Like any other business, insurance agents also need consistent new leads to survive and grow. However, lead generation still is a tough nut to crack for many. Strategies like buying insurance leads, paid advertisements, etc., may sound like the quickest and the easiest ways to grab new leads, but they involve high-cost per acquired lead. Also, they don’t guarantee a consistent flow of leads unless you are ready to keep spending more on them. For most new or small insurance agents or agencies, that’s not a very practical approach for lead generation. So, what’s the other option here?
It’s the internet, the online ways to generate more insurance leads!
With more than 70% of insurance buyers using an online search at some point during their research journey, there is a huge opportunity to attract and get new insurance leads online. Online leads demand only a fraction of the cost spend per lead as compared to the traditional methods. Also, with online strategies, lead generation can happen at any time, day or night. So it doesn’t matter if it’s a weekday or holiday, office hour or family time; you can rest assured of not losing a single new lead!
- What Is Lead Generation for Insurance Agents?
- Steps to Consistent Insurance Online Lead Generation
- Become Active on Social Media
- Build a Website for Your Brand
- Publish Content and Optimize It for Search Engines
- Focus on the "CRO" of Your Site
- Have an Easy-to-Use Contact Form
- Initiate Automatic Replies
- Offer Multiple Lead Magnets
- Run Email Marketing Campaigns
- Add Interactive Yet Useful Tools to Your Site
- Publish Positive Reviews and Testimonials on Your Website
- Conduct Face-to-Face Marketing
- Need an Insurance Online Lead Generation Strategy for Consistent New Leads?
What Is Lead Generation for Insurance Agents?
Lead generation for insurance agents is the process of deploying different inbound and outbound marketing strategies and tactics to identify, attract, and convert your potential clients into customers. Common lead generation channels in the online marketing space are search, social media, email, and your website. The best part about the online lead generation method is that you can automate the follow-up with your potential clients as soon as you capture their lead details. This helps in the timely execution of lead nurturing strategies as you guide your lead through your sales funnel.
Steps to Consistent Insurance Online Lead Generation
Typically, generating leads, especially for a new insurance agency, takes a lot of time, hard work, and consistency. It also requires the combination of different steps and strategies to achieve the desired goal. With that in mind, here are 11 steps to consistent lead generation for new insurance agents.
1. Become Active on Social Media
Social media is the easiest and possibly the quickest way to get your insurance agency online, in front of your potential clients. As of January 2021, about 59% of the global population was active on the internet. With millions of users on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, you probably have a ready market for your services on these sites. All you need to do is set up a social media profile for your insurance business, post some great content over there, work on your online brand image, and interact with prospective clients. This is how easy it is to start your insurance social media marketing campaigns.
Starting with social media also helps create a ready pool of audience for promoting your new website when you launch it. It also helps by giving strong social signals to Google to rank your website for related searches.
2. Build a Website for Your Brand
Set up a website for your agency to attract those high-potential leads who are actively searching for insurance products on Google. You can use your website’s design and content to implement a perfect funnel-like structure that will drive the users to take the desired set of actions at every step of their journey through your website. For instance, you can encourage your online audience to take a survey, subscribe to the newsletter, fill a form, or contact you for detailed information on their desired insurance plans. This helps a great deal in maximizing leads that may eventually turn into sales. Also, make sure to add your website URL in your social media profile bio and occasionally on your social media posts to draw more social signals for ranking and traffic.
3. Publish Content and Optimize It for Search Engines
Typically, creating a website is one thing, while getting prospective clients to visit it is another. Anyone can create a good-looking and feature-loaded website, but that isn’t enough to make it rank on search engines. For that, you will need to regularly publish relevant and high-quality content (blogs and articles) that aim to satisfy the queries or resolve the issues of your target audience and gradually help in establishing you as an industry expert.
You will also need to learn and apply the basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to your articles and blogs with keyword research and on-page optimization to improve their chances of ranking on top of Google’s search results.
Search engine optimization goes beyond incorporating appropriate keywords in your website content. Several aspects like on-page, off-page, and technical SEO must all work together to ensure a well-optimized website with greater visibility and higher rankings. It’s generally not recommended to dive into all those complex SEO activities on your own. If done wrong, it could hamper your website more than helping it. Always seek professional help for that!
We, at Stratosphere, have helped hundreds of insurance agents and agencies with their insurance search engine optimization strategies that brought long-term growth for their business. You can also connect with us to learn more about SEO for insurance agents.
4. Focus on the "CRO" of Your Site
As of now, you have created a website, published a lot of high-quality content that is also search optimized, and driving a good number of visitors to your website. This is just half the journey completed! Your next target is to ensure that the maximum number of these visitors who are landing on your website take some kind of desired conversion action on your website, like subscribing to your newsletter, submitting an inquiry using a form, requesting an appointment with an insurance agent, calling your office number, or signing up for a webinar. This is what is known as conversion rate optimization (CRO).
