According to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, there are almost 6,000 insurance companies in the United States. Although not every company competes with one another, the competition is still fierce.
Auto insurance leads are key to finding new customers and maintaining relationships with them. Before you get started with lead generation, there are some things you’ll want to know.
Keep reading to learn about auto insurance leads and how to get them.
1. You Have to Know Your Audience
One of the most important things to know about auto insurance leads is that you need to know your target audience to get them.
Individuals that are most likely to call about insurance are those that have shown interest in your services. By knowing your audience, you can retarget consumers that have previously been to your website, mobile app, etc.
When you know your audience and use retargeting methods, you can gain better leads.
Once you drive in calls by your target audience, expand your reach to target new audiences that resemble your ideal customers. Facebook calls these people lookalike audiences.
For example, target local users first and then use interests and behaviors to create targeted ads and get more leads.
2. Gain Leads Through the Latest Events
An auto insurance lead might be found anywhere, but you can commonly find the right audience at certain events. Automobile events where people attend to buy cars are great prospects for insurance agents.
Participating in local auto shows is a sure way to capture leads into your system. You’ll find that these shows fall into different categories like luxury, vintage, commercial, motorbikes, and more!
You’ll be able to find all types of vehicle owners through these shows.
If there are driving schools in your area, this is also a good place to scope out the prospects. Try giving your business card to the driving school so that potential customers can locate you through the school.
3. Sales Leads Connect You to Real People
In the auto insurance industry, connecting with real people can help you sell your goods and services. This doesn’t guarantee a sale, but leads can save money and time.
You’ll want leads that are up to date with phone numbers, postal addresses, and email addresses.
Keep in mind that leads don’t equate to prospects. Insurance salespeople commonly believe this misconception. A prospect refers to people that give you the information you need to reach out to someone.
A lead is a person or business that you have identified as a potential customer.
Be on the lookout for quality leads rather than basic leads. A quality lead is one that you know for a fact is interested in your insurance product. These are people that have invested in the idea that you have something valuable to offer them.
4. Leads Grow Your Following
Auto insurance lead generation can help you grow your following as an insurance agent. You can use strategies like content creation and communication to build your leads and boost your following.
When you become a thought leader in your industry, you gain more leads in the future. Growing your following means more customer reviews which can lead to, you guessed it, more leads!
Lead generation helps you with finding prospects but it also presents new business opportunities. By teaming up with a non-competitive brand in your industry, you gain access to their audience.
5. Inbound vs. Outbound Leads
To fully understand leads, you need to know the difference between inbound and outbound leads.
You can achieve inbound leads through blog content that asks your readers to opt-in to your email list. This way your leads aren’t bombarded by emails that they don’t want. You’ll gain access to those that are truly interested.
Outbound leads are an old-school way of doing things but they are tried and true. Outbound marketing tactics involve the following:
- Pamphlets
- Catalogs
- Ad jingles
- Radio ads
- Print ads
The cold call is also an outbound tactic that can give you leads. Aiming to get both inbound and outbound leads will provide an insurance agent with the widest pool of possible customers.
6. Lead Generation Strategies Work
You’ll run into a lot of hurdles if you go without a lead generation strategy. If you don’t have the time to find leads that can help you sell insurance, consider a Pay Per Lead Program that finds quality leads for you.
The three best lead generation methods are content marketing, search engines, and social media. You can use these methods to create a strategy that works for your target audience.
For instance, you can create blog posts and update your website to help with content marketing leads. If you want to rank higher on search engines, content marketing is also helpful.
You can use social media to broadcast your insurance products to your niche audience in hopes of building communication and gaining quality leads.
Lead generation strategies work but it’s normal for trial and error to occur. Track your strategies to ensure you are gaining the leads you want.
7. Leads Value Information
Auto insurance leads refer to those who are interested in your products, but you can help pique their interest by providing them with valuable information.
When you create a website and post accurate content, you are proving to your leads that you are knowledgeable in your industry. With this, you can turn regular leads into high-quality leads.
Those looking for information about auto insurance are the ones who need it most. You can drive your audience to your relevant content so that they are more likely to buy from you.
Your website should be optimized to find auto insurance leads. Informational content will turn prospects into leads.
It’s important not to be too salesy or pushy when you are trying to convert leads into customers. For this reason, focus your content on relevant information that your target audience is actively searching for and be entertaining.
Optimized content can boost your search engine ranking so leads are more likely to find your website and go through your sales funnel.
