Sales lead generation tools for insurance industry

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digital marketing for insurance agents sometimes can be confusing and so what i want to do is really break down a top to bottom explanation of what i see as the most important things to think about when you get into the digital marketing world as an insurance agent now the first thing i want to do is explain really quickly i'm lana mccarter i'm the owner of the largest digital marketing agency in the country specialized in the insurance industry cody askins and i our business partners cody runs a the largest independent insurance conference in the country with over a thousand insurance agents coming to dallas um just to come learn and hear for three days so if anybody knows you know how to kind of speak to this point it is us now another thing that helps us understand just to be able to unpack this for you is we spend 1.5 million dollars a month on facebook instagram youtube and google exclusively in the insurance industry so one of the things that i've learned from top to bottom is really just a quick summary of how i can explain this digital marketing game and the insurance business the first thing i want to explain is the most important part you got to understand is there's two types of advertising that everyone's doing from a digital marketing perspective there's the long term okay now long term what i mean by that is is people work with people to educate them we have got to educate users to understand that they we are the ones as the insurance agent that's educating them give them the opportunity to learn from us first because if we're the one that's educating we're the one that's able to actually earn that business because if it's confusing out there so specifically on like life insurance or medicare or whatever other under 65 health insurance with all these changes going on the market is moving to google and they're getting educated online i can assure you on youtube and using google to to read and understand what's going on before they actually set an appointment with an insurance agent so if you're the one that's able to educate that particular audience you're they're going to get the first whack at getting that business now the next thing you want to do is understand you've got the paid tools right which is really just leads now one of the things that i see individuals doing the most that i think is the biggest mistake is they've got all of their budget focused on short-term lead flow in direct mail or facebook leads or whatever other type of lead that they're getting and they're not really doing anything to educate their particular audience they're only leaning on paid leads whether that's live transfers or whatever that ends up being so what i want to do is help you understand kind of how all this connects so you understand really why we're trying to go after the audience that we're going and what the actual tactics and strategies sort of lean into so the first thing i want to talk about is you got it whenever you're educating you've got to make sure that your website is your foundation okay that website is your foundation of your content marketing content marketing is a new term that allows you to understand where this is home base for all my educational assets so once you have your youtube channel and your social media um going and you also have your content that you're creating that all needs to live on your your website because what will happen is organically you'll get a lot of traffic of people that are using the uh whether it's social youtube or google to get educated and you want them to be educated on your website it's very simple right so i want to do is explain the difference between foundational content all right so foundational foundational content versus supplemental content okay now supplemental content what this means is is on your main navigation tab you're going to have your home page you're going to have your medicare i'm going to make this very simple right medicare and you've got your life and you've got your contact and then you got your blog i'm gonna grossly simplify this okay now let's just enter the medicare tab we've got a d um then i don't know let's just kind of think about those three plans that you specialize in okay so what happens is you've got to have an individual page of content that's relevant to this particular uh topic independently from like your overall content that is sort of covering medicare at large what i mean by that is is google wants they don't care about whose website that they show on their search engine they only care that their users get answers to their questions so if you're able to create a specific piece of content that's relevant to one specific keyword search let's just say medicare part d or whatever right if you're able to create the content that's unique and niched to that and then educate on that particular keyword you have the first chance at winning that business now if that's not enough to just have one page that talks about medicare part d you also have to be educating um on content with relative to that keyword and that's what we call supplemental content so what happens is is you got your blog you know number one number two number three number four number five so let's just say in this example you've got five blog posts that are all built out specific to medicare part d so what you're doing is is you're taking this particular blog post and you're creating authority based on that particular keyword and you're hyperlinking that back to the foundational page that it's relevant to now this blog post may or may not get read by users but what happens is google takes the authority and they say wow this website has one two three four five pieces of supplemental content all relevant all relevant to medicare part d and these five are pointing to medicare part d foundational page this must be the most authoritative page so whenever that user comes to google and does the keyword search you have created five pieces of content relevant to that one particular keyword and you're able to educate on that topic now how you want to lay out your foundational page is very simple okay in my opinion you got to have different pieces of this element right the first thing you want to do is have your foundational page have a video in the top left that's educating on what this particular keyword and topic is you need to be educating on medicare part d we may have entered into the digital age where 55 of all ad spend is digital now that doesn't mean that people don't want to connect with individuals and humans still right so if you're on camera educating that's a positive thing then you want to have like a summary about what the video is about then you want to have a conversion point right that conversion point is means