How to Get More Leads for Insurance: Free and Low-Cost Ideas

If you want to grow your insurance business, you typically need to be able to find leads for your insurance business on an ongoing basis. These leads can be a mix of organic and paid prospects, but you don’t have to spend a ton of money. 

Instead, you can use several free and low-cost lead generation ideas that help you grow your brand awareness and convince prospects to get in touch with you. In this guide to generating insurance leads, we’ll cover the best ways to drum up interest in your business, such as through:

• Referrals
• Reviews
• Content marketing
• Networking
• Cold pitching
• PR
• Social media ads
• Search ads
• Traditional media ads
• Sponsored events

Implementing these types of lead generation ideas can be relatively straightforward and customized to your own brand and preferences. 

If you want to convert more insurance leads into paying customers, we can help. Click the button below to learn more. 

Best Ways to Find Insurance Leads Organically

Before you go and spend a lot on advertising, consider ways to organically generate insurance leads. If you can drum up interest naturally, that often results in high-quality leads because they’re typically coming to you with an intent to buy, and interest in, or at least awareness of, your insurance agency.

Some of the best ways to find insurance leads organically include doing the following:

Ask for Referrals

For those with strong existing client bases but who are looking to grow, one of the best ways to find leads is to ask for referrals. Ask existing clients, especially those you have strong relationships with, if they know anyone who might need your services. These asks can either be informal or formal, depending on the context and your preferences.

For example, if you’re chatting with a client about another business owner they know, you might casually ask them to refer you. Or, you might decide to send out a more templated referral request, such as in your onboarding materials.

In addition to existing clients, you can also consider asking friends, family, former colleagues, and others in your network for referrals. If you see a friend interacting with someone on LinkedIn who would be a good lead for your insurance business, you might ask that friend to introduce you. 

Ask for Reviews

Similar to asking for referrals, it’s also helpful to ask for reviews to generate insurance leads. As you build up a list of positive reviews on sites like Yelp or Google My Business, new leads may come across those comments and decide to reach out to you. This may not be the fastest lead generation approach, but it can be valuable long-term.

Like with referrals, you can choose a conversational approach to asking for reviews, or you might include a “Leave a Review” link in your email signature, on your home page, etc. You may want to try a mix of approaches to generate more reviews and ultimately more insurance leads.

Generate Inbound Leads With Content Marketing

Reaching out to your network for referrals and reviews isn’t the only way to generate insurance leads. You can also have leads come to you. How? By leveraging content marketing.

Content marketing involves distributing content that adds value to your audience, rather than just selling your services. For example, you might blog about entrepreneurship, which can help business owners run their companies. As they engage with your content, they come to learn about your brand and may get in touch on their own to purchase commercial insurance from you.

Network for Lead Generation

Networking can also be a powerful organic lead generation tool. But you don’t have to be too rigid about it. Networking can happen anywhere. Whether you’re mingling with business professionals at a conference, chatting with the person next to you on a plane, or attending a Meetup event, there can be all sorts of opportunities to find new leads.

Don’t go for the hard sell. Just be friendly and see where the conversation goes. If it feels natural, you might tell them a bit about your insurance business and exchange business cards, or you might continue to build the relationship online by connecting on social media. 

How New Agents Can Generate Insurance Leads

When you’re starting out as a new insurance agent, some of the organic lead generation methods, like asking for referrals, can be limiting. But before looking at ways to find paid insurance leads, consider a few other ways to find new prospects, including the following:

Cold Pitch to Find Leads

Cold pitching may have a bad rap, but when done well, it can be a viable way for new insurance agents (or any agent for that matter) to find leads. The key is to not come off like a robotic telemarketer. If you identify prospects that you would like to sell insurance to, such as by searching by job title on LinkedIn, reach out in a friendly and not overly salesy way.

You can develop a templated approach as a base, but try to then personalize it. For example, instead of cold emailing a prospect with a laundry list of services you provide, try sending a note that has some familiarity to it, such as by talking about a recent blog post they wrote, a social media post they shared, news about their business, etc. 

They’re probably not going to go straight from stranger to customer, so the goal should be to continue the relationship. You might ask if you can send them a blog post of your own that you wrote that you think they would find value in, or if you get the sense they’d be open to it, you could try to set up a brief meeting.

