For any business to succeed you need a constant flow of customers. You need to track down the right person and inform him or her about the relevant insurance coverage available in the market, provide competitive pricing information, and deliver value with a memorable experience. This is where insurance sales lead generation becomes difficult. However, using the inbound method can help you get more insurance sales leads.
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How Do You Get Insurance Leads?
This lead generating dilemma is why I would like to present an Inbound Approach to Acquiring Insurance leads. Now, Inbound Marketing may sound fringe, but rest assured that when done correctly, inbound utilizes the same tried and true marketing and sales techniques – just more focused on the online space and the online buyer’s journey. Inbound marketing is client-focused rather than seller focused and has noticeably higher returns on investment because the inbound and content strategy efforts are cumulative and very targeted. Inbound marketing supported by the right inbound software tools also provides great measurability and rich data for the flow of your online visitors and insurance leads.
This makes it pretty apparent as to why generating sales through insurance leads should be approached with an inbound plan of action for any insurance firm or individual agent. The insurance leads can be very detailed and contain most of the information about the prospects. Depending on your ideal buyer, you can qualify your leads and decide quickly on who to pursue with the help of inbound marketing software and a team to maintain and improve upon inbound interactions and contact records.
10 Ways to Get Insurance Leads for More Sales
Here are 10 effective ways to get more insurance leads for ultimately more sales:
1. Revive Stale Leads
The job of a salesperson is to get a decision from a qualified sales lead. If you have let people fade out of existence, or forgotten them in your stack of unread emails, you are not getting a decision! You should strike up a conversation with those people and see how they are doing and if your services may help them out! Otherwise, it is time to send them a Dear John Break up email. It should help you close the gap on leads in your pipeline and those that are burning holes in your inbox – are you willing to do something different to win? You can’t lose what you haven’t won yet.
2. Use Social Media to Attract Prospects
There are several super-powerful platforms right now which all of you have probably heard of/ been badgered to jump on. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are HUGE! Especially for Insurance. Facebook is great for engaging an audience, Twitter is phenomenal for ‘listening’ to those who are interested in Insurance, or checking out people who may be running into qualifying events. LinkedIn is great for finding your ideal customer and engaging with them, this means finding decision makers and nurturing them to your product.
3. Buy Traffic Instead of Leads
Buying leads are essentially throwing money at a problem and hoping it goes away. While buying leads can still be quite profitable if done right, buying traffic is much more profitable and controllable. Media buying is by far the smartest move because it can be done on a continuous basis and with reporting, your lead source should continue to grow. If done correctly and tested thoroughly one can generate leads with the highest return on investment. Buying traffic can be accomplished by creating media or running events that draw attention to you and your brand – thus drawing traffic.
4. Find a Niche
This worked very well for me in 2017. Niche down and use social media outreach or other various methods to purely target one small group of people – it lets you concentrate your efforts, even if you are doing something simple like creating ads for that group, it allows you to be far more targeted. For example, pick a niche like “Skydivers” and write a helpful article on your website about getting life insurance as a skydiver. Nothing salesly — just make it a resource page with a quote request form and phone number prominent (For more information on landing pages check out Unbounce’s Landing Page Course). Then put together a spreadsheet of every blog, forum, Facebook, and Twitter account geared toward skydivers and ask them to share your article with their readers. Wait for 2–3 months and do it again to those who didn’t respond or didn’t share. Lather, Rinse, and Repeat.
5. Harness the Power of Visuals
Infographics and videos, among other visual media, are some of the highest engaging and converting pieces of content. Videos on Facebook ads converted 7x more visitors to customers than any other form of media! People like concise and engaging bits of information that can be portrayed through video. Sharing them on social media, in emails, or to be used in ads are effective ways to build consumer trust, deliver value to your ideal clientele, and build in an effective message for the masses or create highly personalized messages to a specific person or group!
6. Prequalify Your Referral Source
It is far easier to present information to someone than have them generate that same info. I have found much better success when I feed names to my referral sources rather than asking for names. Rather than ask someone who they know at their place of work, bring a copy of their work directory and ask which other pros they know well. Once presented the names, they can check off the names they know. This is a super-effective way to draw more referrals.
LinkedIn is a good tool for the same purpose. Before a client meeting, spend some time reviewing the client’s LinkedIn connections and then present them with a list of 15-20 people which you think you would like to meet with. Then ask them to check those who would likely grant a meeting based on his recommendation. Again, this leads to greater success than asking them to think up the names – not to mention you are choosing the list (so you get to meet with the people you’d like!).
