Digital Marketing for Insurance Agents: Tips to Help You Grow Your Book of Business
In days past, having a website and a robust online presence was optional. It was a helpful way to boost sales and grow your brand, but traditional marketing and referrals were still effective marketing solutions. Today, though, a digital presence is a requirement for insurance agents.
Nowadays, simply having an online presence is not enough – in order to experience true success online, agents must leverage the power of digital marketing.
As an experienced agent, you are an expert in insurance products, sales strategies, compliance standards, and a ton of other facets of your business. But when it comes to digital marketing, many agents only have a surface-level understanding. You’re probably at least passingly familiar with a few terms; SEO, pay-per-click ads, social media marketing, etc. – but understanding these concepts and how they play a role in your online presence can help you build your marketing plan. In this blog, we’ll break down a few key concepts behind digital marketing, and explain how agents and insurance agencies can leverage these tools to grow their businesses.
1. Invest in a Personalized Website
It would shock you to find out that a lot of your competitors, especially in the Medicare sales field, do not have any web presence whatsoever. For years, these agents would go to their in-person sales appointments without ever needing any sort of searchable web persona. If you don’t have a website, then you should absolutely look into getting an insurance agency website developed as soon as possible.
Simply put, your website serves as the backbone of your online presence and your digital marketing efforts. It’s the hub through which all of your online traffic should flow, which is why it’s so incredibly vital to have one for your business. An effective website is more than just a digital brochure for your products; it can serve as a lead generation tool, an outlet for information that is relevant to your customers, and a way to establish your brand. If you’re planning to run digital ads (more on that below) then your website will be a critical part of that process, serving as a landing page that users will arrive at after clicking one of your ads.
A website helps generate leads
Once your website is established, it can serve as a powerful tool for lead generation. By placing multiple points of contact on your website – such as a clickable phone number for your business, forms for users to contact you, and links to an online calendar application – you can collect information from potential customers who are in need of your services, providing leads that you can follow-up on. All of your marketing materials – both traditional and digital – should aim back to your website for this reason, allowing you to consolidate your insurance lead generation efforts.
A website increases your online credibility
If someone is searching for your business online and all they can find about you is a social media page that is only updated every few months, then this negatively impacts the credibility of your agency. In an age when scammers are leveraging technology to steal user data, having a personalized website designed with your own custom branding provides a better, more trustworthy experience for your potential customers. When your website is part of a concentrated effort to establish your brand – alongside your social channels, Google Business Profile, emails, and other online outlets – you can cement your brand as a trustworthy advocate for your customers.
A website is critical for search engine marketing
Using your marketing materials to send potential clients to your website is great, but search engine marketing allows you to reach an entirely new audience of highly-qualified users. We’ll talk more about the details of digital marketing down below, but having a website is a crucial element of this process. It’s especially important for your website to be equipped with lead generation tools so that your digital marketing customers can engage with your business. Your site also serves as the foundation for search engine optimization, often referred to as SEO.
Get assistance with website development
Thankfully, you don’t need to be an expert web developer in order to have a custom insurance website of your own. Pinnacle Financial Services provides custom websites for our agent partners to help them get the essential tools they need to succeed in the digital space. These websites can be created using all of your established branding – and if you don’t have established branding materials, such as a logo, we can even help with that.
2. Keep Up with Social Media
More likely than not, you’ve already established a social media presence for your business. While there are several platforms out there, the most effective ones for insurance agents are Facebook and Instagram (both owned by Meta) and LinkedIn. However, just having these profiles is not enough; in order to experience true success with social media, agents need to perform routine upkeep with their accounts and to actively engage with their audience. Luckily, our digital marketing team are social media experts, and we’ve already written some great content about how insurance agents can leverage social media – be sure to check out our article to learn more.
3. Experiment with Digital Advertising
Once you have a website and some social media accounts established for your business, digital advertising offers a simple way to begin generating leads quickly. With even a small daily budget, agents can spread brand awareness to new customers based on any number of targeting criteria, including geographic location, demographics, interests, and much more.
Unfortunately, digital advertising can have a relatively high barrier to entry. There are a ton of moving parts involved, and a lot of factors to consider when you run ads, and these factors change depending on your chosen advertising platform. Here are a few tips to help you understand your options when it comes to digital advertising.
Google Ads
When it comes to digital advertising, Google Ads is the strongest resource available to businesses – including insurance agents. Google Ads holds a 37% share of all digital advertising, making it the most dominant ad platform on the internet. This platform allows you to serve ads to users in the Google search results, with your ads shown whenever users search for terms related to your offerings. Paid ads are placed above the organic search results, allowing you to achieve high visibility for your business instantly. You can tailor your targeting by a ton of different factors, including keywords, time of day, demographics, geographic location, and much more. Google Ads is the gold standard for digital advertising for a reason.
Free Training Resources
If you’re intimidated by the idea of running ads on Google, don’t worry – Google offers free training and certifications to help you get a complete understanding of their advertising platform. These courses will take you on a tour of the entire platform, explain how Google’s instantaneous online bidding works, how to effectively choose keywords and build ads, and much more. This is an incredibly helpful resource to help agents build confidence before they begin advertising.
Get Certified
If you intend to advertise health insurance on Google Ads, then you’ll need to complete a G2 certification. In order to qualify for this, you’ll first need a page on the G2 Risk Solutions website, which requires some legal verification. While this can present a barrier to entry for a lot of agents, the potential leads you can gain from running ads on this platform far outweigh any time and costs needed to get certified.
