity of accurate citations help SEO
Increase in the level of awareness content for your company
More ways to interact with potential customers
Collect reviews across more platforms
More life insurance lead opportunities

The benefits are quite astounding when taken into consideration together. Here are some examples of websites to list your business profile on:

Examples of sites and directories for audience exposure:

Google My Business page (GMB)
Yelp
Yahoo Local
Bing Local
YellowPages
Life insurance directories
Business directories
Facebook company page
LinkedIn company page

There are many more opportunities to submit your public life insurance business data and citations online, including the use of data aggregator networks, niche blog networks, and press release syndication.

3rd party websites that provide exposure can also be broken down into other types of sites. Examples include question and answer sites like Quora, insurance forums, community sites, and lesser-known social sites. These sites help move you and your company closer to your lead generating goals by expanding your online visibility across many reputable, traffic-filled locations on the web – and help you generate leads through stronger SEO rankings and the possibility of referrals, link shares, and word-of-mouth.

Social Media Marketing

Social media platforms are wonderful tools for life insurance agents and companies to connect with as many prospects as possible.

Benefits of social media for life insurance agents and companies:

Increased brand visibility online
Large numbers of new potential customers
Opportunities to help out, give back and personalize messages
Provide more value that can be shared instantly
Collect reviews, feedback, shares, comments, links, and referrals
Improved influence as a result of a strong relevant network
More influence helps you connect with other influencers
Be seen as the insurance company that truly cares

You might be thinking wow this is a lot, but being active socially online in some form is truly important in today’s world. You can focus on 1 or 2 networks at first, and see which perform well for you and make the most sense for your situation and insurance lead generating goals. You can also hire a social media specialist or team, depending on your model of operation.

For an insurance agent or company, it can be daunting to figure out which social media platforms to utilize, what kind of content to share, how often, and when. For some quick inspiration, check out competitor websites and the type of content they’re sending out across channels. Through some initial research and regular publishing effort, you’re bound to find your way of distributing content that’s right for you and engaging to your audience – improving your insurance lead prospects.

Remember to mix it up versus solely promoting your own content. When sharing your content, keeping the inbound stages of the buyer’s journey in mind, including the awareness, consideration, and decision stages can help you out tremendously. This frame of mind will help you develop better content decisions across not just social media channels, but all channels that allow you to share your insurance content.

Video Marketing

The demand for video marketing is growing at an incredibly rapid pace. Everyone knows about YouTube and other platforms/sites that display public video content. However, you can’t ignore the increase in demand today for engaging videos – both educational and entertaining.

As Hubspot points out, “43% of people want to see more video content from marketers”.

Benefits of video marketing for life insurance agents and companies:

Help convert customers and increase engagement with your brand
Provide a very personalized, human experience
Improved off-page or off-site SEO performance
Below-video descriptions and links pointing to a landing page
A further connection with prospective life insurance shoppers
Feedback through comments and viewing data
YouTube image ads and ad remarketing for more real estate

Examples of effective sites to upload and share life insurance video content to include YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, and Vimeo. YouTube and Facebook Video are likely your best bet to help get more life insurance leads. These platforms lead to the most viewer traffic, and will only help improve your ability to get life insurance sales leads when integrated with your website content, SEO, paid ad campaigns, and analytics data.

Audio marketing

Let’s not forget about audio marketing – primarily podcasts and some webinar formats. While you may not think many people would listen to an insurance themed podcast or webinar, you might be surprised. There’s always an audience out there seeking to learn and hear what you have to say. Based on how you frame your audio content, you can generate huge interest in your company and life insurance services over time. Audio content that’s focused on giving advice, tips, and insight will do wonders for your reputation and authority in the insurance industry.

Benefits of audio marketing for life insurance agents and companies:

Convenient and easy to consume for listeners
Personal and communicated directly to the listener
A cost-saving form of communication and marketing
Blends well with other content and distribution
Spread your message to listeners across many devices
Listeners can tune in at home, at work, and on the go

Consider this podcast statistic from Convince & Convert – “42 million Americans listen to podcasts weekly, five times more than going to the movies”. Alongside this statistic, many people listen to podcasts and other forms of audio content while working, in the car, and anywhere they have access to their mobile device or a laptop. Bonus: You can upload your audio content to video sites like YouTube by connecting a simple background, animation, or supporting video content. You can then distribute your audio files out to audio platforms like iTunes, Soundcloud, and other podcast networks for pretty incredible exposure.

Email Marketing

The online methods above are getting a lot of buzz today and for good reason. However, let’s not forget about tried and true email marketing!

Some of the benefits of email marketing are very good for attracting, nurturing, and closing insurance sales leads. The success of your email marketing campaigns can depend on a variety of factors, such as how you approach subject line use, message context, the relevancy of any content you’re sharing, message timing, and the buyer’s journey stage that the contact is currently in.

Benefits of email marketing and building out a list for life insurance agents and companies:

Ability to offer direct personalized message and valuable content
Signature section to offer ways to get in touch and link to content
A big list is a valuable asset for partnering and sharing mass value
A direct way to nurture and possibly upsell existing customers
Open rates, link clicks, and other forms of valuable data insight
Collect reviews and referrals from those happy customers in your list

With email, you also have the ability to segment your contact lists. For example, these lists can be segmented by the stage a contact is at, and be tagged as a potential or existing customer. The email messages and content you send can and should differ between contact lists as well.

Want to make email marketing even more effective? Software like Hubspot can help you set up workflows that trigger based on certain situations, create email templates, and build out email sequences that once set up, will save you enormous amounts of time so you and your team can focus on life insurance lead prospecting and nurturing.

Life Insurance Lead Generation

As a life insurance agent, marketing director, or marketing specialist, considering these online marketing methods is extremely important when you and your company need to grow your life insurance contact base in the face of more competition.

If you’re just starting out online, start out by honing your company website content, SEO, and then venturing out into content distribution. Having more content to choose from will allow you to mix it up and auto-schedule out social content with software tools like Hubspot Marketing or Hootsuite.

Note that everything to do with online and inbound marketing becomes much easier when tasks are distributed across a team of marketing specialists. However, slow and steady will win the race no matter if you’re solo or have a team – versus attempting to implement a lot online, but inconsistently.

If you have the budget as an insurance company, consider outsourcing to a reputable digital marketing agency – you’ll often get a specialized team managing your life insurance lead campaigns who provide much more strategic work and at a much better price than hiring a large in-house team.

Keep the following in mind for best generating life insurance leads online:

Having a branded presence that’s authoritative, consistent, congruent, positive, communicative, and personalized
Implement custom, unique, non-canned website designs, brand designs, and content
Re-submit your website’s sitemap into Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster when new content is published, to improve the chance and speed at which crawlers will find and rank your content in search engines.
How your directing exposure to your content – to problems you can solve, and your solutions, through actively engaging and helping people online across these various channels
Don’t ignore setting up tracking codes on your site for data given to you through Google Analytics, Paid Ad platforms, email software, and social sites. These metrics will help you make better decisions, save you time, save you money, and increase your chance of acquiring online life insurance leads due to initiating smarter online marketing decisions.
Keep tabs on competing websites. Useful competitor analysis tools include Ahrefs and SEMRush. These tools also help tremendously for gathering your thoughts and making SEO-based decisions.
Gather more insight from life insurance related sites like news publications and community sites. Discover the questions people are asking about insurance offerings and other related topics. You can also set up Google Alerts to get notified about insurance-related content based on keywords.

I hope you found this information useful – at least as a starting point towards utilizing today’s digital marketing methods in 2020 that can net your company more life insurance leads.

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