Top 23 Insurance Lead Generation Ideas From the Pros

1. Focus on a Specific Niche

Chris Abrams, Founder, Abrams Insurance Solutions

It’s getting crowded in the online insurance website space, but the best tactic is to niche down. A general insurance website will take longer to rank, but if you have a website focused on a specific niche, it will rank faster in Google. One of my sites is focused on helping marijuana users find the information they need to obtain life insurance. Besides ranking faster, a niche site is also more attractive for other sites in that same niche to link to.

You can also use pay-per-click (PPC) or Facebook Ads focused on that niche. On every page and stst of the site, I have a life insurance “quoter.” The prospect trades me his contact information for an instant life insurance quote. Then I have a lead to follow up with to see if they have additional questions. Often, these leads turn into a life insurance sale.

2. Capture Insurance Leads 24/7 With Live Chat Software

Jeremy Levine, Senior Business Development Specialist, Fit Small Business

If you use a contact form on your website to capture leads, you can up your lead generation game with live chat software. Freshchat lets you directly interact with website visitors 24/7 using artificial intelligence (AI) and targeted content to begin a conversation you can follow up with later. Freshchat can also automatically qualify leads and upload their information, including social profiles, into your favorite customer relationship management (CRM) tool. Best of all, the basic version of Freshchat is free.

3. Sponsor Value-added Insurance Seminars

Jack M. Cordes, Principal Agent, Bridge First Insurance

I know a lot of insurance agents who offer to do “Insurance 101” seminars for real estate agents, but the truth is that it isn’t very sexy when you try to pitch the idea. Instead, I bring in another party who can provide value to their business and position myself as the sponsor of the event. I recently held an event for real estate agents with a gentleman I know who specializes in social media marketing for real estate agents. He showed them some great tips to improve their social media game and I got a few minutes to talk about insurance and offer my services to the real estate agents and their clients.

4. Develop Solution-based Social Media Content

Chris Jarvis, Author, Speaker & Founder, Chris Jarvis

Develop videos, podcasts, and question and answer (Q&A) segments from an industry leader. The topic would be “Interesting New Applications.” We would create these for agencies or insurance companies to push out to their agents and directly to consumers. The videos and content would offer a free special report with additional detail. This would be procured through a website (the insurance company or the agency’s site) and would generate inbound traffic and leads. I did this earlier in my career and over 15,000 physicians actually called my office or emailed me for special reports, books, and audio.

5. Encourage & Reward Referrals

Joy Gendusa, Founder & CEO, PostcardMania

Since referrals generate the easiest new business for agencies, you can use insurance postcards to entice your existing clientele to bring in their family and friends. The trick is to use an irresistible special offer that will reward your clients for referring new business to you, such as a $25 Visa gift card, a $15 Starbucks gift card, or five tickets in a free TV raffle.

6. Engage Insurance Leads With Email Marketing

Steve Yi, Co-founder & CEO, MediaAlpha

The key to a successful email marketing campaign is maintaining carefully organized lists, as every customer will not be a good fit for each email. Once the best audience is determined for each message, companies need to fine-tune the subject line for optimal open rates. Shorter subject lines typically perform best, somewhere around 10 words or less, and make every word count.

Lastly, companies need to be mindful of the number of emails they are sending. Customers do not want to receive multiple emails throughout the day; in addition, this could potentially flag the company domain as spam. Instead, focus on quality over quantity. One well-targeted email per month is going to go a lot further than several irrelevant emails every week.

7. Invite Your Website Visitors to Take Quizzes

Larissa Pickens, Owner & Creative Director, Float Design

Quizzes are a great lead generation tool and can range from purely entertaining to extremely detailed and informational. They are a perfect tool for educating and guiding a potential customer who is faced with a purchasing decision, like insurance, that they feel uncertain about. The interactive component means you can potentially learn a lot about your lead, but don’t get greedy. Take care to balance information gathering with the user experience. Create an engaging experience with gamification and rewards so the user continues to stay engaged and completes the quiz.

8. Create Website Content Specifically for Your Target Insurance Clients

Wes Marsh, Marketing Director, BCA Technologies

In order to succeed in insurance marketing, smaller insurance agencies need to be able to hone in specifically on their target clientele. They must then create a narrative through content marketing that shows how having insurance meets the needs of their target audience. For example, if you’re a company specializing in auto insurance policies, craft content that gives actionable advice, like what to do immediately following a car wreck. Create personas based on real stories from your customer base. Use stories and content around those narratives to draw people to you through that human element.

9. Send Targeted Promotional Postcards

Allison Potts, Divisional Managing Editor, Fit Small Business

Direct mail is still one of the best ways to let local customers know about your business. Try using Opportunity Knocks to create a targeted mailing list of potential insurance buyers in your area by factors like location, demographics, and buying habits. Once you create your custom postcard from templates designed with tested postcard marketing best practices, Opportunity Knocks will print and ship them on your behalf. Jumpstart your mailing campaign today.

10. Display Customer Reviews

Gregory Bullock, Marketing Manager, TheraSpecs

Nothing does more for validating your business and the work you do than when happy customers share their experiences with others, either through online review platforms or directly with their network. Turn your earliest adopters and biggest champions into the loudest voices of support by asking for reviews on your site, and then make sure to display their comments and ratings prominently. You should also consider setting up accounts through third-party services like Yelp, Thumbtack, or Angie’s List. These platforms offer expanded visibility and make it easy for your satisfied customers to highlight the wonderful things about your company. You also want to address any negative reviews.

