As with any commission-based business, there’s always the “feast or famine” cycle. You know, the part where business is booming one minute and is dead the next.
If you’re an insurance agent, you know how scary the famine cycle can be, especially if you’re new to the industry.
Luckily, Cole Information is here to help you find the best ways to generate leads for your insurance agency and earn a higher commission.
In this guide, we’re discussing the leading causes for a failing insurance business, and the best tactics to convert more clients so you always stay in the “feast” part of the cycle.
Understanding Insurance Lead Gen Challenges
Insurance can be incredibly difficult to sell whether your company offers auto insurance, home insurance, or life insurance.
Other than the fact that insurance is a numbers game, there are a few common challenges insurance agents face that increase the hardship in securing leads or customers.
Once you know the common challenges, you’ll be able to better plan marketing strategies to generate more leads.
Here are the top three challenges insurance agents face.
Not Knowing Your Products
Let’s state the obvious: there are a lot of insurance products available. Like, a lot.
Apart from the type of insurance your company falls under (auto, home, life, boat, etc.), there are more products such as policies.
Policies get tricky to understand since your goal as an insurance agent is to suggest the best policy for each client.
The first step in being a successful insurance agent is deeply understanding the products your company offers starting from the type of insurance you provide down to the policies.
Why?
We can think of a few reasons…
- Confidence: You appear like a confident agent that earns the trust of clients when you know what you’re selling.
- Professionalism: Insurance agents that don’t know what they’re selling aren’t good agents. This lends into confidence – especially in the clients’ eyes – when you’re able to answer their questions from a thorough understanding of your business and products.
- Marketing: Now that you know what products your company offers, you can market directly to the ideal buyer.
Convincing Your Target Market
Like we’ve already mentioned, insurance is hard to sell for a few reasons:
- There are a lot of products and options on the market.
- Rates of people purchasing insurance are dropping.
The second point is excruciatingly true as the generations of Millennials and Gen Z grow up. Since Millennials view insurance as an extra expense and not a real necessity, they aren’t converting into leads or sales.
Even if your target audience isn’t younger generations, not convincing your ideal customer to purchase your product is another big challenge.
The best way to understand your target market is to ask the following questions when brainstorming your ideal customer:
- What age range does your product benefit?
- How does your product benefit this age group?
- What does your product/policies offer to your customers?
Once you’ve determined your ideal client – emphasis on the age and how it benefits their lives – you can do a deeper dive to figure out how to best grab their attention, which we’ll touch on in the next section.
At the end of the day, it’s important to remember that your product does not serve everyone. Once you realize that and have a better understanding of the specific person your insurance services do serve, you become one step closer to generating an abundance of leads.
Marketing Towards the Times
Part of successful marketing for insurance agents is speaking on the right platforms (the platforms your target audience uses the most) and understanding the times.
For instance, we’ve already discovered that Millennials are less likely to purchase insurance than the older generation, which means you have to figure out why.
Is it because of inflation? A lifestyle habit? Are Millennials’ focus elsewhere?
Once you figure out the reason, you’re able to market to the pain point and convince your buyer to buy a product.
The Best Way to Generate Insurance Leads
Now that we’ve identified the common insurance challenges, it’s time to expand on the best lead generation techniques.
As long as you beat the challenges above by knowing your products, ideal buyer, and their paint point, you’re able to create converting campaigns that generate multiple leads with the help of multiple tactics.
1. Be Present Online
First and foremost, if you’re not online by now, then you’re missing out on a goldmine for leads.
Face-to-face marketing is still effective, but nowadays, more of your ideal customers are online and a benefit for you is that it costs less to market yourself digitally.
SEO blogs and social media posts are the best way to build an online presence and connect with your audience to educate them about your services.
Create an online presence for your business by setting up a business website and social media accounts with more connections and leads.
2. Get Crafty On Social Media
Speaking of social media, it’s not enough to just be present. In order to utilize social media to generate leads for your insurance agency, you need to get crafty with content.
By “crafty,” we mean being memorable and one of the best ways to do that is through humor.