8. Leads Cost Money
Generating quality leads is going to cost you. As an insurance agent, you need to spend money to make money.
Cost per lead (CPL) is the most common metric used for evaluating a marketing campaign. You can calculate CPL by taking the total cost spent on digital marketing and dividing it by the number of leads you gained from the campaign.
The average cost per lead depends on the following factors:
- Industry
- Lead generation channel
- Company size
- Company revenue
There are other costs associated with the lead generation process that you might need to add to your calculation. Those costs include:
- Media placement and distribution
- List purchase
- Agency and labor
- Campaign creation
- Incentive
If you work as a lone insurance agent, it’s more beneficial to hire an agency that finds leads for you. This makes the pricing structure more straightforward and guarantees leads. RPM Leader can help with this.
9. Hit Your Revenue Goal
Auto insurance leads can help you hit your revenue goals, but first, you need to understand how many leads you need to reach those goals.
To analyze this, you’ll need access to data elements about your sales. Consider the following components:
- Targeted revenue – The amount of revenue you want to reach by the end of a period
- Marketing-drive revenue – Total income acquired from marketing tools
- Average Sales Price (ASP) – Calculate this by dividing net sales by the number of units sold
- Marketing-driven deals – Calculate this by dividing marketing-driven revenue by the average sales price
- Opportunity-to-sale ratio – How close you are to turning a lead into a customer out of all leads
- Qualified lead-to-opportunity ratio – How many leads it takes to turn one lead into a paying customer
With all of these calculations, you’ll be able to determine how many leads you need to reach your goals in that period. This will help you understand how much you can expect to spend on lead generation and marketing efforts.
You can find online sales lead calculators that help you determine the engagement you need to convert qualified leads into new customers and boost your sales.
10. Lead Generation Is Hard
Let’s not sugarcoat this, lead generation is hard. It takes a lot of effort to find possible leads and they don’t always turn into paying customers.
Inbound marketing is a common tactic to generate leads because people assume the process is “easy”. Inbound marketing is also hard and can be expensive.
If you want to build sales, you have to understand that it’s going to take time, especially if you are an individual agent or have a small insurance company.
It’s easy to do lead generation wrong and waste money. Small companies and individual agents are better off outsourcing some or all of their lead generation tactics.
Companies without sales and marketing departments benefit the most from outsourcing. You can’t avoid lead generation if you expect to grow and make money.
The expenses for lead generation will be painful at times, but in the long run, you’ll receive a huge return on investment.
11. Lead Generation Can Go Wrong
There is a right and a wrong way to gain leads as an insurance agent. There’s no worse feeling than spending money and time on lead generation just for it not to work.
If you aren’t creating new leads, you need to make some changes. Some of the most common causes of slow or little to no lead generation are:
- Unreasonable expectations
- Your prospects don’t know who you are
- Your content isn’t resonating with readers
- Your content isn’t about the customer
Building a lead generation process takes time so it’s important not to have unreasonable expectations if you are doing this yourself. Take the costs of auto insurance leads into consideration to create achievable goals.
Because there are a lot of insurance scammers out there, it’s easy for new customers to write off a company they don’t know about. You might not be gaining leads because you aren’t letting enough people know about your brand.
Your content should resonate with the target personas you create. Great content means nothing if it isn’t helpful to the consumer. Find out what they are searching for and base your content on that.
Manual lead generation is a huge waste of time. If you attempt to research leads, you’ll spend most of your time finding possible customers rather than selling auto insurance.
Outsourcing is the best way to have access to lead generation software that is affordable. Plus, you don’t waste time finding leads yourself because they are given to you.
12. There Is No “Perfect” Lead
In a perfect world, every lead would turn into a customer and keep coming back to purchase your insurance products. There is no perfect world when it comes to lead generation.
There are a lot of promising leads out there but there is no way to know if a lead is going to guarantee you a sale.
Some leads won’t want to talk to you about your insurance services or not have the budget to meet your prices. Other leads might already have insurance that they prefer for their vehicles and aren’t looking to switch.
You won’t find perfect leads, but if you look for as many leads as you can, you better your chances of finding the right ones.
Auto Insurance Leads: The More You Know
If you are an insurance provider, you should know the importance of quality leads. However, simply knowing about auto insurance leads isn’t enough to go out and get them.
If you use a lead generation strategy, you are likely to spend a lot of time and money before seeing results.
Small insurance companies and agents should outsource their lead generation tasks to increase sales and save time.
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