Insurance lead generation is all about creating and building a proper sales funnel with intelligent tactics to attract potential insurance customers.
To do that, you as the insurance marketer must first forget about what you’re selling and focus on how you do it. For example, if you’re actively marketing a new deal on an insurance policy, the chances are that you are doing your absolute best to serve it to your prospects in a way that appeals to them.
But let’s face it, your business is doomed for failure if nobody finds your pitch appealing. That is unless you — the marketer — have an excellent base of qualified prospects and leads to target during your next insurance marketing campaign.
There are two general approaches to lead generation for insurance companies: using various marketing channels to gather leads or purchasing qualified leads from insurance affiliate networks.
This article will unpack the basics of lead generation by providing you in-depth insight so you can learn more about how to generate leads online and how you can take your lead generation to the next level.
What Is A Lead?
A lead or prospect is a person who shows some type of interest in a company’s products or services. Leads often hear from businesses after opting in for communication or indicating an initial interest in the company’s offerings by filling out an online form or submitting personal information in exchange for an offer, subscription, or service.
All in all, leads are known as an essential part of the lifecycle that users follow as they move from visitor to consumer of any good or service. There are many types of leads, and they can be sorted and filtered based on qualification and their position in the sales funnel.
What Is Lead Generation?
The term “lead generation” describes the process marketers follow to attract prospects and move these leads toward purchasing the goods or services their company is offering.
There are countless methods by which insurance leads are generated. For instance, you can gather lead data by using social media advertisements, online coupons, PPC ads, SEO blog posts, gated content, and other types of online marketing methods.
What Is Lead Generation Marketing?
Lead generation marketing is the process that businesses follow to form a good lead base with the contact information of qualified buyers.
Lead generation marketing often includes following the steps of the marketing funnel, which is the process of turning leads into customers, as understood from the marketing and sales perspective. Here’s how the marketing sales funnel works:
- Awareness: This is the uppermost stage in the sales funnel and revolves around creating brand awareness through various marketing campaigns, consumer research, events, advertising, tradeshows, blogs, webinars, social media, and others.
- Interest: Once you have generated a qualified lead base, each of your leads will move on to this stage, where you teach them more about your company and its offerings by providing them with any helpful information and research. This is also where you are given the opportunity to develop a strong relationship with potential prospects within your lead database and introduce them to your company’s positioning.
- Consideration: Here, leads are tagged as “qualified” and are seen as prospective customers. At this point, you should be sending your prospects more information about your insurance coverage and services. You can do this through automated email campaigns, targeted content, free trials, and case studies.
- Intent: This is where prospects demonstrate that they are interested in moving forward with signing up for your services. This usually happens during a product demo or survey. Again, this is an excellent opportunity for you as a marketer to make a strong case for your service or product and convince potential buyers to commit to your brand.
- Evaluation: At this point, buyers are nearing toward making their final decision about whether they want to opt-in for your service or product. All lines of communication must remain open between your prospects and your business.
- Purchase: This is the last step in the marketing funnel, where the buyer has made the decision to move forward with buying your service or product, which turns them into a customer.
The marketing funnel is primarily used to support companies to gather, nurture, and convert leads into sales, guiding them through the process until they are ready to commit to sales.
Why Do You Need Lead Generation?
When consumers engage with your company, they initiate organic interest in the product or service you are marketing. So at this point, it is up to you to provide value to this prospect and transition them to a consumer.
This is where lead generation comes in: it occurs after you have obtained the attention of a target audience and are ready to turn that interest into actionable sales. In short, lead generation is an essential topic for all business models because, without leads, a company will not have the ability to convert prospects into customers.
As an insurance marketer who wants to learn and know how you can grow your lead base, you should consider incorporating the following methods into your marketing strategy:
10 Strategies To Generate Insurance Leads
Leverage A.I. To Its Full Potential
It’s essential to understand how Artificial Intelligence can support your insurance business. Using AI to automate manual practices such as data gathering and sorting will maximize your team’s efficiency and help you remain focused on customer interaction.
Some AI applications can also help put data at the forefront of all of your marketing decisions. For example, some AI integrations allow you to look at past customer trends and behaviors to predict future trends and create marketing campaigns around customer lifetime value, claim frequency, and even new targets for lead generation.
AI applications also help loosen time commitments and ease decision-making when it comes to gathering and maintaining client data. For example, with more and more insurance marketers looking for ways to avoid underwriting policies that are nonstandard, AI can help with the lead filtration process, allowing you to see which of your leads qualify for a given campaign. In addition, leveraging lead management systems backed by AI integrations will help you decide a lead’s eligibility status and quality.