7. Use Seminars or Some Type of Client Group Meet
One of the best methods for getting insurance leads is to hold monthly private client dinner seminars. You can invite a few clients to a seminar at an upper-end steakhouse and “allow” them to bring a guest. Although this is not unique, it is the way that I position it which has made them so successful. I constantly gather referrals from clients so I always have names to work with. Here are the steps that I follow in a client meeting to get their friends’ names:
- I discuss how worried I am about the economy and ask if they would be interested in attending a seminar where I will explain why. (They always are!)
- I get the client to agree that, as a result of working with me, they have peace of mind financially.
- I get them to agree that they probably have friends who don’t have the same peace of mind because they don’t know me.
- I get them to realize that they may not even know this since they don’t typically talk about finances with their friends.
- I get them to agree that, if they did know their friends were worried, they would definitely refer them to me.
- I then suggest that we brainstorm and come up with a list of friends whom they care enough about to invite to a future seminar.
Here is the kicker though; I am not asking for their friend’s contact information. I am simply creating a master list of names so that, as I schedule these seminars, I will have an idea as to how many friends they care enough about to invite. When it comes time to hold a seminar, I invite my client and send them several extra invitations so they can invite their friends. It works great!
There are tons of variations of something similar – have a powwow for your existing customers and get them to chat. It can be about your company, what they like/dislike about insurance processes, etc. This is where you can determine how you can provide value to your buyers, collect referrals, and become an evangelist for your current insurance-related clientele.
8. Stay Top of Mind
Prepare passive insurance-based marketing to always steer prospects your way when they are “ready to buy” (just like when you’re ready to buy a car, you notice all those billboards and car commercials you ignored before). This means being top-of-mind with an established reputation through content marketing, social media, blogging, press releases, and social proof. This can extend beyond your own copy — many top agencies make a habit of commenting on national news stories simply to get their name in the paper.
9. Be Listed in Google and Indexed in a High Position
Being listed and ranked high in Google for relevant keyword phrases that people search could be an enormous insurance lead source for your business depending on the search volume and competitiveness of the insurance-related keywords, whether for national keywords or local-based keywords.
I’ll start this off with an example – say you want to be found when your buyers are searching for “term life insurance” which has 37,000 monthly searchers. Those are people looking for information on life insurance – including quotes, rates, frequently asked questions, services, and more.
In order to rank high in Google’s indexed search results, you need a combination of site authority and context. Authority is built through creating great site content and creating & earning links. The combination of valuable, relevant insurance content and links signals to search engines like Google and Bing that your business and website are a credible source for the content topics and related keywords you want to rank high for. As a result, search engines become inclined to consider you as an insurance authority or the best content option to rank for the right insurance terms. The context for your site is built by doing keyword research, providing valuable insurance-related content, and targeting the correct terms on-page.
You can cover about 75% of the SEO for supplementing getting more insurance leads using these tactics – to help get your content found when your audience is searching online. The best part is, it is often cumulative and gets you very scaleable returns when properly implemented over time.
10. Create a Simple YouTube Video & Offer to Get Qualified Prospects
Film an interesting three-minute video on a subject that your ideal client might be searching for online. Nothing fancy needed. Just be you. The same day, write a 2-to 3-page article with some awesome helpful content pertaining to the video subject — something so good that they want to share it. Then, create a simple one-page “squeeze page” where any visitors can opt-in to get the report you created. Finally, post the video to YouTube. Make sure to put that specific URL link of the squeeze page in the description of the YouTube video so visitors can get the report. Then watch the leads come in. If your video title and description are solid, this will work every time. And the best news is it can be evergreen, meaning always working whether you are or not. The opt-in forms should have all the fields necessary for your marketing/sales team to qualify the leads and prioritize them.
So why would you buy insurance leads?
Point 8 above totally summarizes it!
Buying leads does not fix your insurance lead generation problem for the long term.
It’s smart to diversify your lead generation methods. With the extreme popularity of online channels like search engines, social platforms, and website networks – combined with valuable and insightful data – you can get leads for any type of insurance through the power of consistent inbound efforts. Insurance types such as Auto Insurance, Homeowners Insurance, Health Insurance, Medicare Insurance, Life Insurance, Commercial Insurance, Long Term Care Insurance, Group Health Insurance, Annuity Insurance, Final Expense Insurance, and more.