11. Leverage Social Selling

Jackie Miller, Chief Marketing Officer, Bozell

Social selling is an effective way to generate leads for any type of business. Although often overlooked in more regulated industries such as the financial or insurance space, social media can be a powerful tool to showcase a more personalized side of the industry. People trust people, so allowing them to come to the forefront of lead generation will enable more referrals and position you and your team as thought leaders. Managing Facebook Business Pages and LinkedIn accounts for the insurance sales agents at an insurance company can result in them expanding not only to the brand, but also their clientele.

12. Claim Your Google My Business Page

Termeh Mazhari, PR, Marketing & SEO Consultant, TermehMazhari.com

Google My Business is Google’s free directory of local businesses. It’s the listing that you see below the Google map when searching for businesses. To claim your Google My Business page, simply go to Google.com/business and go through the steps to verify your business. After you’ve been verified, you’ll need to complete and optimize your profile with a keyword-rich description, professional photos, select a relevant business category, add your business hours, and so on. Finally, ask your best customers to review your business on Google. A 5-star review average next to your business listing is a great way to stand out from your competitors.

14. Modify Your Offering

Eric Johnson, Digital Content Creator, Feedback Wrench

In some ways, insurance has become something of a commodity. The average person expects roughly the same service from any insurance company—no matter which it is. Because of this, the way to effectively generate leads in the insurance industry is changing. Instead of positioning your company as one that sells products, realign your brand messaging in accordance with the idea that you’re providing a priceless service. Most people would pay well for less of a headache, friendlier agents, and confidence about their decision.

15. Use a CRM to Your Advantage

Kimberlee Leonard, Staff Writer, Fit Small Business

A strong customer relationship management (CRM) tool like Salesforce Essentials will be your best friend to laser target prospects where your pricing is most competitive, making you the cost leader in the area. But because you won’t know your prospects’ renewal date, you need to establish a drip campaign over several months to build brand trust that ideally hits them when they start to shop. Once you quote a prospect, update their profile and move them into a new list of prospects farther in the sales pipeline.

16. Put More Effort Into Blog Posting

Jeremy Schaedler, President, Schaedler Insurance Agency, Inc.

Insurance consumers have many questions about the insurance products they are considering; by creating blog posts that add value by thoroughly answering common insurance-related questions, potential consumers will view you as a credible source and will often contact your agency when they get closer to making a purchasing decision. Successfully marketing in this manner comes down to effectively adding value, because poorly written articles can portray an unprofessional image and can negatively impact business. Ultimately, if you can find ways to help your customers, your agency will be rewarded with many prospective new clients.

17. Advertise Where Your Target Market Lives

Curtis Boyd, Director of Operations, Future Solutions Media

Advertise where your target market is. One good example is for car insurance providers. Ever tried advertising at the DMV? Here, people are registering for driver’s licenses, auto registration, and other auto-related paperwork. Get your auto insurance co-aligned with the DMV and it could spell big things. In order to advertise at the DMV, you will have to register through the MVNetwork, which regulates what kind of companies can advertise and what kind of ads can be run.

Since these advertisements are on TV, most likely with the volume off, your infomercial needs to have bold text, a call to action (usually a telephone number or website to call or visit), a coupon or promo code, be formatted for HDTV, and a clear hook to grab the prospects’ attention.

18. Use Insurance-specific Templates

Chris Barr, Director of Marketing, Taradel, LLC

Insurance agents are using Every Door Direct Mail’s free templates for lead generation—because there’s just too much competition online. When insurance companies take their marketing offline, it’s much easier to go directly to the consumer. It doesn’t matter if you’re a small business, Geico, or Berkshire Hathaway. Direct mail works.

19. Use Paid Search to Bring in Leads to Your Website

Jonathan Holloway, Director of Digital Strategy, No Exam.com

Using paid searches is a great way to bring in targeted leads for your insurance company. It involves creating a landing page with a lead capture form and bidding on relevant search phrases on Google AdWords or Bing Ads. It’s important that you target search phrases that have high commercial intent. Your landing page must provide what the searcher is looking for. For example, if you are bidding on “car insurance quotes Roswell, GA,” then you want your landing page to align with this by allowing the searcher to get a car insurance quote from an agent in Roswell, Georgia.

20. Interview Your Clients

Scott W Johnson, Owner, Whole Vs. Term Life Insurance

This one is certainly not done enough. Ask clients to be interviewed about why they use and like your services. “I love my insurance policy from XYZ because they are easy to get a hold of.” Get their permission to use their photo, logo, or video and promote yourself as working with real people with real faces. Future prospects are more likely to identify with your target market if they see your clients.

21. Develop Relationships With Your Customers’ Influencers

Raymer Malone, Owner, H.I.P. Insurance Agency

Form strategic relationships with your ideal customers’ “centers of influence (COIs).” A COI could be an accountant, financial adviser, or even another insurance agent not offering competing products. Finding these COIs involves networking, explaining how you can help, and ultimately gaining trust.

22. Invest in Insurance Advertisements in Newspapers

Lev Parinksy, CEO, SmartFinancial

While the number of adults who read newspapers is dwindling, advertising rates are not. They still tend to be high, unless you publish your ads in local or smaller niche publications. Otherwise, you’re likely to pay top dollar if you want your ad to appear in, say, The New York Times (NYT). Before you assume that what’s most expensive is most profitable, ask yourself why you’re not seeing very many insurance agents advertising in the big papers. Remember, a full page ad in the NYT costs $150,000.

23. Create an Engaging Website to Attract Insurance Leads

Aaron Kassover, Co-founder, AgentMethods

When people recommend an insurance agent to their friends and family, it mostly happens via email or a social network, followed up by a search for the agent’s name. This means that if your insurance website doesn’t show up at the top of the search engines for “your name” or “your name + insurance,” you are missing out on leads. Ranking for your name isn’t hard. First, make sure you have a well-designed insurance website that is branded to you. Then write an “about me” page with your name in the page title, header, and naturally throughout the page contents.