Try These 18 Ways To Generate Insurance Leads

Generating insurance leads should be an ongoing process that involves your entire agency team, to one degree or another. To achieve your sales goals, it’s important to keep the sales funnel loaded with leads at varying stages of “ripeness” at any given time. There is no single best way to generate insurance leads – rather, you should employ a variety of strategies and track results to see what pulls the best for you.

All leads are cold until you begin warming them up to foster engagement. Collect all leads, even if information is incomplete, and enter them in your contact management system. Be sure to include the source so that over the long term, you can identify your best sources. At first, you may just have a name, an email, and a company name, but as you engage, keep updating the profile with every new bit of information you accumulate. You may be able to learn quite a bit from which pages of your website a lead clicked on, which topics they downloaded information for, and which webinars or trade shows they attended. That’s all part of lead nurturing, or “ the process of developing and reinforcing relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales funnel” until the lead is ready to buy. But the first step in this process is identifying and generating leads.

Here are 18 ways to generate insurance leads that you might not have tried:

1. Use lead magnets. Offer something of value in exchange for collecting email or other contact information that will allow you to continue engagement. Lead magnets could be whitepapers, e-books, webinars, an analysis of current coverage, a safety walk-through, or a subscription to a blog or newsletter.
2. Engage on LinkedIn. If you are looking for commercial leads, LinkedIn is a key social media channel. Publish your content on LinkedIn and use geographic and industry filters to advertise. Research relevant groups for industries you specialize in. Join these groups, interact, and look for opportunities to answer member insurance-related questions.
3. Speak at industry events and local business groups. Identify your insurance agency’s expert presenters and develop a series of topics on hot issues. Promote these topics and speaking availability on your website. Issue your topics/presenters annually via press release and send it to event planners. At speaking engagements, collect business cards for all attendees in exchange for a summary of your presentation or tips related to the topic. For example, NIP Group has a booth yearly at TCIA’s conference for Tree Care which is one of our core industries.
4. Add contact forms with a call to action to every page on your website. Similarly, add call-to-action-buttons on all your agency social media profiles that lead to a form on your website.
5. Promote your social media channels prominently on your website. Make it easy for current clients and prospects to find and engage with you in various formats.
6. Meet your agency’s neighbors. Who are the surrounding businesses on your street, on your block, or in your business park? Drop in to introduce yourself to the principals of each business, let them know your business expertise, and find out theirs. Explore opportunities for cross promotions and sharing leads. Be sure to let them know you’d love to take care of their insurance needs!
7. Conduct internal telemarketing campaigns and contests. Using scripts, have everyone devote a few hours of time to cold-calling or lead follow-up every week. Hold agency insurance lead generation brainstorming sessions and contests. Award prizes for the most leads per month/per year.
8. Establish cross-referral and lead exchange programs. Work with business vendors and others related to your target businesses and industries to develop lead exchange programs. Examples might include commercial realtors, financial advisors, and commercial fleet salespeople. For example, NIP Group distributes leads to its active broker partners.
9. Develop industry or product niches. Target associations, publications, and trade events geared to those industries. See our tip #3 above, but tailor the topics to the niche industry you serve.

10. Attend tradeshows. If you service a niche business, this is necessary, but even general business trade shows can be helpful in developing leads. If you host a booth, advertise, or sponsor a trade show, you can often get access to a list of attendees with contact information. Even if you don’t have a booth, you can attend, talk to those who are displaying, and collect business cards.
11. Build relationships with friendly agencies, both in-state and out-of-state to make them aware of your niche and your willingness to work with them to service any business in those niches. Look for ways to collaborate. Plus, agents in other states may have leads but no licenses in your state.
12. Invest in search engine optimization (SEO). Optimize your site to be found in the search engine results for the type of clients you serve and the keywords you want to appear under. Prospective clients who don’t yet know you need to be able to find you! Reach out to NIP Group and our marketing will be happy to review your site and provide suggestions.
13. Build your own lead lists. You can buy lists, but good lists are expensive. Build your own lists from LinkedIn groups and community or industry membership organizations. Lead extractor software can sometimes smooth the process. One word of caution: follow CAN-SPAM laws before adding to an email list.
14. Run pay-per-click (PPC) ads. PPC ads can be cost prohibitive for popular consumer insurance lines such as auto, homeowners, and life. Instead, try PPC ads targeting niche industries or niche coverages. Hire a PPC ad firm to help you test the waters. While not PPC, social media ads can be an affordable way to advertise, offering the ability to target using various filters.

15. Promote case studies and success stories. People like success stories. Feature case studies and testimonials about how you saved money, found coverage for a difficult exposure, or provided over-and-above service, concluding with calls to action. Feature these prominently on your website and deploy on social media.
16. Read and notate business and trade announcements. Business and trade media are filled with potential leads and productive networking connections. Look for executive promotions, product launches, new office buildings/locations, business acquisitions or expansions. These are not only leads, but they also offer a congratulatory entrée to begin a conversation.
17. Mine your book. Your current book of business holds leads. Mine your personal lines clients for commercial leads and mine your commercial businesses for personal lines opportunities.
18. Don’t forget old friends. Former clients are leads. Old leads that bought from another agency are still leads that just haven’t closed with you yet. Keep them all in your contact management system and strategize about reaching out pre-renewal dates.

Check out more of these broker marketing articles:

• Insurance Agency Marketing: Best Practices for the Digital Era
• How to Make Insurance Social Media Work for Commercial Agents
• 17 Foolproof Marketing Ideas for Insurance Agents