If you’re hoping to break into the insurance sales business, developing a sustainable lead-generation system is job one. Get important advice here.
One question keeps new insurance agents up at night: “Where will I find leads?” All agents face that question, of course. But “newbies” have an urgent need for answers. If they can’t find enough leads fast enough, their careers may be short-lived.
Designing a lead-generation system can be tricky for rookie agents. It’s not just a matter of copying what experienced agents do. It’s about picking techniques that respond to the unique needs of new producers. For example, since you are new to the business, you won’t have a sizable book of business generating renewal commissions. Everything will hinge on new sales. That means you need to find and close leads fast.
As a new agent with limited skills and knowledge, you’ll also need tactics that are easy to execute. Low-cost methods are important, too, as your low initial income will constrain your marketing budget. Finally, with so much at stake, you want to make sure every hour you spend seeking out leads will be effective. So tactics that amplify your personal efforts—for example, a website that captures leads while you sleep—will be essential.
However, before you begin to generate leads, it’s important to plan your effort. Here are some must-haves to consider.
Must-Have #1: Lay the Groundwork
One of the great truisms of insurance sales is to start with the end in mind. Before you begin generating leads, get clear on what success looks like for you. How much money do you want to make? How many sales of which type of insurance do you need to generate that income? How many prospects must you see to make those sales? Finally, how many people should you approach to snare the required number of interviews? This last number is what your lead-generation system must solve for.
Another planning task is to define your value proposition. This is Marketing 101, but you’d be surprised how many new agents never articulate one. It should not only describe what you hope to do for your clients, but also which specific buyers you want to serve. Many new agents leave their value proposition overly broad—“sell life insurance to anyone I can get in front of”—instead of narrowing it to a specific niche: “sell life insurance to Baby Boomers with chronic health conditions such as heart disease or diabetes.” Here’s why narrowing your focus is so important. When you frame your desired service/customer tightly, it helps you get found easier on search engines. So when a diabetic is having trouble finding life insurance searches on Google, the person’s query might read: “life insurance for diabetics.” If your website content uses the same term, Google will more likely serve up your content to that prospect.
Finally, before you begin seeking prospects, think through exactly how long your lead-generation “runway” should be. Jeff Root, managing partner of DigitalBGA, defines this as the number of prospect names needed and the time frame required to begin generating sales. Unless you create or buy a sufficient number of leads to hit your sales target—and give your marketing system enough time to work its magic—you may find yourself lacking the runway you’ll need to launch your business successfully.
Must-Have #2: Plan Your Lead-Generation System
No one technique will likely generate enough leads for you to become a successful insurance agent. Instead, you’ll need to build a portfolio of different tactics that together produce a continuous lead flow. One useful way to approach this task is to think in terms of three levels of tactics:
- Must-do activities
- Nice-to-do activities
- “If time’s available” activities
Must-do activities are the essential tasks most agents use to build their businesses. As a new agent, you’ll want to select from this list those activities most likely to generate fast results at a reasonable cost.
Nice-to-do activities are actions that produce leads but with a higher investment of time or expense or with a higher risk of failure. You won’t want to devote most of your time to these, but testing out some of them might make sense.
“If time’s available” activities are fringe or experimental tactics that might work but also could fail. As a new agent, you might take a flyer on these when you have time to spare.
Consider devoting 80 percent of your time to must-do activities, 10 percent to nice-to-do tasks and, perhaps, 10 percent to experimental efforts. But the second two slices of your schedule should not come at the expense of your primary slice: your must-do prospecting.
A final word about executing a lead-generation system. It's one thing to design it on paper, but quite another to execute it in the real world. To make it work, your prospecting must be:
- A continuous daily activity
- Documented in a tracking system
- Evaluated periodically
- Revised to improve performance
Note: because so much is at stake, the remainder of this article will focus on two must-do lead generation tactics for new agents: building a website and prospecting on social media. Part two of this series will focus on four additional must-have tactics. Together, the two articles will cover six high-potential techniques most new producers should consider.
Must-Have #3: Create a Robust Website
The core of your lead-generation system is your website. It allows you to build awareness and response from thousands of more people than you could ever approach in person. It also works for you on a 24/7 basis. While you’re home watching TV or sleeping, your website will remain hard at work, engaging with prospects and then funneling their information back to you to follow-up.
Think of your website as a marketing machine that entices people to come to learn about you. If they like what they see, they can fill out a form requesting further information or a personal meeting. Content is the fuel that makes this machine run. Your website should have one or several pieces of cornerstone content—a white paper, PDF booklet, or a long article—that provides answers to your target prospects’ most important questions. For example, to attract diabetics, you might publish a guide on how to qualify for life insurance despite having a chronic health condition.
