Advertising VS Pure Lead Gen
Written by Justin Thomas on Jul. 17th 2020
I have a lot of insurance agents contact me every day because they need help. They’ll often say something like “I want to learn how to use Facebook ads” or “can you teach me how to advertise.” I love helping people and teaching agents. When I get these types of questions my first instinct is to dive deeper and find out what exactly they are looking to do, and how I can help them. Most agents that I speak to have bought leads at some point in their career. Some of these leads are direct mail, some are Facebook leads that were generated by a 3rd party lead vendor. This is the only experience most insurance agents have with "advertising". When they come to me I ask them questions about why they want to change what they are doing. The most common answers I get are that they want to have more control over what’s being shown to a potential lead. They often get a lot of objections that are along the lines of “I never filled out my information” “that wasn’t me” and “oh I didn’t know that was about insurance.” These are very common objections and a seasoned sales person trained to work leads would not flinch at objections like this… however, that does not mean that every insurance agent should have to sell like that, or be trained to overcome objections like that. Maybe you feel uncomfortable pushing someone in that situation and you just want different interactions.
In 2020 we have so much technology at our disposal that we can craft any reality that we want! So back to these agents… They come to me telling me that they want to be able to generate their own leads but when I ask questions, what they really want is advertising and branding. They are looking for a situation where people already know who they are and even come to them to get help with insurance. Most of the time they don’t know that this reality exists. It definitely does, and in 2020 it’s cheaper to achieve this reality than it ever has been!
This sparks the topic of this article, what’s the difference between pure lead generation and advertising?
With lead gen… someone will make a very generic online presence. That may be a website, a Facebook page, a Youtube account…a name on a direct mail letter... it can come in many forms… sometimes it may even be a fully registered business. They then run ads, send out letters, or try to rank their sites on google. The messages these companies use are very direct response advertising, which means they are trying to get you to take an action based on very moving information that you read or see or hear. For insurance, this means that they are usually talking about the rates or price and how great they are at this very moment, they usually create urgency by talking about death or showing something that will invoke an emotion for you to take action. The goal is to get the potential lead to be interested enough to fill in their information to find out more.
There’s nothing wrong with this, this has been done for a long long time. What it does, is find a person that has some interest in the product. On the other hand, the person has no idea who the company is, they have no idea who is going to call or show up at their door. They maybe were just hoping for an email or something and now they have a sales person tracking them down. Again, I’m not against this approach, sometimes people need to be snuck up on in order actually take action and protect their family or do what’s right. I don’t think this method of drumming up business will ever stop because it’s very profitable for a lot of companies and there are many sales people out there that are trained on this process very well!
However, there are also a lot of individuals out there that got into insurance because they were truly interested in the financial products and want to use their knowledge and creativity to help families by getting them the absolute best combination of insurance products. They don’t feel comfortable “SELLING,” they just want to be a service provider. These people usually get told, “well you’re in the wrong business then.”
For these types of people, true advertising makes much more sense. In 2020 it’s easier than ever to advertise yourself. A lot of people will call what I'm talking about “Branding.” Branding will allow you to differentiate yourself from all of the other insurance agents in your area.
Branding will allow you to show off those skills and the knowledge you have spent time learning about all of the different financial products and your creativity to help families.
Branding will create trust before you ever talk to a person because they will have seen pictures and videos of you talking and demonstrating that you know what you are talking about.
Branding will be slower to start, but it will build a pipeline of people waiting to talk to you and do business with you because of the snowball effect.
When you advertise yourself, it’s not about the product anymore. With insurance, people know they need it, people know it’s out there, you don’t have to advertise products or price anymore, you can advertise why you are the best person to deliver that service. You can advertise how you care about your clients.
Finally, one of the most amazing things with advertising yourself, it creates an amazing follow up opportunity. If someone sees an ad of you educating them on a certain product, or telling a story about a client you were able to help. Maybe they clicked on the ad and ended up getting busy or decided right now wasn’t the best time, but they still gave you their information. Well now you can create email follow up campaigns and retargeting ads and they will actually open the emails and click on the follow up ads because they remember who you are. This adds to that snowball effect!
Both advertising and leads are great and agents can have massive success with both. They just create very different interactions!
Justin Thomas
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