Effective lead generation through digital marketing

How to Increase Your Small Business Lead Generation

Lead generation is a critical component of many different businesses. Take an insurance agency, for example, whether you provide auto, life, home, life, health, or business insurance, you need to understand how to consistently get more customers and use your sales funnel.

A potential customer is a person who has shown interest in your company’s product or service in some way.

You want them to buy something from you, but you need to spend time building the benefits and courting them to entice them to choose you over your competitors.

A lead generation funnel focuses on a large number of names being poured into the funnel. Over time, you identify which are viable targets, then hopefully convert those targets into leads, and finally convert them into buyers as they move down the funnel to buy.

Direct marketing dates back to the world of insurance sales, but the Internet has made it much easier for insurance companies to gain new targets and automatically follow up with leads.

If you’re using online marketing strategies, it doesn’t matter if it’s dark and your business is closed: your insurance agency can get new clients anytime, anywhere.

There are 3 steps to this process:

1. Generation

This is the first part of the journey, where you generate the initial spark of consumer interest or inquiry about your products or services.

Ideas to start trying to convert goals into paying customers include:

• Ask people to sign up for your email newsletter

• Encourage people to fill out an online form for a free consultation

• Using an exit intent popup on select web pages

If you’re doing SEO, SEM, social media marketing, and content marketing right, you should have a high number of visitors to your website and social media accounts, where you can initially attract new customers.

Please note that Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) requires that you receive recipients’ consent before sending messages. Be sure to ask people if they’d like to sign up for your newsletter before you start sending your finely crafted marketing materials to their inbox!

2. Qualifications

Not every lead you capture will turn into a sale. You must have an effective process of filtering all your potential clients to find the best ones. Otherwise, you’ll be wasting your time with audiences that will never convert.

For example, a potential customer who comes to your site, visits your “Pricing” page, and enters their information into a form to download your free report is more valuable than a person who comes to your site, reads a blog article, and then it goes.

Here’s an example of lead generation through digital marketing from everyone’s favorite gecko.

3. Nourish

This is the step where you are focusing your efforts on providing relevant information at each stage of the buyer’s journey. Some examples are providing targeted marketing content and email personalization.

Studies show that compared to traditional marketing, content marketing and email marketing generate 50% more leads. Creating quality, original content is important if you want to attract customers, especially since so much insurance information is confusing to the average person.

Content marketing helps you get discovered on social media and search engines.

Then you can help generate new referrals organically. Engage potential customers’ needs and pain points with solution-based content and you’ll get their attention.

Through continual nurturing of valuable content, people will begin to think of you as a trusted source and authority.

The importance of A/B testing

You’ll never know how successful a campaign is without trying it out! A/B testing is a popular way to determine what works and what doesn’t.

You need to test the effectiveness of one element at a time to determine what is actually responsible for an increase (or decrease) in traffic or conversions. The more time you spend testing, the better results you will see.

Some things you can A/B test include:

• Add or decrease text or blank spaces on your website

• Change a call to action in your email or on your site

• Change a title or block of text on your sales landing page

Finding new clients is hard work. So is working hard to stay ahead of your competitors. Will it be easy? No. But if you put in the time and energy, you’ll see your insurance marketing strategies pay off!