To Buy Leads or Do Marketing? That is the Question...

syntaxninja

New Member
6
Hi Everyone,

This is my first post and I hope to contribute often to this great resource moving forward. As it is my first post, please let me know if I cross any lines.

Lets get started...

I have been in the insurance industry for about 7 years now in a number of different roles. I have worked as a producer for a P&C agency, in a call center for USAA leading an inbound sales team, and I recently left a management position at an IMO.

My point in explaining all of this is I am curious about others experience and preferences in regards to purchasing leads versus working with marketing companies to generate their own leads.

How many of you are running your own marketing campaigns or working with someone to do so? Are you doing online SEO, PPC advertising, content marketing, and traditional mail campaigns? If so, are you also buying leads in addition to these efforts?

To be totally transparent, I am looking into a couple offers I have on the table to work for a lead aggregation company and a startup marketing company that wants to focus on marketing for agents, both online and with traditional mailers.

Throughout my own personal insurance career I have both purchased leads and done marketing online and with direct mail. I was always frustrated by the quality of leads I was purchasing from the lead gen companies. So I have been leaning towards the marketing opportunity. However, maybe this is not the experience the rest of the industry is having.

The whole point of this post is try and get an understanding of what agents prefer and think about the different solutions. The marketing company is a startup, but from my perspective they seem to be on the right track. It is also worth mentioning that the marketing company is not an IMO, so they don't require agents to move over their contracts. They are just focusing strictly on marketing.

The lead business on the other hand seems to be a necessary evil for some agents (I paid for leads when I was a producer but I never had a lot of success with them). Or maybe there are lead companies that agents love working with. The issue I have with the lead business I am talking too is that they are doing a lot of lead arbitrage. So they really aren't even generating the leads themselves and don't know the quality of the content they are selling until after it has been sold. They also aren't exclusive leads if I understood correctly.

Anyway, I appreciate any feedback I receive. I am very excited to contribute to these forums and add what I can from my experience on both the producers side and from the perspective of an IMO.

Also, if this is posted in the wrong forum please inform me and I will move it.

Thank you to everyone that responds!

CHEERS
 
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