Insurance Lead Ads Still Work (When You Do This)

Since insurance ads are part of the Meta special ad category, can you even run ads that convert high-quality leads? The answer is yes. And if the answer is yes, what strategies are actually working right now in today's day and age, and what is going to future-proof your account as we continue to move forward? That's exactly what we are talking about today as we dive into these strategies that are actually working to generate high-quality leads in the Meta special ad category. So if you're an insurance agent or other life licensed professional, this is information that you need to know. Now, last year alone in 2025, I managed over $2.5 million in the special ad category generating leads, and I was able to see inside of hundreds of different independent insurance agents' individual ad accounts spending anywhere from $5 to $50 a day. So I have a pulse on what has been working, what is going to be working, and I am very excited to share that information with you today. I've got 6 different strategic tips that I wanna share with you today after all of my experience in the Meta special ad category. And by the way, in case we haven't met, my name is Shauna. I teach insurance agents and licensed professionals how to generate their own exclusive leads without the overhead of an expensive marketing agency and without ever having to purchase a lead from a lead vendor again. Now, in today's 6 strategies, the very first one I'm gonna share is the most important, so we're gonna get right into the good stuff. And then the very last one is what I want you to walk away with and not forget. So let's start with number one, and that is add creatives first. You hear me talk about it's the messaging that matters, it's the creatives that matter, and that's because this is what is true. We are past the day and age of where we had niche, very, very specific targeting, and then we could have these super generic messages. And I will tell you right now, because I'm nosy, nosy, and I'm always looking at what's happening in your space, the lead vendor ads are still using that generic messaging approach. They are using the ChatGPT, write the ads for me. Let's just say, hey people, I have Medicare, or they're using bait and switch. They're talking about state-funded burial programs, grocery cards, extra Social Security money, uh, for PNC. They're talking about being able to get the lowest quote possible. They're still out there. And on top of that, giveaway ads, those are still out there. But I'm here to tell you, their cost per lead is going to slowly start to creep up. Which they're gonna pass that off to you. Don't you know that's true? And then they're gonna tell you it's 'cause their quality's so high and blah, blah, blah. But that is going to slowly creep up and their quality is slowly decreasing. If you're buying leads right now, you've probably had experiences of buying batches of leads that you paid a premium price for, and then whenever you tried to actually call them and work them, the people had no idea what you were calling them and trying to talk to them about. Now, if that's been your experience, You're not alone. It has to do with the source that actually got the leads. And that is why the ad creative is literally the most important thing. Okay? It is what is doing the targeting for you. The more specific your message is, the more that you're able to speak to people's pain points, the better the response is going to be and the higher the quality of the lead's going to be. There is a big difference of talking to someone about Medicare that responded to an ad that says that there are new plans that are like Texas seniors, there are new plans that are available to you. Now is the time for us to start reviewing your account so that way we can make sure in the next year your doctors are in network, your prescriptions are covered, and all of your questions are answered. Generating that lead versus the deadline's running up and so many seniors are getting $3,000 extra and like, click this button to see if you qualify, or look at this grocery card, or all of those different types of things. Very different leads. So your messaging that your ad creative does, not only does the targeting for you with this new algorithm, But it also is part of the quality filters. So if you take anything from anything that I ever say, now is the time for you to start learning how to speak to your prospects before they ever become a prospect. If you can learn how to handle objections and how to sell different products and how to write these very complicated businesses, you can learn how to talk to your people where they're at. Meet them where they're at. You're selling annuities. You need to talk to people that don't even know what an annuity is. All they know is that I might not have enough in retirement. and I wanna continue living this lifestyle. You offer IUL, you better learn how to talk to people that don't even know what an IUL is, that are interested in maybe having some sort of benefit while they're protecting their family, that they have the opportunity to withdraw from while they're still living. You want to get that education out there. Whenever it comes to any type of life product, or even if we're talking final