Insurance Lead Generation Ideas to Increase Sales Effectiveness

Achieving your goals with the selling process you’ve implemented for your agency isn’t always enough. Focusing all of your attention on closing the deal can lead to overlooking important steps. Traveling with your prospects along the marketing funnel is key to ensure they are high-quality leads that will convert into clients. Good news is that your insurance agency doesn’t need a whole marketing department to implement a lead generation strategy. In this week’s post, we share insurance lead generation ideas to increase the effectiveness of your marketing programs.

Why is the marketing funnel important for insurance lead generation ideas?

The more leads you generate means the more information you collect based on your audience’s behavior, and the more data you collect, the better marketing funnel you can create. Leads start at the top of the funnel. When they learn more about your business and get closer to making a purchase, they move down toward the bottom.

As shown above, sales and marketing work together, but the tasks have changed over time. Before, sales tried to convert leads into clients when they reached the consideration stage. Realizing that the prospects weren’t ready to convert in that stage of the funnel, the roles sales and marketing play have changed. Now, marketing works with the prospects throughout the funnel to get them ready to purchase. A lead generation strategy is important to allow your prospects to travel through the funnel at their own pace, while you create the perfect content for each stage and advise them along the way to build trust. But how can you start getting leads into the funnel? The following are 5 insurance lead generation ideas.

Use Social Media

When implementing a lead generation strategy, you want to attract leads from a quality audience, meaning, leads that come from your target audience. Attracting prospects that won’t turn into clients can be frustrating and a waste of time. For example, if you sell health insurance plans only valid in California, you don’t want companies based in New York contacting you for quotes.

Social Media is a great tool to filter out unqualified leads. You don’t have to be an expert in social media or set up accounts on every social media platform available. When focusing on insurance lead generation ideas, we recommend using LinkedIn, since you can filter by professional demographic data, such as job title, company, industry, seniority, and more. This feature allows you to target relevant prospects, such as HR professionals in specific regions.

LinkedIn can help you find quality leads, but it can also become a platform to share interesting content with your prospects. Link back to your blog posts, answer questions, and participate in discussions about your industry. If you are able to develop a relationship with your prospects and create engagement, they will naturally become leads.

Getting Referrals From Current Groups

Referral marketing is based on word-of-mouth. As we shared in last week?s post, people seek validation from a trusted crowd and use their opinions to make an informed decision. For example, HR administrators searching for insurance brokers will consider peers? opinions and what they have said about them.

As a technique to generate leads for insurance agencies, ping your current groups with a phone call or an email to thank them for their business, make sure they are happy, and convey how valuable your relationship with them is to you. At the end of the conversation, ask if they have any contacts they can think of that would be interested in your services, and you can even suggest connecting you with a quick introduction email. If any of your groups help you generate more business, compensate them with a handwritten note and a small item like a gift card. Referrals are a great technique to generate leads because they are serving up your target audience.

Start a Monthly Email Newsletter as Part of Your Insurance Lead Generation Ideas Initiative

A monthly newsletter consists of sending a recurring email to prospects that subscribed by filling an opt-in form. The key element to creating a successful newsletter is content. When thinking about insurance lead generation ideas, your monthly newsletter needs to be informative and relevant. Newsletters give you the ability to establish an ongoing relationship with your prospects. Instead of pushing your services, share content that will resonate with them.

For example, if your subscribers are mostly HR professionals working in companies under 100 employees, understand their problems and try to solve them. You can compile a newsletter with your latest blog post, add a section with tips to help them stay ACA compliant or navigate open enrollment during Q4, list interesting facts about the health industry or share new reviews about your agency.

In order to nurture prospects through the marketing funnel, stay consistent. A monthly email newsletter will get in front of your prospects in their inbox reliably. Create a strategy, pick a frequency, and stick to it. Each newsletter needs to fulfill a specific goal and include a clear and strong call to action to guide the users to the next stage in the marketing funnel.

Offer Value To Your Audience

In the Broker Tool Belt blog, we have talked about the importance of sharing quality and unique content with your audience. Approaching your prospects with the sole intention of making them spend money is not the best strategy to build a strong business relationship. As you know, one of the most popular methods of content marketing is blogging. To make sure you are creating valuable posts for your prospects, research your clients’ most frequently asked questions and start by answering them in different blog posts. If you write about what you are an expert in, you can become a thought leader in the health insurance industry at the same time as educating your audience.

In addition to writing your own blog, collaborate with another source of related content by becoming a guest blogger. Email the blog’s owner or author and ask about the possibility of writing as a guest. Some blogs have posted guidelines so you can submit your proposal without having to contact them personally. When focusing on insurance lead generation ideas, don’t forget to include a couple of links to your own website in the guest blog post to drive traffic back to your agency.

Optimize Your Website

Everything on your website needs to lead up to a Call To Action (CTA) button. As part of insurance lead generation ideas, carefully select the images you use, the headlines, and the copy. Think about every page as preparation for your prospects to convert: what do you have to do for them to click that final button?

Revise your website, focus on your homepage and key pages, such as your services page, and use heat maps to understand user behavior better. What elements on each page draw your visitors? attention? What are the elements they ignore? Every little detail is important and requires attention to be as efficient as possible. For example, if you want to include a CTA promoting a prospect to request a quote, make sure that page focuses on the advantages of your services in the most compelling way for them to want to know more.

Final Thoughts About Insurance Lead Generation Ideas

These are five insurance lead generation ideas we recommend integrating into your marketing programs. Creating a lead generation strategy will help you avoid wasting time on unqualified leads and increase the effectiveness of your sales efforts. Thus, drive high-quality B2B leads to your insurance agency by marketing each lead appropriately at the different stages of the marketing funnel. Embracing this perspective, you will build a strong relationship with your prospects that, as a result, will drive more conversions down the funnel.