In today’s society, most people need some form of insurance coverage. So if you are an insurance agent, the opportunities for you are endless. Inbound marketing provides both long-term results and data to help you discover the people who are actually interested in getting insurance, and the kind of insurance features and rates they’re interested in. Further, you can position yourself in the online insurance space to provide helpful insurance information and value for potential prospects, existing customers, and your network. As a result, insurance lead success will tend to slowly gravitate your way.
No one can deny that an increasingly larger number of individuals are turning to the Internet to compare insurance pricing, features, and options before deciding on an insurance provider.
When investing resources into inbound marketing, here are some things you will never have to worry about:
The quality of leads when using inbound marketing.
By developing your Opt-in forms, you can effectively filter out your least favorite leads, or even people who just aren’t ready to buy! This gives you the opportunity to email and nurtures them for the sale when the time is right for them! Don’t let your ambition to sell be quelled because of ‘bad timing’. This positions you to generate the self-sourced leads for your ideal customer, giving you more control over the quality and quantity.
Are you an agent that specializes in life leads or health leads? Maybe you have a growing customer base in auto insurance leads or are looking to capitalize on that specific market.
No matter what type of insurance lead area you are interested in, the inbound methodology can deliver the right leads at the right time. With so many high- quality monthly insurance searchers across home, life, final expense, small business, commercial, auto, and health lines of business – and with the ability to target leads by State or Zipcode – it’s no wonder agents are trusting the Visitor → Lead → Customer inbound model to help them achieve their sales goals. No matter your agency’s size, geographical requirements, budget, or requirements, there is something that can be done to get you more attention in your space.
Am I just going to be put in a queue and get the same leads as thousands of other agents?
There are millions of people searching for insurance quotes or other insurance-related information online. Because these leads see you as a trusted advisor or as an authority, they are generally easier to convert to customers.
More Insurance Leads for Agents = More Sales
Sales leads for the insurance industry are pretty self-explanatory – when it boils down to it, quality leads help agents, brokers, and carriers sell more policies. Your lead generation spend needs to measurably get you returns – if you can’t tell how much money you are making from buying leads, you may be wasting money.
Make insurance leads a key element of your agency’s marketing mix to find prospects already looking for the insurance products you sell.
Getting solid leads helps with:
- Higher Close Rates
- Fresh Lead Delivery
- Track old and new contacts
- Custom-Target Opt-in Filters
- 24/7 reach
A Marketing Strategy For Insurance Agents To Succeed in A Crisis Economy
With the internet taking more of a share of people’s time and attention, consumers can more readily research, compare prices, and shop for insurance. As consumers become more Internet savvy, they are no longer content with insurance rates or experiences offered by their local insurance agency.
ComScore, a media research group, recently studied online auto insurance shopping activity in the United States. The study showed that auto insurance policies. That’s a 37% increase compared to the year before. With such a massive 32 million people went online to shop for auto insurance quotes, and over 12 million purchased the flight of consumers to the Internet to shop for insurance, Internet insurance leads must be a major feature in your marketing portfolio. To direct some of that growing traffic your way you need a rock-solid game plan to jump into the most prominent insurance superhighway.
Real Prospects With Real Interest in Quotes – Work Smarter Not Harder
With content you can target and get leads instantly through form fills that are qualified to your specifications of a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL).
Personal story: I had inserted my phone number 1 time on an insurance website and within minutes I had 12 insurance sales reps call – not only that but the phone numbers proceeded for about 6 months thereafter, I would get at least one call per day. That is not a good experience, making it very easy to change providers upon being presented with a lower quote. This creates a sloppy rat-race that many of you are very familiar with
Integrating with a CRM like HubSpot, you are able to automate follow-ups, get notifications on new leads, and create sequences that you can build value for apprehensive prospects to ease the sales process. By notifying prospects with automated follow-up emails and delivering details you can bridge the gap between completing a form online and speaking to a sales rep.
Contact and delivering insurance quotes. Insurance leads can be filtered per your ideal buyer personas
The right inbound marketing campaign can deliver insurance sales leads by being there for your customers at the moment they are ready to be sold to, tracking each client by their individual stage in the buyer’s journey.
The Secret of Success When Working With Insurance Leads
The best way to working with any kind of lead is knowing that it is a numbers game, you will get 5,000 website visitors, 10% of those visitors are qualified as a lead and opt-in to receiving information, then once nurtured and sold to, 10% of those leads become customers.
Need help in generating more insurance leads? We can help you generate business through experienced digital marketing campaigns.
Our digital marketing agency based in Lubbock, Texas specializes in SEO campaigns, PPC ad campaigns, and digital marketing consulting for local and national businesses.
Contact us at HONE Digital Marketing for more information and to request a free quote.