Publicize Yourself to Find Leads

While it’s easier said than done, it’s important to publicize yourself as a new insurance agent to find insurance leads. From making yourself available to media through resources like HARO to writing op-eds for your local paper to showing up at relevant events, there are lots of ways to get your name out there without spending a ton of money.

This approach can take time to pay off, but as you grow brand awareness, your pitches might become warmer if leads start to recognize your name — especially if you’re going for a local client base. If you’re trying to go broader, it can be tough to build enough brand awareness, but you can still gain benefits that result in more leads. For instance, participating in media articles can lead to you getting backlinks to your website, which improves SEO. That ultimately can help prospects find you organically.

Generating Paid Insurance Leads

While there are lots of ways to generate insurance leads organically, sometimes putting a little money into lead generation can take you further. Many business professionals find that a combination of organic and paid lead generation works best, so you can experiment with what works best for your specific insurance business. 

How Much Do Insurance Leads Cost?

You don’t have to break the bank to find leads. Insurance agents can spend as much or as little as they want, with much depending on factors like the type of insurance business, location, target customers, etc. If you’re advertising on Facebook, for instance, prices can differ based on the target audience criteria you select. The quality of leads can also make a huge difference. You might be able to buy a cheap list of so-called leads, but they might not be good fits for your business.

Instead of looking at what others might be paying, it could be useful to run your own experiment. Try budgeting a few hundred dollars for different paid lead channels, such as Google Ads and Facebook Ads. Then divide what you spent by the number of leads you generated from these campaigns to get a general sense of how much insurance leads cost for you.

Once you know that number, you can determine if continuing to generate paid leads is worth it for you compared to investing resources into organic methods, like content creation and attending networking events. Or you might combine these, such as by putting budget behind advertising your content marketing.

Is Buying Insurance Leads a Good Idea?

In general, buying insurance leads isn’t a great approach to finding new customers. As mentioned, even if buying leads might seem low-cost at first, those might not be quality leads, so you waste time and money going after them. Plus, buying leads can get you tangled up in all sorts of privacy, compliance, and general customer experience issues that you may want to avoid, especially as data privacy laws become more restrictive.

And if someone doesn’t provide their information to you willingly, then they may not be very receptive to your messaging. At least with cold pitching you’ve done the effort to vet them, find their publicly available information, and personalize your message. But sending out email blasts to paid lists, for example, could seem like spam.

Best Ways to Find Paid Insurance Leads

While buying insurance leads generally isn’t a good idea, there are other, more effective ways to put money into lead generation. Try using:

• Social media ads: Consider which platforms your target audience is likely to use and test out some ads there. Multiple networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn could be used to get in front of your intended audience and generate new insurance leads. These social media ads can have different pricing models, with some being based on factors like the number of views and others being more focused on clicks.
  
• Search ads: In addition to trying to boost your organic SEO, you can jump toward the top of search engine result pages by buying ads through platforms like Google Ads. These ads often use a cost-per-click model, where you will be charged as people click through to your website or landing page. 
  
• Traditional media ads: While traditional media ads, like a print ad in a newspaper, may not be as popular in the age of digital advertising, it’s still an option to consider. For example, if you’re focused on generating local insurance leads and your community has a strong publication, you might consider advertising there.
  
• Sponsor events: Another way to get your name out there, particularly locally, is to sponsor events. For example, sponsoring a networking event can be a good way for you to publicize your brand while also being able to interact with potential leads.

Converting Insurance Leads Into Paying Customers

Putting in all this work to generate insurance leads only pays off if you can then convert them into customers. Whether you use organic or paid lead generation methods, it’s important to have a sales and marketing process in place to move leads along the funnel. Once you generate that initial awareness and interest in your brand, you want to be able to convince them to purchase from you

Having a strong website can help, as leads who land on your site want to understand what you do and how you can help them. Implementing tools like Wheelhouse on your site can then allow these leads to easily generate bindable insurance quotes on their own, so you can move closer to closing deals.

Lead generation is key to growth. Click the button below to learn how Wheelhouse can help.