by Guest » Wed Dec 09, 2009 06:26 am
How important is it to generate online insurance leads for a successful sales campaign? Now-a-days the agencies wouldn't even go for a proper online insurance sales training. Please share your feedback!
Posted: Wed Dec 09, 2009 06:52 am Post Subject:
It's a new dimension to do business altogether!
There are things we don't like at all, but operating online is something that we should learn to stop business from running out of our hands.
In today's world people are surfing more and coming across new options. So, it's already a global stage set to explore new possibilities of buying and selling. Roddick
Posted: Thu Dec 10, 2009 05:27 am Post Subject:
Generating leads online takes a big investment of either time or money. Either you have to learn SEO and implement it which can take up loads of time unless you pay an expert to do it for you, invest in Pay per Click, which can be expensive if you don't know what you are doing, or use social networking like Facebook to generate leads.
Then you have to consider that you will competing directly against the insurance companies themselves who have deep pockets and experts on their staff.
That being said, if you can generate your own leads, you will have higher quality prospects, so it is well worth it to invest and learn. It is the best step I ever took in this business. It just took a while to pay off.
Posted: Thu Dec 10, 2009 06:41 am Post Subject:
It is the best step I ever took in this business. It just took a while to pay off.
Yes, I understand that it takes a while to pay off, but then it really maximizes your conversion opportunities. Would you like to share with us the challenges you'd faced initially with such a step?
Posted: Thu Dec 10, 2009 07:32 am Post Subject:
Gosh, where do I start?
I guess it all began when I first came across this forum looking for sources to buy insurance leads for the seniors market. I found a lot of people here that pointed me in the right direction.
One of them was Insurance Maze who suggested that I would do a blog about my challenges as an insurance agent. I knew absolutely nothing about internet marketing or blogging at the time, but I started the blog using the advice given on his own ampminsure blog.
I followed all of the steps and after a few weeks I noticed that I could find my posts listed in search engine results.
After awhile, I started getting approached by various recruiters and lead companies that wanted me to give them a plug on the blog. This got me to thinking about using what I had learned to try to generate my own leads.
I started setting up all sorts of blogs all over the place but had no real idea how to do SEO, what keywords were, or what a backlink was. Needless to say, my early efforts were dismal.
So my first big stumbling block was I ran with a good idea as fast as I could in the wrong direction.
The second challenge started when trying to learn SEO. A lot of what is out there passing itself of as "courses" is total misinformation and garbage. I overloaded myself on this information and thought I knew what I was doing.
So again, I ran as fast as I could with what I thought I knew, in the completely wrong direction, with the same dismal results.
I finally figured out that I needed to talk to people who actually generated their own leads to find out how they did it. I expected for them to be hiding some closely guarded secret.
The opposite was true of these folks, (thanks Alston) and the solution was rather simple.
I was doing online what I had seen a lot of agents do in the real world that failed. I was going for a home run every time I tried something instead of taking things one step at a time. When I changed my attitude about what I was doing and learned to target "low hanging fruit" instead of trying to compete with insurance carriers and lead companies, the results were much better.
Posted: Fri Dec 11, 2009 02:36 am Post Subject:
How important is it to generate online insurance leads for a successful sales campaign?
In current business world, where number of netizens is increasing at a tremendous pace, with people changing their work place very frequently, especially the younger generation, it is very-very important that insurance marketing professional pay proper attention on internet as one of their marketing channel.
This channel is definitely new, and when it comes to using it, the things which come to our mind are:
1.
Generating leads online takes a big investment of ither time or money.
, and2.
Then you have to consider that you will competing directly against the insurance companies themselves who have deep pockets and experts on their staff.
etc....
Now, let's discuss above points one by one.
Generating leads online takes a big investment of ither time or money.
,Now the good news, generating leads online never requires BIG time or BIG Money. In fact it reduces both. in last two years I have generated more leads (and business for my self working online).
Try to answer this..
How many Cold calls do you make in a day 10, 20, 30,.... How many visits you make in day..... 5, 10,..... . Finally, what is your cost and success ratio?
Using Internet as your marketing channel provides you following advantages:
1. You can work during the hours, when in normal course you can not call a prospects, say early morning hours, or late in night.
2. You may approach may be 100, 200, even 1000 people in your area in a single day, and even if your success ratio is 1% in generating a lead, believe me you will have good output.
The time involved in above activities will never be more than 2 hours per day (I am sure that you will not mind putting extra hours in case someone requests for a response). It will be good if you can do it yourself. However, in case you don't have 2 hours or say 10 hrs per week, you can hire someone working for you online fom any part of the world on hourly or fixed cost basis, which will keep your expenses under control. (Approx. US$600 to 800 per month)
Then you have to consider that you will competing directly against the insurance companies themselves who have deep pockets and experts on their staff.