you want to get your lead right then you want to have content right down here right that content is educating with words and then you want to have another call to action conversion point all right now the this needs to be about 400 words if you can all right then you want to essentially create a video call to action text about what you're about call to action under now the pop quiz which of these conversion points do you think it's more action if you said the first one you were right because people typically find what they want from the video of your overview enough to reach out all we're really trying to do is educate the individual enough to get them to reach out call us schedules go to our contact page etc if that makes sense right now this all takes time this takes time to develop you have to have a strategic approach of what your foundational content is built out and laid out as you need to make sure that each of your individual topics that you want to become the thought leader on is separate from your overall sort of you don't want to have one page on your website that says insurance services and then lists out all your services or whatever you want to have individual pages that communicate and educate on one particular group in that you also maybe these words also maybe there's like a chart or something whatever you can do to add to the user experience to try and get to educate them as best as possible right so this that really kind of covers like the long-term strategy so what i've mentioned is is you know creating youtube videos along with you know website content along with um you know taking those youtube videos and then creating sort of smaller bite-sized pieces and using social media to sort of push that out into the market to try and drive people back to your to your website if that sort of it makes sense at all now on the flip side you've got your short-term solution which is paying for for leads specifically with paid tools so what we're trying to do with the long-term solution is we're trying to create this opportunity where organically we're found we're educating we're building an asset we're building we're creating something that communicates the brand of we want to educate you as your provider of insurance in this particular area whatever that is that will generate leads but it takes time a lot of time to really build that out so you're creating an asset that's driving organic traffic to then hopefully get leads but it's also helping you close leads that you're getting because you're exuding confidence in the market saying look look at all the work that i've done all the videos i've shot all the content that we've written to make sure that you're educated who would you rather do business with someone that's created an entire website that's built to educate you as the prospect or someone that has a landing page on that says i sell insurance talk to me because i'm the expert well you know this symbolizes i'm all in i'm really involved in educating you the other is just checking the box to kind of get things done we are moving into a digital age or that digital footprint absolutely matters 100 right so when it comes to paid what you got to understand is there's there's several different ways that people are using um with paid in the insurance industry um right now a lot of it's direct mail right there's a lot of social like facebook leads right then there's a lot of google then there's a lot of like telemarketing leads so tele-leads really and then there's also seminars as well now this this these five things are really like what most people are spending their money on when it comes to short-term lead flow what i mean by short-term lead flow is is i'm paying today for leads today to close today right so let me illustrate an actual example of what i want to kind of really bring this thing full circle so here is an example of how this stuff works so here's january right here's december this is the year all right now this is number of website visits now we don't necessarily care about how many website visits we get we care about leads that we're getting and we're using let's just say social let's just say facebook and google we're creating those landing pages on our website to drive social traffic into our landing page of our website to then convert we're doing the same thing with google as an example on the digital side so what i'm focusing on right now is these two things an actual digital component if that makes sense so what will happen is your website will have a certain conversion rate what that means is what percentage of the traffic is turning into a lead a good conversion rate is you know three four five percent of all traffic and excellent conversion rate is more than that i'm okay with the one two percent conversion rate depending on how much traffic that we're getting overall i'm not convinced that a one two percent conversion rate on paid traffic is all you want what i'm saying is is we're looking at our entire website traffic all in one sort of category if you will right so what happens is is this long-term strategy of building out and educating content and doing youtube you're investing money now and you're over time sort of increasing the overall line okay of your overall traffic so you may be getting let's just say we got 100 users and 10 000 users right so over time you're basically creating this sort of asset that's ongoing you know you may every month you wrote a blog post relevant to medicare part d that really struck a chord in your particular area maybe you're getting three four extra visits a month because of that one particular blog post that you're getting but it's adding the overall authority to that medicare part d page and over time you're sort of increasing the overall traffic of your overall website and if we have let's just say a set conversion rate you're getting leads from that because you're getting website traffic you're educating they're convinced that you're the person to work with so they didn't convert with you right so then what happens though is if you stop investing in your long term you kind of plan out but you're still going to get traffic based on what you've earned so you're paying money today for long term benefit so of all the money that you invest in this is your best return on investment because you're going to reap that reward in the long term in perpetuity essentially because you're building this asset out on the flip side you've got your paid side right so you get your paid ads now what this means is if you if you said like i had a client the other day that said i need 500 leads a day it's no problem to get you 500 leads a day with google and facebook it's just a matter of budget all that takes is budget we couldn't do that with content marketing but we could do a mix of both so what we're doing is we're