Improve Your Online Presence & Learn How To Generate Leads
Build your website around high-quality content relevant to the insurance business. You can additionally distribute outperform the other and long-form industry guidelines, gated white papers, and shorter blog posts that include high-volume search keywords unique to your business or industry.
By consistently creating and distributing appropriate materials, you will attract more web traffic, increase your insurance company’s visibility across the web, and encourage existing and new policyholders to visit your website and sign up for the services you are marketing.
Take that creation process up another notch and produce engaging social media content and invite your customers to follow your ventures through these social accounts. Again, share relevant and educational content that is light and easy-to-digest for your clients and target audience.
You can additionally use targeted social media ads to a specific demographic in a given geographical area to raise awareness regarding new promotions, company updates, or other events that your insurance company is currently handling.
Use Data To Grow Your Insurance Audience
Once you have organized the basics of your campaign, focus on following up with leads, website visitors, and those you send gated content about insurance leads to. Use data analytics to understand which of your lead marketing initiatives outperform the other and narrow down characteristics about your target audience.
For example, see if return visitors outnumber newcomers, then create content directed exclusively toward the consumption of these personas. Additionally, use lead tracking metrics that will help you understand which of your marketing campaigns have worked and which strategies need to be altered or replaced to provide you a better return on your marketing investment. When you deploy the practice of using data to drive your campaign, you will be much more successful.
Deploy Inbound & Outbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is a strategy that uses many forms of pull marketing — in blogs, SEO content, social media, and other metrics — to increase brand awareness and attract new leads. It consists entirely of organic leads, so it’s completely independent of marketing budget limitations.
On the other hand, outbound marketing revolves around proactively reaching out to customers to draw them in to commit to purchasing and using your products or services. This method helps promote a product through continued advertising, promotions, PR, and sales pitches.
When you utilize both methods, you’ll create an effective marketing environment, with multiple running outreach campaigns that are sure to bring a positive return on your investment.
Leverage Email Marketing To Sell Your Insurance Policy
Email marketing is one of the oldest yet most effective methods of lead generation. It is so because consumers generally like having the option to visit deals and do “shopping” at a time that is most convenient to them.
Email marketing channels allow marketers to send personalized, demographic-specific messages to prospects who are likely to show interest in the product or service they are offering. Additionally, email marketing provides room for strategic, targeted campaigns and follow-up emails based on client response.
Add Paid Search To Your Marketing Plan
Paid search ads allow companies to reach out to vast amounts of customers in almost an instant. With inserted keywords and terminology, paid search advertisements are an effective method to reach target audiences. Here are four of the most common methods of paid search ads for insurance carriers:
- Pay-per-click ads: This internet advertising model is used to drive traffic to websites, where businesses pay publishers (i.e., Google or other search engines) when a client clicks on an ad. Pay-per-click is commonly associated with first-tier search engines and is known as an excellent way to drive valuable lead traffic to your business. PPC ads bring about 50% more conversions than organic traffic.
- Search Ads: These usually appear at the top and bottom of Google search results and consist of short descriptions and targeted keywords. You can identify these PPC advertisements with the word “ad,” which indicates paid search results.
- Display Ads: These ads usually revolve around an image and a short call-to-action. Display ads appear on websites that are partners with Google.
- Social Media Ads: These ads appear across most social media platforms and include videos, photos, text, and a call-to-action button.
Invest In New Technology
Emerging marketing technology and software are the driving force behind any industry trend or standard, especially in lead generation for insurance marketers. Thus it is essential to keep up with new and coming technologies that can automate your marketing efforts and allow you to focus on the actual act of providing customer support.
Here are some technologies you should consider in your insurance marketing strategy:
- Lead Management Systems: This platform provides a systematic process to manage, nurture, and distribute qualified leads to later convert them into sales and partnerships. This system collects leads from multiple sources and marketing channels, enters them under the same roof into the lead management system, and later prepares them for your sales team to reach out to and turn them into paying customers.
- Lead Tracking Software: This type of tracking software allows companies to track the customer journey, all while drawing a direct line from their first interaction with your company’s marketing campaign to the distribution and the conversion of the lead. It also always provides marketers data like conversion status, position in the marketing sales funnel, and return on investment (ROI). Modern-day lead tracking software also provides real-time reports and dashboards to control other factors of your lead management.
