Adbetter | Digital Performance Marketing Agency

Facebook marketing for insurance agents: key elements of success

Tom Richards

If you’re an insurance agent, you can drive huge returns with Facebook marketing. But before you do, there are a few things to learn.

Contents

Before we start…

No doubt you can drive transformative revenue with Facebook ads. But without the right knowledge, that can take time.

So how about leaping ahead to the part where your ads are working effectively and driving a predictable flow of revenue for your business?

We are a paid media specialist – and we drive huge returns for our clients. There’s a good chance we can do the same for you.

“Working with Adbetter, we’ve been able to maintain and grow both trial and paid subscriber numbers during an uncertain and choppy year. The team were able to integrate with our reporting workflow, which is invaluable for keeping track of our main KPIs and having a central point of truth for measuring campaign performance and success.”

Tim Jarvis, CEO & Founder, Fabrik

Can you run insurance ads on Facebook?

In a word, yes. But Facebook is strict with anything related to finance. And that can make it harder to get your ads approved.

Introducing special ad categories

There are certain sectors – financial services being one of them – that Facebook is extremely tetchy about. Because many annual insurance premiums are spread across monthly payments, Facebook is likely to judge you as providing credit – which falls into one of Facebook’s special ad categories.

That can make ad approvals unusually tricky – and every ad needs to be approved by Facebook before it goes live.

Even if your ad doesn’t flout Facebook’s rules, it may be automatically rejected. And if you continue to get flagged as breaking the rules, your entire advertising account may be blocked – meaning your journey to revenue generation is over before it’s even properly started.

Facebook’s rules aren’t the only ones you need to be aware of. The Financial Conduct Authority has strict rules regarding the promotion of financial products and services.

But – before we move on – it’s important to remember that navigating the red tape isn’t about trying to duck under it or hurdle over the top. It’s about knowing what the parameters are and how to work within them.

How to promote your insurance business on Facebook – finding your audience (and your niche)

You don’t need us to tell you about the basics of Facebook marketing. We’re going to assume you’re all over having consistent branding over your posts, a reasonably good idea of content strategy and – if nothing else – a good idea of what not to post. (Nobody cares about Mark from HR’s holiday to Alicante.)

But when it comes to really driving revenue from Facebook, you need to go beyond basic best practice and embrace Facebook ads.

Here’s some of the things we’ve learned about best practice. (Telling you everything would make for an even longer article.)

Niching down

Succeeding with Facebook ads is about targeting the right audience. To do that you should create separate campaigns for each of the insurance products you sell.

The audience you will target for life insurance is very different from the audience you will target for phone insurance – and the creative of your ad will differ too. 

For the best results, create a campaign for each of the types of insurance you want to promote.

Finding your audience

When you know what you’re promoting, you can think about the type of people who are likely to be interested.

Just some of the audience variables you can work into your targeting include:

You can also ask Facebook to recommend an audience to you based on your existing customer data.

Facebook’s algorithms have been trained by assimilating the data of more than three billion people. So if you have good customer data, Facebook’s lookalike audience suggestions are definitely worth exploring.

Consider lead quality v lead quantity

Would you rather have lots of half interested leads, or a smaller group of very interested leads?

Many businesses waste a lot of time and money trying to convert prospects who have low purchase intent.

Think about how the targeting, look and feel of your campaign can attract the people who are likely to convert, while screening out those that you don’t.

Location targeting

Are you a specialist independent insurance broker? Then it makes sense to set up a campaign to target Facebook users within a short radius of your office.

Invite them in for a free consultation and you may find yourself with a few extra people knocking at your door.

Branding and creative for for insurance agents marketing on Facebook:

The look, feel and messaging of your ads can make or break your campaign. Here are some of the key considerations.

Take care over your branding

A little irreverence takes some brands far. But insurance isn’t something to joke around with.

Your branding should look credible, professional and trustworthy. People must have faith that you are a legitimate, well-considered business before they trust you to protect their financial welfare.

Stay away from boring stock photography and create something that is eye-catching, consistent and recognisably yours.

It’s also recommended that you include details of your FCA registration in your ad. Either in small print across your image or as part of the ad caption. The FCA is also very big on clarity of language. “Fair, clear and not misleading” is a phrase that regularly crops up in guidance from both the FCA and the Advertising Standards Authority. 

So make sure your language is…fair, clear and not misleading.

Educate your audience

Considering insurance is an everyday necessity, may people remain unaware of what a good policy entails. Or how different policies differ from one another. Or how to find the policy that’s best for their circumstances.

A good way to drive awareness of your products – and the service behind them – is simply to educate people. People don’t want to be sold to. They want the answer to a problem. A little openness can break down a lot of barriers between your brand and your audience.

Whatever type of insurance you are trying to sell, honesty is the best policy.

Call on customer reviews

Sometimes one of the best ways to market is to let other people do it for you. Especially if those people are your previous customers.

Don’t underestimate the power of a good set of customer reviews – particularly if they are from verifiable sources like Trustpilot. Ripe for including in your Facebook ad campaign.

Where should you place your ad?

Good question. But perhaps one you don’t need to fret about.

