4 Ways to Generate Leads that Aren't Client Referrals

Learn how to get more leads in your sales process effectively.

For many health and life insurance agencies, growth is the goal. But we often hear that one of the top challenges insurance agencies face is lead generation.

Many agents are already utilizing client referrals—and those are highly effective! While referrals are a powerful lead source, they shouldn’t be the only way your team generates leads.

Here are four other ways individual health, group benefits, and senior insurance agencies can generate leads that aren’t client referrals.

1. Paid Media Advertising

Your sales and marketing teams should work hand-in-hand. Marketing generates and nurtures leads and then passes them on to sales for conversion. Some highly effective forms of digital marketing include:

• Paid online advertising, also known as paid media
• Content marketing 
• Organic social media marketing 
• Email marketing

While all forms of digital marketing can be great lead generators, we’re going to focus on an efficient driver of highly qualified leads in this blog: paid media advertising.

---

Types of Paid Media Ads:

There are a few different types of paid ads that are relevant to lead generation.

Paid Search Ads: These ads are run on search engines through Google Ads (pictured below), Bing Ads, and more. When a user searches for “best insurance agency,” for example, you can “bid” on that phrase (also known as a keyword), and pay to have your agency placed at the top of search results, above competitors and other results.

Display Ads: Display (banner) ads are created with a static or animated image, URL, and accompanying copy. You may see these on web pages in banner locations, sidebars, or within the page’s copy. Upon clicking a display ad, users are taken to its corresponding landing page.

Pro tip: Use the remarketing feature in your display ad campaigns to get your agency in front of people who have recently visited your website but didn’t complete a conversion.

Social Media Ads: You can also run ads on social media platforms, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and X, formerly known as Twitter. These advertisements are integrated into the user’s feeds so that they appear as regular posts. Note: Each platform has its own types of ads and specifications.

Local Service Ads (LSAs): LSAs are a great way to reach customers on a local level. These are location-based ads run on Google that follow a “pay-per-lead” model, meaning that you only get charged if a user contacts you through your LSA.

Most of the above advertising methods follow a pay-per-click model. This means that advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. Essentially, it’s a way to bring high-quality visits to your site, rather than competing to earn visits organically.

Pro tip: Use branded content, like articles, podcasts, videos, and more, to grab your target audience’s attention, build awareness, and provide value. This is a smart way to advertise your brand without being overly promotional.

---

If you want to start a paid advertising campaign, here is a brief, five-step outline of the process:

• Create an ad for social media or search
• Design a landing page for the viewer to “land” on once they click your ad
• Set a budget for the ad
• Select your targeted audience (based on gender, age, location, profession, etc.)
• Run the ad and watch the leads pour in!

Pro tip: A landing page is where you’d put your customizable AgencyBloc lead form to capture your visitors’ information and have the chance to convert them to clients. This can be on the homepage, a testimonials page, or a page with gated content (content behind a form), for example. Make sure your lead form is optimized for conversion.

2. Professional Partnerships

Developing mutually beneficial partnerships with other professionals is another great tactic for your agents to generate leads without spending tons of time searching for them. 

For example, your team can partner with a wealth management company. Then, when they have clients in need of your services that fit your criteria, they can send them your way. You can do the same when you have a client who needs their services and fits their criteria.

Networking is a great way to build these partnerships. It allows you to connect with like-minded individuals who could be assets down the road. You can do this by:

• Attending tradeshows
• Giving presentations
• Joining local associations 
• Attending local industry meetings
• Attending national industry conferences
• Become a member of a local chamber of commerce

These partnerships don’t have to be solely within your own industry. It could actually be more beneficial to build partnerships with related industries, local professionals, and others so your offerings don’t overlap. 

3. Lead Purchasing

Sometimes, your lead generation strategy may include buying leads from a vendor. If you choose this route, be sure to carefully vet the vendor you’re buying from—you want to ensure the leads you’re buying are worthwhile; otherwise, it can be a waste of your time and money.

Look at the vendor’s different lead types and levels to decide what’s best for you—these allow you to find the right fit for your budget while not compromising quality. Buying leads this way is significantly different from buying a list of cold leads, as cold leads have potentially never heard of you and may not even be in the market for your services.

If you have an agency management system (AMS), check to see which lead generation companies they’ve integrated or partnered with. AgencyBloc’s AMS+ integrates directly with a variety of lead vendors and has an Open API, which allows you to connect with more third-party vendors, like lead vendors. 

This enables you to seamlessly bring the leads you buy from those vendors into our platform. Plus, you can set up automated workflows to alert you when new leads come in so you can follow up instantly.

4. Host Q&A Sessions

Informational sessions about individual insurance, group benefits, and senior insurance can give you a chance to earn your prospects’ trust, get your name out there, and meet with a large group of your ideal clientele face-to-face. For example, you could visit a retirement home  to answer residents’ questions and potentially earn their business.

When you host these sessions, come prepared with a professional presentation and business cards. These free, pre-designed templates can help you create assets that make an impact:

• Business Card Templates
• PowerPoint Templates for Your Next Presentation

You will also want to bring pamphlets, carrier-specific handouts, and a folder for attendees to put all of these in.

Optimize Lead Management With AgencyBloc

It’s essential for independent insurance agencies, GAs, and IMO/FMOs to have a strong, conversion-focused lead management strategy. By incorporating different methods into your lead generation strategy, you’re more likely to increase the number of leads you’re bringing into your book of business.

Bringing leads into your agency is easier than ever with the help of the lead routing rules in AMS+. Automatically assign leads to agents based on lead source, location, and more in a round-robin fashion or directly to a specific agent. Then, use the built-in, industry-specific VoIP features to call leads, record and store calls, drop voicemails, and more.

Keep in mind that regardless of how you get leads, you need to woo your prospects and give them the attention they need—which is where lead nurturing comes in. With AMS+, you can nurture your leads from prospect to client. Use sales-specific workflow automation to stay top-of-mind with consistent, valuable communication to your leads via phone calls, emails, and text messages.

You can also track your most profitable lead sources with Dashboard Analytics to make informed decisions about where to focus your resources. Then, once the leads are in your funnel, you can use AMS+ to manage the sales process and improve your chances of conversion. These are just some of the features that our robust, industry-specific CRM has to help your insurance agency thrive.

This blog was originally published on January 10, 2017, and has been most recently updated and republished on September 27, 2022.

Posted by Allison Babberl on Wednesday, September 28, 2022 in Automated Lead Routing & Assignment

1. prospecting
2. selling