Hitting the Target: Why a Competitive Filter Lead Gen Model Works
One of the biggest concerns businesses have when it comes to curating leads is ensuring each lead is relevant. Designing the perfect advert and throwing money at a PPC team is useless unless you know you are getting a return on every pound you spend.
So, how can you be sure you’re getting the most for your money? Targeting. Without being able to filter irrelevant leads, you will struggle to grab and retain the customers you are most able to help with your services.
The Pitfalls of Standard PPC
PPC is an effective tool for advertising your business to key audiences. Mainstream platforms like Google Ads and Bing Ads have the ability to target specific audiences on specific days, and this makes it a great way to cast a wide net to get results.
However, there are some issues you need to consider, particularly since the coronavirus has left some brokers looking at more cost and time effective processes.
PPC itself is a highly measurable and customisable way of managing your ads, but the necessary investment of time can end up costing you more than you initially thought. You will need to pay someone – either in-house or an agency – to manage and optimise your campaigns in real time, therefore ensuring you get the best ROI.
Even specialist PPC agencies will struggle to give you absolute certainty as to whether your clicks and visits will eventually lead to meaningful leads and conversions. There is a risk that a poorly-maintained account will only attract poor quality leads. This is where a competitive filter lead generation model comes in.
Filtering Out Poor Quality Leads
Your brokerage is only as strong as the leads it brings in. If your website is getting clicks but no conversions, it’s because the leads you are attracting are either at the wrong stage of the buying cycle or are not in a position to convert.
However, with a competitive filter lead generation strategy, the irrelevant leads don’t get qualified. With QuoteSearcher, each insurance product is given a specific set of questions that range from where they live, their age, number of years with no claims bonus, number of vehicles etc. Once the form has been submitted, customers are matched in real time to your brokerage – either via an email or a warm transfer.
For example, if you were running PPC on Motor Fleet insurance customers, without services like ours you wouldn’t be able to target fleets of 4+ vehicles that are fleet rated, excluding family fleets, and excluding certain business types like courier or retail. This means you would get served a large number of leads that do not meet your criteria.
Another very interesting part of our type of model is the control you have over dates and times. So, you can specify that you want Motor Fleet leads with x filters but only from Monday to Saturday between 9am and 5pm. PPC, on the other hand, offers little control other than turning a campaign on or off on certain days.
Let’s look at the difference this makes our clients.
A QuoteSearcher Case Study
Our Client has been established for over 15 years, having built a solid referral business with a strong client base. They pride themselves on delivering transparency for their clients to show them the true value in what they spend on commercial insurance, however they were not immune to the potential pitfalls COVID had unleashed.
Once all the remote working aspects had been set up and their operation of 15 staff were feeling more comfortable in this ‘new normal’, a problem had suddenly become very apparent (one we have sadly seen happening since the pandemic had begun).
Their previous referral business started to dry up as the lockdown had taken hold, and with their other source of lead generation being an agency, had also experienced lead volume drop off. This left them critically low in terms of potential business to quote.
With an ever-increasing amount of wasted leads being generated, they realised their Google advertising was not sustainable. The leads did not meet their schemes and, with money effectively going down the drain. they decided to pull back. They had no way to filter this data, which was impacting their bottom line along with the resource/opportunity costs of managing this.
Reluctant to have the team on furlough as they believed it was vital to keep plugging away and keep revenue coming in, they had several conversations with carriers looking at alternative products in which they could approach until the storm blew over. Unfortunately, they were lacking the data to find out which insurance products were performing well in these uncertain times.
They had approached QuoteSearcher, looking to fill the lead volume drop-offs they were experiencing, but were also keen to get a market viewpoint to see which insurance products were still in demand that could potentially match their criteria.
We were able to scope out potential areas of interest, with cumulative real time volume statistics for them to forecast in those areas which were not their previous bread and butter products.
Firstly, we set up custom campaigns for their existing insurance products, delivering these through a combination of email and warm transfers in real time, for their team to keep doing what they do best and keep that engine running.
Our unique footing in the insurance lead cycle and our proprietary QuoteSearcher system (which sits behind our platform) allowed them to filter the incoming leads to their carrier’s requirements, reducing wastage and increasing the amount of leads their team could convert, all while freeing up resource to be able to concentrate on other important matters.
After setting up new campaigns for their additional products once they acquired the specific schemes through the carriers using our data, they then had the ability to test the market, tweak certain aspects and build out a lead gen strategy alongside QuoteSearcher that had delivered £300k gross written premium over the last 4 months and is a basis for their future expansion plans.
Why Choose QuoteSearcher?
We pride ourselves in being able to help brokers tap into the potential of lead generation through our systems, discovering other strategies to drive revenue and growth, giving them peace of mind.
Here at QuoteSearcher, we like to think of ourselves as a V12 engine always running in the background, helping you get to where you want to go at speed and in style.