There’s plenty of ad real estate on Facebook. But the most cost-effective placement for insurance services tends to be in-feed. If in doubt, utilise Facebook’s Advantage+ tool. Feed it the right assets and it will place your ad everywhere that’s relevant for your campaign.

Test, test, test

Your ads will be made up of visual assets, headlines and descriptions – and Facebook allows you to submit multiple variants for each campaign. This is important. 

Facebook will test the various combinations until it learns which drive the best results. That means your ad spend gets used as effectively and efficiently as possible.

Another benefit of testing multiple creative assets is that your campaign will fatigue less quickly. People begin to get blind to ads they’ve seen on more than a few occasions. Just remember that with descriptions, Facebook will truncate your description after 125 characters. The first part of your message should inspire your reader to expand and read more.

Oh and if you are considering experimenting with video, make sure you include audio. Video ads with audio have a 35% higher clickthrough rate than those without.

Facebook marketing for insurance agents: what happens after the first click?

You’ve worked hard to create an engaging ad and attract the click. That’s great!

But in so many ways, success with pay per click advertising is about having a clear strategy for what happens after the click. Here are some tips.

Gathering customer data: in-app forms vs landing pages

Ultimately, the purpose of a pay per click campaign is to find people who are interested in your services and capture their data so you can begin nurturing them towards becoming a customer.

With your Facebook campaign there are two main ways to do that: 

  1. Getting your lead to complete a popup form within Facebook
  2. Getting your lead to click through to a landing page on your website

In a moment we will talk about the pros and cons of each strategy. But first…

Create a lead magnet

You can incentivise your audience to part with their data by having something to give away. And that’s usually knowledge.

For instance, you might offer your customers:

The point is to provide something that your lead is likely to find genuinely useful.

Facebook form or landing page?

With Facebook instant forms, you can gather audience data without people even leaving the Facebook app. They can simply hit a button and complete a simple popup form without disrupting their browsing experience. 

Better still, the form fields will be prepopulated with the data Facebook already holds on them. This seamlessness can encourage people to part with their data. 

Contrast that with a landing page. In order to capture data, you must count on your leads being prepared to leave Facebook and disrupt their browsing experience. This enhanced cost can mean fewer leads. 

However, because they have made the effort to come to your website, there’s a stronger chance these leads will be highly interested in your services and bought into your brand.

A minor consideration? Perhaps. But if you want to generate big returns with Facebook ads, the minutiae matter.

Landing page best practice

If you are driving traffic from Facebook to your website, it’s best to create a specific landing page for each ad campaign. That way you are offering a consistent journey with a highly targeted message.

Landing pages are worthy of a weighty article in their own right. But here’s a shotgun guide to best practice.

Facebook marketing for insurance agents: nurturing and retargeting

Some people may see your ad and buy a policy straight away. Others may need a little nurturing. Your job here is to reach out with well-targeted, genuinely helpful content about your policies and services.

Make sure your marketing is geared towards the distinct audience(s) you targeted with your original ad campaigns.

For example, if you segregated campaigns based on insurance type – you’ll want to make sure the people who engaged with your ads about travel insurance are now receiving nurture content about, you guessed it, travel insurance.

And remember: rather than bombarding your leads with bombastic sales pitches, show that you can provide the answer to their problem. Selling is psychology.

Back to Facebook ads

You can reutilise Facebook ads for this nurturing phase too. The first step is to remove your new leads from your cold lead generation activities.

This will prevent you wasting money serving ads to people who have already registered their interest in your services, and will make sure you don’t annoy your new leads by pushing the same marketing messages to them.

Instead, create a new audience from the people who clicked one of your campaigns – and serve new ads aimed at nurturing. Customer reviews are a great option at this stage. Likewise highlighting anything that makes the provision of your service unique – such as UK customer service or low policy excesses.

Be diligent with your data

The most important part of your ad campaign is the performance data it gives you. Take the time to interpret it correctly and you will reveal the strategies that are giving you the most success.

Then you can double down on the creative strategies that are getting results, and ditch the stuff that isn’t working.

That leads the way to better performance, more leads and more revenue. But that can only happen if you…

Get your tracking set up correctly

For accurate, actionable insight, you must be able to track all points in your user journey, from the first click to the moment your lead buys their first policy – and beyond. Setting up a holistic picture of your customer engagement landscape takes time.

It’s technical. It involves things like Facebook’s Conversion API. And many businesses don’t bother.

It’s why doing the hard yards here gives you a double benefit. Firstly you get insight that will help you to continually ratchet up the effectiveness of your campaigns. And secondly you’ll steal a major competitive advantage over other businesses in your sector.

Too busy? Let us do it for you.

We get it. Running an insurance business is busy. So let us take care of your paid media activities for you.

Our service includes everything from creating your ads to carefully and comprehensively measuring their performance.

And here’s the thing. We’re so confident in our ability to drive transformative revenue for our clients that if we like the sound of your business, we will cover your ad spend. So there’s zero financial risk on your side.

Sounds good? Find out more.

These articles might be useful too:

>> Where to find the best leads for life insurance businesses
>> Leads for health insurance: how to win big with pay per click
>> Lead generation for financial services: 16 tips for getting big results

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