“Conversion rate refers to the number of times a visitor to your site completed a goal, divided by the total amount of website traffic.”
While search engine optimization (SEO) gets visitors to your website, conversion rate optimization (CRO) compels them to take the necessary action. To enhance your CRO, you may consider these:
- Increase your insurance website’s loading speed
- Keep your best content above the fold
- Make CTA buttons attractive yet conspicuous
- Use power words in CTAs
- Do A/B testing with button colors, rewording call to actions, text volume and empty spaces, and more
5. Have an Easy-to-Use Contact Form
Well-optimized contact forms are also a part of the conversion rate optimization strategy; however, it’s a very important topic that needs a dedicated section of its own. Contact forms, if well-optimized, can increase your conversion rate significantly. According to a HubSpot research, conversion rates were increased by half just by reducing the number of form fields from 4 to 3. That’s one way to make your contact forms conversion boosting. Other ways could be:
- Placing the form on the first fold of your landing page so that it’s instantly visible as the page loads
- Ensuring that the form gets submitted in a single click
- Incorporating additional but lighter pop-up forms on the landing page with one or two fields and a single click submission
6. Initiate Automatic Replies
Even when your team is not working, potential clients may still visit your website to inquire about insurance-related matters. To make sure that you never miss out on any potential lead, use chatbots to initiate conversations and send automated replies to your website visitors. These AI-enabled tools will not only inform prospective clients of obvious information such as the existing rates, location, and available coverages, but they can also direct them to schedule appointments with your agents or take other conversion actions.
7. Offer Multiple Lead Magnets
Lead magnets are free services or other incentives that you offer to your website visitors so as to gather their contact details. Though the immediate goal of any lead magnet is to gather more email subscribers, the ultimate objective is to gain a purchase down the line. Lead magnets should ideally cost you little to nothing to create and distribute as you are offering these for free. These can be in the form of free webinars, detailed insurance selection guides, whitepapers, and reports.
8. Run Email Marketing Campaigns
The information you gather through filled forms, email subscriptions, and other lead magnets should enable you to build an email list of your potential clients. With a ready list, you can now venture into running email marketing campaigns regularly to nurture your leads and eventually generate sales from them.
In your newsletters and email campaigns, make sure to inform the target audience of any exclusive offers, company news, and important announcements. That way, you can keep your leads updated about all your company events and offerings. Also, keep updating your email list from time to time to ensure that you capture all possible leads. Many insurance agents underrate email marketing, arguing that people consider emails as spams and they don't convert. The reverse is true. According to a Marketing Sherpa report, email marketing for financial services and insurance delivered more than 15% conversion rate. Click on the link to learn more about other underrated insurance marketing ideas that still deliver exceptional results.
9. Add Interactive Yet Useful Tools to Your Site
Your conversion rate will most likely increase if you add interactive tools such as an insurance premium calculator or an insurance quote generator to your website. These are especially useful if your team is offline and your website visitors need to generate a quote or know the size of premiums on their desired packages.
10. Publish Positive Reviews and Testimonials on Your Website
According to the Spiegel Research Center, 95% of shoppers read online reviews before making a buying decision. In other words, potential customers want to know what experience others have had with your insurance services before purchasing a policy. That said, ask your happy clients to write a review via Yelp or Google My Business account, and publish the prominent ones across all your marketing touchpoints, like your website, newsletters, emails, your social accounts, and even offline advertisements, if you do any. Just don’t forget to take written permission from your clients before publishing their names or pictures.
At Stratosphere, we offer online reputation management services for insurance agents that let them acquire consistent positive reviews and manage other aspects of online reputation on an automated mode. Learn more about our reputation management services for insurance agents.
11. Conduct Face-to-Face Marketing
While digital marketing is the current real deal due to increased internet usage, do not ignore offline marketing activities. Offline networking and promotion will not only help you attract non-internet savvy leads, but they will also help you by bolstering your online insurance lead generation efforts.
Organize seminars for local businesses, become a guest speaker at a conference, and be an active participant in community events. While at it, ensure you market your insurance service by speaking about it, giving out flyers and brochures, and displaying your company’s banner. This will help you in spreading the news about your agency in your community faster. Also, the local media coverage will help improve your agency’s citations and build more links to your site or social accounts, thus boosting your website’s local ranking and lead generation counts.
Need an Insurance Online Lead Generation Strategy for Consistent New Leads?
While you should never cease your offline efforts to acquire new leads, focusing on online lead generation is the call of the time. With 70% of the insurance purchasers using online search before making a purchase, there is no way you can afford not to have an online lead generation strategy for your insurance agency. We, at Stratosphere, are a pioneer insurance lead generation company with a record of helping over a hundred insurance agents and agencies spanning across the US. With world-class designed websites and smart digital marketing strategies, we can help you revamp your online lead generation strategy to generate more leads for your insurance business. Contact us today to get started!