- Front-End Automation: This is a way to characterize automation and streamline tasks focused on customer interaction, data accuracy, user experience on a website, and ease of use of the user interface. Having control over what happens on the front end of your marketing campaign irons out the possibilities of any inefficiencies that may later arise on the back-end.
Network Beyond The Web
Build a network of people who will attest to your service’s quality and recommend them to their networks of insurance prospects. Here are some networking methods that can help you widen your audience:
- Thought Leadership: Encourage C-level executives in your organization to share thoughtful content on social media, company blogs, and external host sites. This way, prospects will get to know your brand beyond what you’re selling, but rather the philosophy that drives your company.
- Professional Networks: Use professional social media platforms like LinkedIn to your advantage by connecting with professionals who work in similar industries as you. Make yourself, your company, and your services are known to these new connections and send them occasional updates and messages.
- Referral Groups: Joining a business referral network is beneficial for insurance lead generation on so many levels. These clubs are all about giving and getting lead referrals.
- Inter-Community Partnerships: Partner with community organizations, entrepreneurs, and entities to build a support network within the town or area that your organization operates in.
- Event Sponsorships: Sponsor and host industry-specific events during conferences within the community or industry to increase your company’s visibility and recognition among various individuals and organizations.
Build An Insurance Lead Generation Website
Your insurance lead generation strategy should have a single direction and a practical goal: to get people to visit your website. Once you have accomplished that, move your visitors through an easy-to-follow informative funnel.
To do that, you should consider the following:
- Align The Visitor’s Search Intent With Matching Content: Optimize keywords to pair the suitable campaigns or offers with the correct landing pages. Provide plenty of educational content to answer the visitor’s questions. Your insurance lead generation website should be attractive and engaging for prospects to visit your website and commit to your services.
- Capture Contact Information: Whether it’s a contact form to access gated content or a subscription to your email blasts, your website should provide your visitors with helpful content to draw them in and keep them interested. Include CTAs throughout your website and at the bottom of landing pages to encourage web audiences to give you their contact information.
- Boost SEO Strategies To Get More Visitors: SEO doesn’t rely on cold calling or sending direct mail to grasp clients’ attention. Instead, it’s rather interest-based and allows people interested in your services to reach out to you by visiting your site. As a result, it can be one of the most valuable marketing tools you will use in your sales funnel if done right.
- Create Lead Magnets: These usually come in the form of original research, e-books, industry guidelines, white papers, templates, or others; lead magnets are a form of gated content that can only be accessed after a reader enters their contact information. Instead, create valuable and educational content and advertise it throughout social media to get more people on your site. This will make lead generation a seamless process and a fair exchange on the user’s end.
Join An Affiliate Network To Buy Insurance Leads
Affiliate networks act as the “middle man” between publishers and buyers, allowing affiliates to find qualified leads suitable to purchase their products or services.
Joining an affiliate network means you will gain access to the sophisticated technology that paves the way for high conversion rates for the web and call leads you purchase. In addition, affiliate networks allow you to filter and pay for only the leads that convert.
Publishers use proven marketing channels like SEO, PPC traffic, and social media platforms to generate leads. These leads are then fine-tuned and distributed to advertisers, who then contact these leads to convert them into sales.
Being a part of an affiliate network for insurance carriers means that you first look at new leads at competitive industry prices.
Final Tips For Insurance Lead Generation Campaigns
Are you still wondering how to generate insurance leads online? Just know that there are many moving parts to any lead generation campaign, and it’s often difficult to tell which parts of your campaign are working and which ones need to be fine-tuned a little bit. Regardless, there are always little-known tips that every insurance marketer should know.
Let’s highlight some of the basics for when you’re building up your next campaign:
- Use The Right Lead Generation Tools: Invest in top-notch software to help you automate some of your tedious practices.
- Always Offer More: Create insurance discount offers for all stages of the sales funnel.
- Create Good Content: Make sure that the content that you put out on your site is relevant to your target audience and offers value beyond the services you provide.
- Link To Your CTA: Have a call-to-action button on all of your product and landing pages.
- Have An Actionable Social Media Strategy: Social media is a low-cost source for lead generation, so utilize it to grasp your target audience’s attention and engage them with your product or service.
The aforementioned tips will help you refine your marketing strategy and pave the path to a successful lead generation campaign, supplied by valuable content, competitive social media presence, data analytics, and a modern approach to lead generation.
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