Sales and marketing are two very different business lanes that are easy to confuse with one another if you aren’t involved with them regularly. In short, marketing helps turn people into prospects, while sales is the process of turning those prospects into profits. They can work hand-in-hand, however, when it comes to generating leads for your agency. Let’s take a deeper dive into how marketing can most directly drive sales through lead generation.
Marketing isn’t just about attracting customers someday; it’s about turning cold leads into warm leads and prospects into clients. Your digital marketing strategy can be an integral part of your lead generation process, and if you’re successful, you’ll regularly fill your sales funnel with these two types of leads:
1. Marketing qualified leads. These are contacts who’ve engaged with your marketing via website, blog or social media but aren’t ready to make a purchase … yet. One example is someone who’s looking to buy a house within the next year and followed your social media page to peruse their homeowners insurance options.
2. Sales qualified leads. This group has expressed a specific interest in your products or services on one or more platforms. For example, a parent wants to add their child to their auto insurance, so they’ve reached out to learn more about your rates and policy offerings.
Now that you know your two main types of leads, here’s how you can strategize your digital marketing to target them:
Email marketing campaigns. Maintain an ongoing conversation with existing clients and educate them about the benefits of bundling or adding additional coverage they might need. You can even sweeten the deal with exclusive friends and family discounts for existing customers. But whatever you do, don’t bombard their inboxes until they click unsubscribe.
Pay-per-click campaigns. Insurance keywords are notoriously expensive, but you can often attract more traffic — and more economically — by targeting long-tail keyword phrases instead. Rather than going for something broad like “auto insurance,” make it more specific to your target audience: for example, “Orlando auto insurance.”
Social media marketing and paid social. Add direct links to your social posts that take people to a dedicated landing page or promotional blog post. This is also an effective way to run a contest while gathering lead information. For example, host a contest where boat owners can enter to win a fish cooler just by signing up to learn more about their insurance options online.
PPC landing pages. Don’t make customers spend lots of time hunting for the information they want. Link them to a PPC landing page with all the specifics in one place. They’re more likely to take action when they aren’t stuck searching for what they need.
Direct mail. Use a more personal touch with new home buyers with a well-crafted direct mail campaign that lands right in their brand-new mailbox. Use your mailer to welcome them to the neighborhood and include an offer just for new homeowners with a QR code to your website or landing page.
Gated content. Any information that requires a visitor to provide information or create a user account to access it is considered gated. If your content is behind a gate, make sure it’s something that people are really interested in like money-saving tips, in-depth information or special offers. You could tease an exclusive whitepaper on commercial liability insurance that’s only available to subscribers to encourage signups for your newsletter.
Marketing Moves the Needle
Marketing is more than creating brand awareness. It’s also about generating marketing and sales qualified leads to ultimately build your book of business. As a part of the We Insure family, you have access to professional marketing support to help you nurture your leads into clients for life.
“The information contained in this page is provided for general informational purposes only and may not be applicable to all situations. WeInsure makes no guarantees of results from the use of this information.”
