10X YOUR ONLINE MARKETING INTERVIEW
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hat does digital marketing even mean? Is it one of those phrases thrown around to make consultants money? Is it like synergizing paradigms for maximum results or something like that?
Well, Jeremiah Desmarais says he knows what you are talking about because he has helped actual insurance agents and financial advisors 10X their businesses using digital marketing and has seen skeptics become believers. He has real-world examples, such as an insurance agent who generated 324 leads in 10 days with $10,000 in commission in 24 hours using one email, and a retirement planner who filled his Social Security seminar for $20.19 using Facebook. These are just a couple of ways advisors were able to generate business using simple techniques. Jeremiah has been in the insurance marketing trenches for more than a decade, helping boost revenue for organizations such as Norvax/GoHealth, Applied Systems, UnitedHealthcare, Aetna, Humana, Allstate, the United Nations and more than 100,000 agents in 51 countries. He also has honed his message on the speaking circuit and recently boiled down the lessons into a book called Shift: 201 Proven Methods to Sell More Insurance and Financial Services Online Now. In this interview with Publisher Paul Feldman, Jeremiah talks about what digital marketing actually means, and how agents and advisors can use it today to boost their business. FELDMAN: How is digital marketing transforming the way agents and advisors are doing business today? DESMARAIS: Digital marketing has
proven to be the next way to interact and engage with prospects and clients. Gone are the days when we actually had to travel to meet people. Ten years ago, if somebody had said, “I can show you how you could possibly save an extra $100,000 for retirement. Just click on the link that I just sent you in your inbox and I’ll show it to you right now,” people would have said, “No, I have to meet over a kitchen table.” Digital marketing has allowed advisors and agents to have more time freedom, which I think is really important with the amount of chaos and confusion that exists in all of our lives today. It also has allowed people to have more time to be in control and really work on their business. FELDMAN: Do you have examples of how digital marketing helped advisors free up time to focus on their business? DESMARAIS: I’ll tell you a quick story. One of my clients was an individual advisor who had a successful agency, but he didn’t have a lot of time. After working with him for three months, we implemented two digital marketing strategies. One had to do with prequalifying leads over the internet, and the other one had to do with generating more leads over
quit her job and now they work together. So that is a great testimony to how digital marketing can empower advisors today. FELDMAN: Are internet leads different from traditional leads, and do they need to be worked differently? DESMARAIS: Absolutely. Most financial advisors are used to leads that come from either a seminar where the person has been indoctrinated for an hour and got to meet and know and like the person, or from referrals. We know with seminar leads, you might get maybe 30 percent of buying units to visit your office. We also know that referrals typically have anywhere from an 80 to 90 percent close ratio. But when you get to internet leads, you can have as low as a 5 percent, even a 3 percent, conversion ratio depending on the type of lead. That’s where you get into the world of the different kinds of leads. FELDMAN: What are the different types of online leads you are referring to? DESMARAIS: The most common lead today is called a shared lead. It’s the lowest-cost lead. You can typically get them for around $10 to $20 a lead.
Gone are the days when we actually had to travel to meet people. the internet as opposed to just relying on newspaper ads, which is what he was doing before. When I followed up with him about 90 days after he implemented all of this, we were doing a Skype call and he said, “Hey, I want you to meet somebody,” and he pulled his wife into the video. And I said, “Who’s this?” He said, “This is my wife, and I just want to tell you that because of the techniques and the training that I went through, my wife was able to quit her job and we now have more free time and we have more revenue.” He added $100,000 in income — in extra income that year after just 90 days of implementation. His wife was able to
These are leads you can buy from lead aggregators that basically spend millions a year on SEO, and buying traffic and affiliate networks. So these lead companies will go out and find people who have prospects who they are already marketing other products and services to, and they’ll say, “Can you put my offer for a free life insurance quote in front of your audience?” And they might pay that person $2 to $5 for every qualified person and then they’ll sell that information to an agent for about $10 or more. The problem with a shared lead is that a lead generated in this method is usually shared among
September 2017 » InsuranceNewsNet Magazine
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