expense, there is a way to speak to people that can take them down the customer journey where they go from not even knowing that they could possibly qualify for something that would protect their family to showing them that there's product that was actually created for them. So knowing how to have that right messaging, now is the time. And if you're not ready to start running ads, let me just tell you, first of all, welcome. So happy that you're here. I love working with agents that are brand new to learning how to advertise. The very first thing you can start doing is starting to post on social media. Just start getting comfortable putting yourself out there and actually getting your message out there and learning how to speak to your ideal audience. Strategy number 2 is having the right offer. And what I mean by that is anytime we're running an ad, we have some type of offer that we are hoping that people decide to opt into. The main 3 for insurance is a consult, is some sort of lead magnet or something that's high value, and that is a, some sort of a guide. And the last one is some sort of a webinar or live event. So that could be something that you offer online, or it could be a live event that you want them to actually show up to. Now, deciding Deciding on the right offer is critical to what your cold audience strategy is. Now, when we're running social media ads, remember this is disruptive marketing, okay? People are minding their own business. They're looking at dogs swimming in pools, which is my, like, I don't know, I've been watching a lot of dog videos lately. They're looking at what's happening with their friends. They're seeing like, they're looking at recipes and then boom, you pop in and you show up and you disrupt what they're looking at. And if you disrupt it in the right way, you capture their attention, you pique their curiosity, you hit on a pain point, you bring up a benefit, then they're gonna stop and they're gonna give you their information. Now, the other thing whenever it comes to thinking of the right offer is you want to decide what your cold audience's customer journey is. What are the steps that it takes to get someone that doesn't even know that they need your services? So you're speaking on just what their awareness is, like they know that, ouch, this hurts, or this is what keeps me up at night. You're hitting on That, and then slowly moving them to get in the chair to actually have the consult with you. Now, whenever it comes to something like Medicare, your offer is probably going to change based on the time of year. So whenever we are outside of AEP, OEP, you're probably going to be running ads that offer some sort of a lead magnet, especially if we're trying to generate T65, or you're going to be offering some sort of like a webinar or some sort of a workshop if you wanna call it that. But then during AEP, obviously you're probably going to be pushing direct to consult. Now you've got a benefit during AEP. You have a real life deadline, and people oftentimes need a little deadline to push them into actually having the conversation with you when they've never heard of you before. So your offer might change, but what I don't want you to do, and I see so many agents do, is they wanna offer everything and they're like, I'm gonna run ads to this checklist, to a consult, to direct call, to like this webinar. I'm just gonna have ads to everything. When you do that, it really convolutes your not only your customer journey, but your data. Like it's very hard to know what's actually working and what's not. Now it's fine for you to have all of those offerings on your website or even on your social media, but whenever it comes to social media advertising, this is literally the top of the funnel. It's the very first interaction that people have with you. They've never heard of you. They're brand new, and our goal. Is not for Facebook to be our bouncer and say, nope, you're not a qualified lead. Nope. I only let in good leads. That's your CRM and your job. The goal of Facebook and Instagram and any type of social media advertising is we wanna get in as many prospects as possible. We wanna pluck them off the platform and get their contact information for as cheap as possible. Of course, we want them to be like qualified to some degree. But we wanna get them off for as cheap as possible so then we can market to them with our CRM. We could choose to retarget them on the platform if we wanted to. We can text them, we can message them, we can do other things versus having to just use that ad to do all of the heavy lifting for you. So understand what your customer journey is and make sure that you have the right offer. Let's roll right into number 3, and that is Multiple ad creatives. Anytime you are running some sort of a campaign, one of the biggest mistakes that you can make is only having one ad in the entire campaign. Now, I know Meta will let you set it up that way, but here's the deal. Meta greatly cares about the content served to its users, not for any warm and fuzzy feeling. It's because their number one concern is keeping users on the platform. And if you give them an ad and you say, here's my one ad, serve it, it's the only way you can get money from me. If they're serving your ad and it's not working and