Getting Life Insurance Leads Using LinkedIn

The largest professional networking tool in the world — LinkedIn, with 450 million members. This social platform not only allows you to connect with professionals in your own industry but is also a fantastic way of connecting with prospects. People who may be interested in buying insurance from you.

According to research done by Reachforce, 44% of marketers have generated leads via LinkedIn. Whereas only 39% have generated leads through Facebook and just 30% through Twitter.

There is a variety of tools which LinkedIn offers to help you find leads and expand your customer base. You have to know how to use the site to its full capabilities though, if you want to build your business.

Here are a few ways to be productive by using LinkedIn to secure an appointment with an insurance lead:

Your Profile

Your LinkedIn profile needs to stand out. It should portray an image that exemplifies you as a professional. Having a minimal presence on LinkedIn is better than nothing at all. But you cannot find life insurance leads on the site if you have a weak presence.

Also, the more comprehensive your profile, the better your chance of having a high ranking in the LinkedIn search engine.

You want prospects to learn about you, you want to make them feel as if they know you and make them want to do business with you.

Here are a few things to do (and not do) which will ensure your prospects will want to do business with you:

• Upload a picture that exemplifies you as a professional — NO selfies and no holiday pictures. It doesn’t have to be a shot taken by an expensive photographer, but it’s worth paying a reputable studio for a professional headshot.
• Make sure your profile is “built up” — list all your employers and your job history, update your profile summary and participate in the professional groups which the site offers.
• The profile summary section is very important, as this is where people who visit your profile will look to see an overview of your professional background. It needs to illustrate who you are, why you are into life insurance sales and it should detail all your accomplishments.
• Stay active on the site, as LinkedIn rewards uses who are active on the site. By updating your profile, you show up in the weekly digest mail and in your connections news feed. This will help to keep your name or agency at the top of your connection’s minds.
• If you have any relevant articles that you’ve written, try to get them featured on LinkedIn’s Pulse. Pulse is a great way to increase your distribution and get your name out there. Choose a topic that is relatable to your followers because the more organic viewers, comments, likes, and shares you get on your article- the more your chances of it getting featured.
• It also helps to interact with companies and other writers on the site by liking and commenting on their posts. They will do the same for you.
• Also take stock of who has been checking out your profile. If they haven’t sent you an invitation to connect, send them one as they were clearly interested in your profile in the first place. This could help increase your amount of followers.

Advanced Search

The Advanced search function can help you expand your prospect list. It allows you to search for prospects by location, profession, company, or industry. Once you have defined the search criteria you can then ‘save’ this search. LinkedIn then will email you on a daily or weekly basis the results of your saved search. Giving you greater time for other lead generation tactics. The search does limit you to 100 names unless you pay for the premium membership.

Lead Builder, a premium tool from LinkedIn — gives you the ability to create and save prospect lists by using focused search filters such as interests, years of experience, seniority level and company size. It has the ability to give you daily email notifications which are triggered when updates to your searches happen. This will free up more of your time and allow you to focus on crafting personalized InMails, not just hunting for the right person!

You will also be able to find the right prospects and manage your existing clients with LinkedIn Sales Navigator. This premium tool from LinkedIn remains their faster growing component of premium subscriptions, with a 17% increase year-over-year in revenue for the company. This sales tool has an algorithm which will give you lead recommendations that are tailored to you. You will be able to easily save leads and create a sales lead list.

You can try out the free trial or request a free demo, there is however an ongoing cost associated with it. In a nutshell, the service can give you:

• Based on your preferences, it will give you custom lead
  recommendations
• The ability to import your Salesforce data
• Effortlessly find the right leads with Advanced search, with lead builder
• The ability to see who’s viewed your profile in the last 3 months
• Unlock full profiles for leads of those not in your network*
• Live sales updates on your prospects and customers
• inMail to reach out to any LinkedIn member
• You can access your colleagues LinkedIn networks through TeamLink*
• The SSI dashboard will give you the ability to measure and track your
  efforts.

There are many success stories of companies using this service and leveraging off this social selling.

It also has the tools to help you stay informed and up-to-date about your prospects, which will allow you to be in the know with timely and accurate information instead of just cold calling.

Build relationship

After you have recognised a prospect and have been successfully introduced by a mutual connection, don’t immediately start with your sales pitch. This will certainly rub your prospect the wrong way. You may even completely ruin the chance of establishing a relationship.

If you jump right into a sales pitch, it communicates that you don’t really (or want to) understand your prospect’s needs and are only interested in making a sale.

Rather be genuine and make an effort to get to know your prospect and find out how you can help the prospect.

Here are a few resourceful ways of showing a prospect that you want to help them:

• Send a personal message or note congratulating them on a recent business achievement or work anniversary
• If someone in your network could also be helpful to your prospect, offer to introduce your new connection to them.
• Dig in to your existing customer base and connect them with like-minded people or even conferences that may increase their profile or visibility with others in their field.
• By clicking on “my network” — “connections” , you are able to search a number of topical things like:

- Birthdays
- Status updates
- Work anniversaries

• Import your contacts from Gmail and Google. This will allow you to connect with them on LinkedIn and that will alert you to any shared connections and possible leads.

This will demonstrate your credibility, which will help you establish trust with your prospect.

Engage with LinkedIn Groups

The easiest way to make new connections is to join groups on the site. Or if you have the time and resources — create your own group.

The group search function on LinkedIn allows you to find groups related to your industry, your job and even hobbies.

Don’t just sit in the group, join the discussion and contribute by leaving comments which are thoughtful and relevant. Try not to sound like a pushy salesman though,
This way, you will gain the trust of others in the group and establish yourself as an industry expert.

Professionals in related fields will then feel confident and comfortable about sending business your way. It will also make them look good by extension, by having someone in their network.

Want to create your own group? Here’s how:

• Move your cursor over “Interests” at the top of your homepage and select “Groups” from the dropdown.
• Click on “My Groups”.
• Click the “Create Group” button on the left side of the page.
• Fill in the requested information
• Click the “Create Group” button to create your group.

People love to belong to a community and the more you are able to connect like-minded people together, the more they will appreciate you for doing so.

The name of your Group is important. Think of keywords that your target members will search for and make sure that your group name is clear and includes these keywords.

The Group should be created for the industry and not just your agency. The chances of people joining a group is higher when it’s not simply for fans of your agency.

Build up your group by:

• Inviting your existing connections to join the group
• Promote the group on your website, blog and email newsletter
• Sending weekly emails to members and promoting the group on social media.
• Invite industry experts to join and engage with your group.
• You have to be committed by enforcing group rules, moderating posts and also leading conversations.

Link to other social media

Take full advantage of your agency’s social media accounts and blog by integrating your feeds.

With each post that you write on your blog, you can link to it from your LinkedIn page. You will find that your connections, as well as others, will be clicking through to your website where they will be able to learn more about your business and hopefully contact you about your products and services.

By integrating your twitter feed, you will be able to stay in front of your connections and shed light to new efforts without having to publish them across both platforms.

It’s important to note that LinkedIn allows you to use a hash tag for posts you want to appear on your profile so if your Twitter feed contains business and personal content, so be sure to use this option to maintain a professionally focused profile.

Adding a LinkedIn Share button on your website next to all posts, will allow for visitors to click the button and share the related content via LinkedIn.

How to add a share button to your site?

• Click on “Developers” (at the bottom of your LinkedIn profile page)
• Hover your cursor over the “Documentation” tab (at the top of the
  page) and select “Plugins”.
• Click “Share on LinkedIn” on the left hand side.
• Select your preference and click “Get it”.
• Click “Get Code”.