There’s no other way to put it — generating leads with your website is literally impossible without traffic. The smart marketers will tell you, that when it comes to digital marketing and generating leads online, rule number one is, never rely on only one source of traffic.

The more traffic sources your website has, the more opportunities you’ll have for lead generation. Lead generation is a game of numbers. If you’re relying on only one traffic source, or none, you can’t expect much if anything in the way of leads. That’s just the way it goes.

SEO is important, but it’s not the only way

We all know that search engine optimization (SEO) is extremely important to your online visibility, but digital marketing doesn’t begin and end with SEO. It’s only one piece of the lead generation puzzle, and only one of the many ways you can drive traffic to your website.

The truth is, even if you do everything right, SEO is typically a very slow-going, and often times labor intensive process. There is no easy button with SEO, and neither you or your website has any control over how many people are searching for insurance in your area each month.

As we’ve stated many times before, Insurance SEO is very backlink-reliant, which requires great, link-worthy content. In other words ranking high organically is a game of copywriting.

Unfortunately because of the time investment required to create great content, content creation is one of the last things most agency owners want to partake in.

Depending on where your agency is located geographically, what the search volume and competition is for the terms you’re trying to rank for, and how much content you’re willing to create for your site, you may rarely see consistent leads via SEO.

Remember in order for SEO to work, someone has to search for you first, and you have no control over that. No matter how nice your website is, you can’t control search volume which makes SEO a passive traffic source.

Just like a billboard has no control over how many cars drive by.

Augmenting your organic website traffic with paid traffic

That’s where pay-per-click (PPC) advertising comes in. When done strategically, PPC can help you generate traffic faster, resulting in more lead opportunities without having to wait around for someone to search for the services you’re offering, where you’re offering them.

PPC is the perfect way to augment SEO, or other organic/passive marketing strategies like word of mouth referrals for example.

When we say PPC, what we’re referring to is paid ad campaigns using platforms like Facebook and Google AdWords. The way PPC works is you create an ad, or group of ads that run in Google and/or Facebook, and you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, hence pay-per-click.

That ad when clicked, will link the visitor to a landing page on your website that has some kind of offer for what you’re selling. To put things in perspective, Facebook and Google are both billion dollar companies because the paid ads people run on their platforms flat out work.

If you’d like us to implement PPC strategies for your agency we may be able to help.

Insurance  PPC Package

Discovery Phase

Through comprehensive keyword analysis, we’ll help to identify which terms and phrases should be targeted with your ad campaigns. This process can quite literally make or break the success of your campaigns.

Landing Page Creation

Rule number one of PPC is you never drive ad traffic back to the home page of your website. You need a targeted landing page that is designed optimally to capture and convert traffic into leads.

Account & Campaign Creation and Optimization

The structure of your account and campaigns has a big part in your success. We’ll get both of them set up the right way.

Ad Split Testing

The process of split testing is when you test one version of your ad against another version to see which one is more successful. This is extremely important in identifying which ads are generating more traffic, so you can make adjustments and maintain a competitive cost-per-click.

Negative Keyword Utilization

Negative keywords are an important part of any successful AdWords campaign. They allow you to exclude terms and/or phrases from displaying your ad in a result. This helps us further sculpt your campaigns so that you’re only getting the clicks that have the most intent behind them.

Bidding, Positioning, Management & Reporting

We’ll help identify how much you should bid for certain terms so you can run the most lean and optimized campaign possible. This requires ongoing management to ensure you aren’t overpaying for keywords and that your position remains as high as possible.

Remarketing/Retargeting

Remarketing is a strategy that, in short, keeps your products and services in front of your website visitors after they leave your website. This is a a critical component to any PPC campaign and can dramatically impact your conversion opportunities if executed properly.

The fact is, at least 90% of your website traffic leaves your site before taking the action you want them to take. Re-marketing makes it possible to re-engage with your abandoning website traffic, and get them to come back to your site to do what you want them to do.

The harsh reality of marketing agencies serving the insurance industry

After doing digital marketing and SEO for 12+ years, you get to see a lot. I’ve dealt with many marketing agencies in my day and have come to the conclusion that probably 70% of them are:

  • Out-sourcing everything to another 3rd party company who you’ll never talk to who may or may not know what they’re doing
  • Using temp workers or interns to manage your accounts
  • Talk a big game but literally have no idea what they’re doing at any level
  • Never get back to you

Sad but true, and it’s one of the reasons I started Advisor Evolved to begin with — because I saw digital marketing companies literally ripping people off in our industry.

Insurance PPC Package Pricing

With PPC, there is no one-size-fits-all package. It really depends on what type of audience you’re trying to reach and what your offer and budget is, therefore there is no set price. In fact, after our initial discovery call, you (or us) may decide you don’t want to even run ad campaigns due to competition or budgeting concerns.

However here is what you should earmark for your campaigns:

  • Ad Account(s) Setup & Optimization: $1200/one-time, per-network (i.e. Google AdWords, Facebook, AdRoll) Facebook + AdWords would equal $2400
  • Analytics Account Setup & Optimization: $600 (one-time)
  • Landing Page Build: $600 (one-time) 
  • Minimum Monthly Ad Management Retainer: $1000/network
  • Minimum Monthly Ad Budget: $500/network

As you can see, this is for serious agencies only who are dedicated to driving traffic and who have some disposable income that can be relegated to marketing each month.

If you think the pricing mentioned above is expensive, you probably haven’t received quotes from other ad/marketing agencies. We actually encourage you to do that. We’re able to offer lower pricing because we have a very tight, proven process that allows us to move faster than other agencies who don’t understand the insurance industry.

And of course….we know what we’re doing, which unfortunately can’t be said for a lot of people pushing ad management services.

Note** If you’re an Advisor Evolved customer, we have a landing page builder that allows you to build professionally designed landing pages in a few clicks. If you build your own page, there is no charge for a landing page.

If you’re interested in driving more qualified traffic to your website or landing page, schedule a call to have a conversation about what you’re looking to do.