How to Advertise For Life Insurance Leads

The success of an insurance advertising campaign relies mainly on two things: how targeted it is, and whether it focuses on a specific type of insurance. With life insurance, there is a third consideration: the sensitivity of the marketing campaign.

Selling insurance is selling peace of mind. People often think of insurance as a way to mitigate a worst-case scenario like a car accident, a fire, theft, and the passing of a loved one. And while getting insurance for material possessions is one thing, life insurance has much heavier undertones as it forces people to come to terms with their mortality.

Marketing a product that's only useful in the event of the insured's death is no walk in the park. It's why life insurance advertising must show a high degree of sensitivity to the perpetual fear of mortality faced by every human being.

What does it take to run a successful life insurance advertising campaign? How important is it to adopt the right tone? How do you target the right audience? We answer these questions and more in this in-depth guide.

The Three Steps to Successful Life Insurance Advertising

1. Understand Your Audience

A well-targeted ad campaign is infinitely more impactful than one without a target audience. It also yields better returns in terms of leads and conversions. It is not a very popular niche; it has a particular target audience whose needs you must understand. To that end, you must focus on the following aspects:

Age

Not everyone will be interested in life insurance. Typically, good life insurance marketing strategies must focus on middle-aged and elderly adults where the need for life insurance is more prominent than in, say, kids and teenagers.

Age is a crucial consideration when it comes to life insurance advertising. Aside from its obvious association with a high risk of mortality, it speaks to your audience's propensity to invest in life insurance. Older audiences are generally more financially stable than younger ones.

Understanding audience demographics requires market research. It doesn't matter if the data comes from surveys or market studies done by other agencies-it all counts. One reason you need to know who you're advertising to is that it is tied to the platforms they frequent.

Facebook is a haven for boomers and elderly individuals, while younger web users are more likely to be found on Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter. Casting a wide net by plastering messages on all platforms may reduce your relevancy, creating bad impressions, so you need to understand how to target your audience first.

Personal Income

According to Chirag Pancholi, founder and CEO of the first independent insurance cross-sell platform Wisemuv Inc.; life insurance should not be sold by brute force tactics. Instead, he advises agents to get a nuanced understanding of family income statements and their unique needs.

He compares a family to a company in the sense that there is income, and there are expenses every month. Every family handles their money differently. Some prioritize education and stash it away for a college fund while others prefer to invest in property or business.

You can get insight into a family's spending habits, particularly how they like to spend their disposable income that will tell you whether they are likely to invest in life insurance.

2. Learn How to Create and Use Targeted Messages

Narrowing down your audience gives you the benefit of knowing exactly how to structure your message. Life insurance will always be associated with mortality, so your message should convey it in terms and sentiments that are sensitive to your audience's perception of death.

This is one area where spamming posts with keywords will lose you more than your search page rankings.

3. Use the Right Online Marketing Techniques

There are three things that are crucial to the success of any ad campaign:

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) teaches online marketing basics like how to target keywords your audience is searching for and how to attain and maintain online visibility. To grab the attention of your audience, you have to perform keyword research, structure posts around the most relevant ones, and use just enough of them to grant you authority status over the search query.

Taking advantage of tools like Google My Business allows you to capitalize on your local presence while fostering your brand reputation online.

User Experience

Websites are the storefronts of online businesses, so they have to offer an enjoyable experience. While in a physical store, you can offer complimentary gifts, refreshments, and discounts; your website will benefit more from good page speeds, easy navigation, and engaging content.

A website's user-friendliness is balanced precariously on factors like its hosting service and web development. Pages that load too slowly make for frustrating user experience, and so do numerous pop-ups, confusing layouts, and ad banners. Offering the best user experience may not come cheaply, but it's certainly necessary to grow your traffic exponentially.

Social Media Integration

Organic traffic (customers who visit from search engine results) may take a while to pick up if you're a new business. You can increase your reach considerably through social media implementation.

If your website is your headquarters, think of social media pages as branches. They require little to no investment and can amplify your reach to specific demographics.

Content

Websites that thrive the most are those that provide valuable content to their audiences. Many people on the web are in need of one thing or another. If you can prove to be a reliable source for something that people need, they turn to you every other time they face a problem you've helped them solve before.

Your ad content should be valuable, relatable, and engaging. It should answer your audience's questions and provide the information they didn't know they needed.

How to Set the Tone of a Life Insurance Advertisement

Life insurance is sensitive because it strongly implies death. You must approach it with tact lest you risk coming off as indifferent or uncaring. As much as it is a sales pitch, you must convey condolences, understanding, and assurance to come off as genuine. It's important to adopt a sensitive tone when structuring your life insurance campaigns. Here are some things you can do:

Avoid Shock-Value Advertising

It is worth considering as shock-value advertising can sometimes have a high degree of effectiveness. Nevertheless, you need to make positive impressions to garner a respectable audience. The inevitability of death is fairly clear to your audience-don't hammer it home to scare them into buying life insurance.

Be Creative

A little creativity can take your message further than you can imagine. Grabbing the attention of your audience may require a little innovation on your part, be it using unique platforms to reach out to them or creating messages with a different appeal.

Either way, standing out as a reliable provider of life insurance is about how many people stop to read your message, so structuring your images, banners, and media content to grab attention will gradually improve your list-building ratios and sales-conversions.

Promote Family

The sudden passing of a loved one often leaves families with debts or obligations they weren't prepared for. While you can approach your audience from this angle, i.e., with a promise to take care of their loved one's outstanding debt, it doesn't strike a chord with most of them.

What does is family. After all, they are the primary beneficiaries of the life insurance policy. Protecting family in the event of their sudden passing is something most will do no matter what they have to sacrifice today. Some of the most effective advertisements (in any industry) are those that appeal to inherent behaviors, like our sense of familial love.

Three Tips for Marketing Life Insurance

1. Brute force marketing is expensive and ineffective-lay off it

Companies spend large bundles of cash bombarding Facebook, Twitter, and Google with ads. To return to our net analogy, they cast wide at great expense without specific targets in focus. The result is always insignificant. Brute force marketing is expensive, and effective in some applications, but it will not yield returns as far as life insurance advertising is concerned.

2. Avoid worn-out cliches

Life insurance advertisers appear to be stuck in the "Mad Men" era where happy kids playing on a green lawn or a family posing on the beach is the gold standard for image advertising. It really isn't.

Avoid being too cliche;. What you need to communicate, rather than happy families and couples walking in the sunset, is that you can provide consistency and familiarity in the wake of the most tragic event in their lives. That brings us to the last tip.

3. Connect with consumers on a real-world level

You connect better with your audience when you give them clear assurances about what will be saved or preserved following the passing of their loved one. It's another reason why getting insight into the financial status of the family is critical. Once you know their consumption habits, and the real-world trade-offs they will have to make if a loved one passes, you can craft messages that will grab their attention.