After you post foundational content, build out your website with other articles, case studies, FAQs and other information that answer your prospects’ questions. Try to build the best online resource for the people you want to serve. If your content is good enough, it will begin to attract visitors, which will push it toward the top of Google’s search rankings. If you appear high on Google’s page one, your website is doing its job.
To make sure Google can see your website, make sure to optimize your content. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a complex discipline that integrates targeted keywords into your content and uses other methods to encourage Google to rank your site highly. As a new agent, think about hiring a local SEO consultant to optimize your site. Even though this will cost money, it will likely be money well spent. It will make your website a much more productive lead generator. You could also teach yourself SEO by watching YouTube videos, reading books or taking a course from Lynda.com or SkillShare.com.
Once your site begins generating traffic from your content, the goal now is to convert that traffic into leads. Old-school approaches include publishing your phone and email for prospects to contact you or a web form they can fill out to request an appointment. There are also apps that allow them to see your schedule online and book an appointment that works for them.
Chatbots are a relatively new innovation in agent websites. These are prospect engagement systems that use artificial intelligence to mimic human interaction. A chatbot can welcome a person in conversational language, ask a few qualifying questions and then collect the personal information you need to make a call back. It also can collect people’s social profiles and upload those, as well as their personal data, into your customer relationship management (CRM) system. A number of insurers, insurance marketing organizations (IMOs) and brokerage general agencies (BGAs) are using such systems today. So depending on which entity you’re affiliated with, it should be easy to implement this technology on your website.
Another new technology is instant quoting. Back in the old days, customers requested premium quotes from their agents or brokers, who then passed them along to brokerage agencies or directly to insurers. The problem is, this took a long time. New agents are now installing instant quoting for one or multiple insurance products on their websites. Similar to chatbots, this technology collects information from prospects to generate a quote in real-time. It then sends you the lead for personal follow-up. The beauty of this approach is that the time lapse between a person expressing interest in buying insurance and speaking with you can be as short as a couple of minutes.
In addition to including chatbot and instant-quoting features, your website should:
- Be mobile-friendly
- Include a click-to-dial button so prospects can speak with you right away
- Be promoted on all your social media profiles
Must-Have #4: Do Social Media Marketing
If you’re a new insurance agent, you have to go where the people are...on platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter. It’s helpful to split your social-media lead-generation into two pieces. The first is organic marketing, which involves your normal participation on the platform: sharing news or thoughts on your feed or page, links to articles posted on your own website or PDF guides to buying insurance. Creating a business page on Facebook and then stocking it with free posts is an example of organic marketing. When you post a link to one of your articles that results in someone clicking through to your website and then requesting an appointment, that’s an organic lead.
Paid social media leads result from your investment in advertising on various social media platforms. Here, you tell the platform about your marketing objective, your audience and the desired specs of your ad. Then, it serves up the ad to the platform members who meet your criteria. For example, advertising on Facebook is as easy as submitting your decisions on the following:
Objective: What you want the ad to achieve traffic to your website, awareness of your firm or content downloads.
Audience: What you know about the people you want to reach—age, location and other details—as well as the behaviors that best represent your audience.
Destination: Where you want your ad to run. Choices are Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Audience Network or all of them. You can also designate your ad to run only on specific mobile devices.
Budget: How much you want to spend, either over your lifetime or the campaign’s duration.
Ad format: Which ad format you prefer. You also can elect to display a single image, multiple images or a video.
Order placement: Once you submit your ad, it goes to Facebook’s auction, which funnels the ad to the right people. Auction mechanics are the most complex part of Facebook marketing, so you’ll need to study them carefully.
Evaluation: Once your ad is running, you can track performance and edit your campaign.
In planning your lead-generation system, it’s important to consider timing. It will likely take many months for you to build and refine your website and for your SEO to bear fruit. Since you still have to eat, you may need to invest in paid social media ads in order to generate leads quickly.
“In the long term, you want more organic leads,” says Jeff Root of DigitalBGA. “These are search engine-generated leads. They take time, content, backlinks and a good, fast website. All of those things will get you to rank on search engines if you’re doing the right things. But it takes six months to get momentum. Organic leads are the best leads because they represent actual people searching online for the insurance they need to buy,” Root explains. “But pay-per-click ads from sources such as Facebook, Google Ad Words and YouTube will generate business in the short term, as will leads purchased from insurance lead vendors.”
In Part 2 of this series, we’ll discuss five other important lead generation techniques for new agents:
- Search engine marketing
- Email marketing
- Content marketing
- Lead purchasing from commercial firms
- Offline, “old school” techniques
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