their algorithm can't make any changes, can't test for other things, can't make changes based on how the users are responding, they're gonna go, mm-hmm, okay, we'll serve your one ad, but we're gonna charge you more than someone else. And that is how your CPM, which is the metric of how much they charge you for every 1,000 eyeballs, your CPM can start to go up. And the whole reason is because you're only giving the algorithm one ad to actually serve. The other thing is it's a detriment to you. Anytime we're running ads, we are essentially doing a test. It's, it's kind of like a fancy, like gambling experiment, right? When we're running ads, it's essentially a hypothesis that our ad is going to convert and we wanna collect data and know what images are working well, what videos, if you're running videos, what headlines, what copy. What's working so that way once we get our initial results and we've gotten several thousand impressions and we can analyze them and see what's happening, we can make a decision of what direction we should go. If we only have one ad and we look at the metrics and the data, we're going to be like, I can't, I don't really have anything to compare it to either. Like this ad is doing okay or, or, or it sucks, but I don't really have any information for me to continue to hone in on my hypothesis. So always always, always multiple ad creatives. Number 4, placements. We want to not only control the placements, but we also wanna make sure that we have ad creatives that are specific to each placement. Now let me show you what I'm talking about whenever it comes to placements. So let's talk about placements because we still can control where our ads are being served right now. And there are multiple different placements within the Meta ecosystem, and the reality is some are more optimal for lead generation and completed registration if we're running a webinar ad, and others are just like a terrible placement. Like you're not going to get a lead gen conversion on that. So while we can still control them, I highly recommend that you do. So in this test campaign, in this test account, I'm at the campaign level. I'm going into the ad set level. I'm gonna click edit here and I'm gonna show you what placements I make sure that I exclude every single time. Now I'm gonna tell you, single person's ad account, not every single, but there's a lot of different variety of the way that an ad account can look like because different features are rolled into different ad accounts at different times. But I can tell you, they are making it more and more hidden to be able to customize where they're actually going to be serving your ads. So I'm all the way down here, and in this ad account, I have to click show more settings. When I click show more settings, it magically shows me all of the different placements that I can customize whenever it comes to my ads that are being served. So right here you can click this little edit button and you can see that we've got Facebook, Instagram, and I'm gonna go ahead and tell you Audience Network, we do not want our ads being served on Audience Network. That allows your ads to be served on third-party websites that Meta has a relationship with, that they have a pixel installed, that your ad could get populated there. You could be shown on different apps and different things like that, that they kind of outsource it. So we for sure want that one checked, but you wanna even go down here to placement controls, click this little edit button, and then move through each and every single little section. Now you can look here on this one. I chose to uncheck Facebook right column. That's questionable. You could potentially decide to keep it. That's when it shows up kind of in the, the side corner when someone's on desktop. Um, then I have Threads excluded from here because Threads is their newer platform. It's just not ready for lead generation results. I don't want them spending my ad money and learning about what works and what doesn't work on Threads with my money. Then we've got Stories and Reels, and this is a really popular placement. This is the vertical, uh, video ads, which kind of brings me to So when you are running an ad, you wanna make sure that you optimize it for each placement. That's just fancy language for we wanna give the algorithm a square ad that it can use in newsfeeds, and then we wanna replace that image whenever it comes to these placements in the ad creative setup for an image that's going to work in those actual feeds. Then we're gonna scroll down, and this is a big one that you absolutely need to have unchecked. For any type of lead gen, and that is in-stream for Reels. So let me show you what that looks like. Let me see if they're gonna show me what this looks like. Okay. Right here. Do you see over to the right? So this person is watching the video of this cat, and then at the bottom of the Reel, they have something that pops up and that's the actual ad. Now I can see why this works for e-commerce. Like if I forgot about a pair of shoes that I almost checked out with yesterday and they show me the shoes, I'm like, oh yeah, I want these shoes. Cool. But if it pops up here and it's like, by the way, don't forget to attend this estate planning workshop, like it's not gonna be very