YouTube Ads
Because Google owns YouTube, advertisers are able to run video ads on YouTube directly through their Google Ads account. YouTube is the second-most popular search engine (behind Google search) which makes it a powerful platform for advertisers. Don’t have the budget to produce video ads? No problem! Google Ads has built-in tools that allow users to create dynamic video content using images and text that you can upload to their platform.
Microsoft Ads
While Google ads are only shown to users who are utilizing Google’s web search, Microsoft Ads are shown to those who prefer to use Bing as their primary search engine. While Bing has a much smaller user base than Google – which has a 90% market share when it comes to search engines – Bing has a few benefits that can make it appealing to agents.
Integration with Google Ads
If you already have a Google Ads account set up, then you’re in luck when it comes to running ads on Bing. Microsoft understands that Google Ads is the dominant online advertising platform, so they’ve built-in a simple way to import all of your Google Ads campaigns, ads, and targeting directly into Bing Ads with the click of a button. This eliminates a lot of the footwork involved in setting up your account, allowing you to run ads much faster as long as you’re already advertising on Google.
An Older User Base
While many people default to using Google as their primary search engine, a lot of older Americans tend to use Bing instead. The reasoning for this is interesting. Bing is owned by Microsoft, and it is the default search engine used by Microsoft’s Edge browser that is pre-installed on nearly all PCs. Some older folks, who may be less tech-savvy, are not as inclined to download a separate browser or seek out Google’s search when they need to find something online. Instead, they’ll use the default search engine on their browser, which happens to be Bing. This makes Bing Ads a particularly good tool when marketing certain products, such as Medicare.
Meta Ads
Most Americans use social media in some capacity, and Meta has the largest market share by far; as of 2026, Meta boasts a user base of 3.07 billion monthly active users. These users are spread across three of Meta’s platforms – Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. This audience is enormous, and offers an incredible opportunity to agents. With even a small budget, you can spread awareness of your brand by running ads on Meta’s advertising platform. These ads, which are shown to users who match your targeting criteria, are more powerful than organic social posts, which are shown primarily to people who already follow your page.
While these ads offer demographic and location targeting options, it’s important to note that Facebook has some advertising restrictions for financial services providers – including insurance agents. Financial services is considered a special ad category to Meta, limiting the demographic targeting for their ads. You can still target by location, but the special ad category prevents agents from running ads according to demographics (including age, income, etc.) This can be a huge negative, especially if you’re running ads for products like Medicare that are only available to users of a certain age. On Meta, your Medicare ads would be shown to people of all ages, and many consider this net to be too wide to capture ideal customers.
LinkedIn Ads
As an insurance professional, you’re probably already using LinkedIn to some capacity. You should have a page for yourself, but also a page for your agency at the very least. This will allow you to set up an advertising account through LinkedIn. The big differentiating factor with this platform is the fact that your targeting options are tailored toward showing your ads to other professionals. You can target by job title, industry, and place of employment along with all of your traditional targeting methods (geographic, demographic, etc.) So, if your goal is to go after professionals specifically, then LinkedIn ads can be a powerful tool in your arsenal. Just be aware, these ads can be a tad more expensive than advertising on other social platforms, but the results you can gain here are significant if your goal is to target a professional audience.
4. SEO is Foundational for Success
SEO is probably a term you’ve seen thrown around for the past few years. Truthfully, despite the fact that the term itself is commonly used, many business owners are still in the dark when it comes to how SEO can be leveraged. To put it simply, search engine optimization is the practice of building content and establishing your brand so that your website is more likely to appear in the Google search results when a user searches for a term that is related to your business.
By building content – both on and off your website – and cementing your brand as a credible source of information that is relevant to your clientele, you can slowly build your SEO presence. This makes it more likely that your website will show up higher in the search results, yielding more traffic to your website. This is one of the reasons why having a robust website is so important for your overall digital marketing efforts!
SEO is a multi-faceted and highly-complicated process that requires months – or even years – before you can start to see real results. That’s why it’s vital to establish the basic building blocks of your SEO efforts as soon as possible. Thankfully, Pinnacle has all the information you need to get started; check out our guide on SEO best-practices for insurance agents to start growing your organic digital footprint today.
Persistence and Consistency Are Key
As you continue to experiment with digital marketing, it’s important to strive for persistence and consistency across all of your efforts. Continual content creation is incredibly important both for social media and SEO; posting high-quality content frequently is a tried-and-true method to help you grow your brand presence, reach new customers, expand your organic digital footprint, and generate more leads to grow your book of business.
Don’t be afraid to experiment with different types of content. When creating blogs, creating informational articles is always helpful, but you may want to try posting different types of content to see what your audience engages with. The same goes for social media – it’s great to promote your educational events and AEP on your Facebook page, but it’s also helpful to post fun videos and relatable content to help humanize your brand.
Need guidance with your digital marketing efforts? Pinnacle Financial Services is a leading national FMO for a reason; we partner with agents across the country to help them grow their book of business with a suite of services that are tailored to their needs. We stay on top of the latest technology so that our agent partners can leverage the latest tools and resources. Want to discuss your needs with our team? Contact us today to learn how we can help your agency, or get contracted with Pinnacle to jumpstart your growth today!
Rob Valincius
Marketing & Development Manager
x7701 | rvalincius@pfsinsurance.com