Take a few minutes to browse through any social media platform and you’ll find a myriad of humorous advertisements whether it’s TikToks, reels, or photos.
That’s because humorous content makes brands appear more relatable and causes them to stand out versus others.
But, one major component to social media marketing (or any marketing, for that matter) is experimentation.
As you begin to post humor or educational content on your platforms, keep an eye on analytics to see what posts get the most engagement and response from your audience so you post more effective content.
3. Optimize Content for Search Engines
Insurance is a hefty industry for clients to understand but setting up a blog page on your website can be incredibly beneficial for your business.
One of the challenges insurance agents face for securing leads is buyers not seeing the products as something of value, which may come from a lack of knowledge of how policies work.
Blogs are perfect for educating your ideal customers on your products and services, but the only way for your target buyer to see them is if they’re optimized for search engines.
Perform in-depth research of content ideas (specific keywords) your audience is searching for on search engines and then write a high-quality blog post including these keywords.
But, don’t just write blog posts just to have content on your site.
The key for writing converting blog posts is to write exceptional content that comes from fully answering your audience’s most-searched questions and educating them.
Once the posts are published, advertise them on your social media channels to increase visibility and attract more customers.
4. Create an Easy-to-Use Contact Form
And once your customers make it to your site to read the blogs, make sure you have an easy-to-use contact form ready on site.
Contact forms are great for multiple purposes:
- It moves interested customers to the next step (a consultation or meeting).
- You land contact information (names, email addresses, and phone numbers).
Though most customers who fill out these forms are ready to speak to an insurance agent next, not everyone is ready to buy.
By getting contact information, you can keep leads in the loop either via email marketing, mailing flyers, or sending SMS texts.
Regardless of the information you get from someone signing up, contact forms should be easy to use since this is for leads who are serious about inquiring for more information.
Make sure the contact form is bold, visible, and not extensive.
5. Use Referrals to Your Advantage
As you start to gain more business, it’s important to ask clients that have a happy ending to leave a review.
Positive reviews show potential clients that your business is legit and you do good work. When people feel as if they can trust you, they’re more convinced to work with you.
Post your reviews on your website, social media, or marketing materials to showcase what previous customers had to say about your services to generate more leads.
6. Build an Email List
Remember when we said back in the contact form section that you should use collected email addresses for marketing? Well, as every insurance agency knows, you can’t conduct business without an email list.
An email list is crucial for your email marketing strategy since it sends your content to the right hands and luckily, there are several ways to gather email addresses.
Here are a few ideas:
- Lead Magnets: eBooks, freebies, newsletters, whitepapers, guides… all are lead magnets perfect to offer prospects in exchange for their email address.
- Contact Form: Use the contact form on your website to ask for the lead’s name and email to use for marketing purposes.
- In-Person Events: When you host in-person events, have a sheet ready for leads to write down their best contact email address.
Whether you’re updating clients on new products you’re offering, changes in policies, or advertising a new blog, an email list is valuable to have as an insurance agent to stay connected with leads.
You can even automate your emails with the help of a CRM tool that schedules your mail and tracks open-rate analytics.
Just don’t get spammy with your emails but overdoing it. The best rule of thumb to follow is to only send two to four emails per week after coming up with a converting email marketing strategy.
7. Locate Prime Leads
They say you should always shop around every few years for lower insurance policies and as an insurance agent, the best leads to contact are those with current policies approaching expiration dates.
Implementing technology like Cole Information’s X-Date platform helps bring clients to you that fit your criteria.
Instead of putting lots of effort (and money) into strategies and hoping they work, you’re able to jump several steps ahead by having leads brought to you.
Customize your search to find leads in your area with policies set to expire so you can approach them at the right time and secure more customers.
8. Host Informational Events
Even though we said digital marketing is the goldmine for insurance agents in today’s time, there’s still value to in-person events for leads in your local area.
Teaming up with real estate agents nearby to host informational events within the community is a great way to meet prospective customers and introduce yourself face-to-face.
This also gives you a chance to educate buyers in-person about your services, products, and policies while also passing out business cards with contact information.