creating the content engine that is going to over time build out the asset and then use more paid budget than we will need to later to offset the short term lead goals that we need to get so what will happen is as you start let's just say you need 10 000 website visitors to get the leads that you need right you want to increase your budget you increase your lead flow you decrease your budget decrease your lead flow but the negative side of this is if you cut your budget all together you go to zero with no real long-term benefit it's just a matter of how many clients that you acquire how many referrals are you getting from those actual clients if you will right so you cannot put all of your budget into paid you also have to invest into long-term marketing which is also termed like seo slash content marketing right search engine optimization is kind of evolving into a new thing which is just educating content the games that we used to play with link building and all this other stuff with the link wheels those are getting sniffed out by google's algorithm and it mostly becomes down to customer experience and how well are you educating and how well are you converting so what this explains is a very simple process of how you should look at your marketing budget so in general like a good healthy budget that we try to recommend our minimum that we recommend is 1500 a month that's when we can start working with you really but an average healthy budget is typically like starting is anywhere from four a month to about to sixty thousand dollars a year right once you have sixty thousand dollars a year you can establish benchmarks pretty easily and then scale from there so like a sixty grand a year marketing budget as a new agent um is is a healthy budget now if you're like a larger company that's a call center you might be spending that per week right so you know what needs to happen is you look at your particular lead goals you figure out what you're trying to accomplish you know use those paid tools and long-term sort of asset development to then bring value to your prospects to then educate them use the short-term paid tools to then drive leads now and then get your acquisition costs figured out set your benchmark get your return on ad spend number figured out so that you're able to then scale because the best part about this whole thing is once you get going and you do six eight nine 12 months you're gonna understand what's working what isn't working are we doing seminars are we using digital to fill those seminars are we using direct mail to fill those seminars all that stuff is sort of being fleshed out as you go there is no exact science because every market and every business is different some people want to do seminars only some people want to do telesales and never talk to a person individually so what needs to happen is if you're in the insurance marketing game you understand understand that this is how this game is played now one of the things that i want to make sure you're completely distinct on and understand is that insurance marketing is totally different than other other marketing right i used to own a digital marketing agency that had no specialty and all we did was just kind of do a lot of this stuff at base level and didn't quite understand and deep down in the niche of what was what was a what was really needed to take place to understand in a particular industry what was going to work and what wasn't going to work to understand the kpis and all of that so what you got to realize is is that insurance marketing is totally different it's a lead dependent business you've got to make sure that you're you know building a brand and all that stuff is great outside of the insurance industry but inside the insurance industry you've got to be building a brand while you're generating leads and understanding what your cost per acquisition and return on ad spend is i'll give you a quick example i have a large client that places a lot of tv with us and when i talk about the cost per call that we're getting from their tv stations they keep telling me just give it time it takes time to build a brand i need six months i'm like we're spending ten thousand dollars a month and you're telling me to spend sixty thousand dollars before i can determine if your return on investment is going to be valuable or not and they're like yeah that's like normal that's how you do it and i'm like look we had to pull the budget move into something that's a little bit more more tactical and trans you know parent because in the insurance industry everyone needs it so we are able to identify lead opportunities very very easily and set those benchmarks very easily the thing that is constant though in this business is change facebook and google and organic content all this stuff is a moving target you've got to have a constant team around you that can help you understand what the numbers are are and be able to pivot ingly you know there's even live transfers that are going on right now that are running a lot of these call centers as a big part of it as an example most of these big call centers that we work with are typically using some type of live transfer and some type of digital and mixed in between the two that's pretty much what everybody's doing right now on a large scale from a small scale they're using some mix of direct mail paid organic content marketing website and seminars that's it so when it comes to insurance digital marketing insurance marketing we want to be the foremost educators this just understand you know you watch this video on our youtube channel build to educate insurance agents this video will be on our website build to educate and have all the case studies on our website so go over to securitymarketing.com if you want to see what i mean by foundational content and supplemental content we are connoisseurs of what we preach because of all of this that we do for ourselves we're actively searching to get a thousand leads a week into my sales team into my call center to then qualify build relationship and then scale from there so not only do we am i teaching you this stuff we do it i'm all in i spend thousands of dollars a week on this stuff i have multiple staff members that their entire job is to only do this if you work with an agency like secure agent marketing we're able to then take our tools because your client relationship and contract might be touched by 15 different people on my team there's no way in heck you can hire those 15 people and know what the heck direction north is without partying with an agency like us so i hope that this was beneficial for you to understand how insurance digital marketing is working in 2021 the game is changing it's going to change again but this is the state of union and i appreciate your guys's attention [Music] i don't know [Music] you