I read somewhere long back-- Play to your strength. In case we try to compete with insurance companies, and use same strategies that they are adopting for business promotion then we are surely going to lose.
Insurance companies use internet marketing mostly use:
1. Banner advertising.
2. PPC, SEM (may be on high Bid rates).
3. Live Chat Support etc..
sort of things with their huge budget for mass marketing.
However, above things are not really required for an insurance agent to launch a marketing campaign.
Depending upon your initial budget, you may create a Blog (totally free), or a single page website (with or without ad support), or a simple profile page on portals like Facebook, Ecademy, MySpace etc. in a professional manner (Free or with a nominal fee).
Now depending upon your area of your operation. say for personal line of insurance I would suggest you Facebook and Myspace. and for Business Insurance portals like LinkedIn, Sta.rtup.biz, Ecademy.com will be helpful.
Moreover, you can use portals like alibaba.com also to generate your leads. Alibaba allows you to look for specific industries in specific areas, an allows you send 300 messages everyday (30 at a time), with facility to create your message templates (helps a lot).
Ensure using your profile links in all your activities everywhere, which will help you more backlinks to your webpages.
Thanks for reading upto this line (I know I have written almost an article), and in case you need any professional support, send me a message.
For your success.
Posted: Fri Dec 11, 2009 05:12 am Post Subject:
Now the good news, generating leads online never requires BIG time or BIG Money. In fact it reduces both. in last two years I have generated more leads (and business for my self working online).
That is all relative. If you are talking about a new agent just getting started in the business you are usually talking about someone who does not have much of a marketing budget, and is having to learn sales skills and product knowledge when they are not actively prospecting.
Now the good news, generating leads online never requires BIG time or BIG Money. In fact it reduces both. in last two years I have generated more leads (and business for my self working online).
That is all well and good, but if you do not know how to get traffic, and I mean targeted traffic, you might as well put a "buy insurance here" sign in the middle of outer space.
Moreover, you can use portals like alibaba.com also to generate your leads. Alibaba allows you to look for specific industries in specific areas, an allows you send 300 messages everyday (30 at a time), with facility to create your message templates (helps a lot).
Alibaba.com is where you find Asian suppliers and manufacturers of private label goods. How do you use that for prospecting for US insurance customers? Just curious...
Posted: Fri Dec 11, 2009 06:15 am Post Subject:
Many thanks for reading my post so well upto the last line with interest and raising some very valid points.
That is all relative. If you are talking about a new agent just getting started in the business you are usually talking about someone who does not have....
I accept that the term Big and Small are relative terms. However, the beauty of internet channel is that it provides tool to meet every kind of marketing budget and level of expetise that the Agent has. To use this channel also the Agent needs to have required level of subject knowledge, which he requires otherwise also, while using other methods of prospecting.
Moreover, even when you are generating a lead through internet, you will need to meet the client in person to finalize the business, as we were discussing online lead generation.
That is all well and good, but if you do not know how to get traffic,....
Getting targeted traffic, is no doubt is no doubt the most important part.
As we already know that to get targeted traffic options alable to anyone are SEO,SEM,SMM,Classifieds (free and paid), affiliate marketing etc...
But there is one issue, even best planned SEO, can only bring traffic to your website, but it may or may not get you qualified leads. This is where Social and Business networks helps us. On these network you get opportunity to meet people from your region, those may become your hot prospect, or may refer you as well.
Alibaba.com is where you find Asian suppliers and manufacturers of private label goods. How do you use that for prospecting
Trrue, alibaba is from Asia. However, in case you visit us and search for business in USA, you will get number of entries in all categories. (look for both Suppliers and Buyers Categories.). In addition to this you may try Merchant Circle to develope contacts and generate leads for yourself.
Regards
Posted: Fri Dec 11, 2009 06:20 am Post Subject:
That is good to know, and may be a good way to get some fresh contacts. I have friends who do business on Alibaba as importers here in the US and make good money re-selling. Just never thought of it as a way to find US biz leads.
Posted: Fri Dec 11, 2009 06:27 am Post Subject:
It really sounds good.
I am considering to charge some consultation fee for all above stuff now. :lol:
Regards
Posted: Fri Dec 11, 2009 07:00 am Post Subject:
How many Cold calls do you make in a day 10, 20, 30,.... How many visits you make in day..... 5, 10,..... . Finally, what is your cost and success ratio?
I've come across people who've called 500 prospects a day and achieved around 20 world class sales with some of our so-called tough tele-sales campaigns. I guess that's quite an achievement!
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