effective. Then we wanna get rid of apps and sites. And then there's this new little sneaky snake feature that they have on here that they pre-check, and it's right here. Allow limited spending to excluded placements. We will aim to spend around 5% of your budget. In the placements that you tell them not to serve. I'm sorry, the answer, if you wanna know, can I waste just 5% of your ad spend? No, Meta, you cannot waste just 5% of my ad spend. So those are the placements that you wanna make sure that you exclude and include. Number 5 is don't be sporadic. Don't be a sporadic ad account. Don't go in and start making lots of changes, lots of tweaks, lots of adjustments once you launch a campaign. It's one of the fastest way is for Meta to go, okay, this is an account that I can't count on and I can't set up what's going to happen in Q next. I can't pre-plan, I can't optimize the budget, I can't optimize which ads I'm going to serve because this person be turning on and off ads, they be changing things, they be updating the budget, they be decreasing the budget. Just don't do that, especially if you're brand new. Give the account some time to run your ads and to actually collect some data for you. Now, if you're enrolled in my course insurance, click to close. You'll hear I rarely tell you to turn off an ad. I will only tell you to turn off an ad if it has gotten 3x the ad spend for how much you want to pay per lead. So like I always say, a realistic approach whenever you first start running your own ads is you should be able to generate leads for around what you're buying them from a lead vendor very quickly. Say like for Medicare, we want to get you leads like between $20 and $30 $3 from the very beginning. And then the goal, and most of the agents enrolled in my course are generating them for like $6 to $8. But for that very first campaign, we need to just let her go. We need to just let it serve. And if for some reason one ad is taking all the ad spend and we've reached where it's spent 3x what our ideal cost per lead is, we'll turn it off cuz we'll be like, okay, no, no more serving that ad. But for the most part, the algorithm is gonna go Oh, this one isn't working, and it'll pivot to your other ones. And we can at least collect some data and be able to make then an educated decision of what we're going to do for the next one. So don't be a sporadic ad account. Just sit back. It's one of the hardest things, even in today's day and age, like with all my experience, when I'm running ads for myself, I like look at 'em all the time and I wanna like think about if I should do things or not. Don't do it, girl. Just let 'em serve. Let the algorithm like kind of do its thing and don't be a sporadic ad account. And last but not least, don't give up. And I mean this, you may be one decision away from having a campaign that completely changes the trajectory of your business. You might be one decision away from having a campaign that creates leads on autopilot that you know that you can convert. Don't give up. I am telling you, there are so many agents, there are so many entrepreneurs, and even people that are just in all sorts of different industries that they start running ads and they expect to be a unicorn, to be a magical creature that just automatically like gets the leads from the very, very beginning. It's most likely not going to happen for you. What I can promise you is that no campaign is a waste. When you are collecting the data, there always something that we can do with that data. We can actually break it down and we can figure out exactly what part of your ad isn't doing its job. We can see, is your CPM super high? Can we do some things to actually control the CPM and get a little bit of a discount from Facebook? Are people actually clicking on your ad? More importantly, are they clicking on the link? Okay, if they click on the link but they don't convert, how can we optimize your form or your landing page to get more conversions and so on. There are so many things that we can do with the data. And the reality is lead vendors are not doing anything special. They're not. In fact, their ads, I'm gonna say it, their ads suck. Like most of them, even the super reputable ones that talk about how like amazing their lead quality is. No, I've seen your ads. No. And they are not amazing and they're not attracting quality leads. And if you are on the other end trying to dial these leads, then you've probably experienced it. I'm telling you, especially in my course where I kind of show you some lead vendor ads and I show you how you can spy on all of your competitors and you can see what's actually out there, you will see you can do this. They are not doing anything special. And the sooner that you start, the quicker that your account is going to optimize. And even if you're not ready to start running ads yet, you can still take action now by actually posting on your page, getting some reps in, starting to build a little bit of an audience, show the algorithm what you're about. But please listen to me whenever I say you can do this. Don't give up. If you made it to the end of this video, I want to say to you, trust me, you are more than capable of learning this skill set. You are more than capable of breaking free from lead vendors and being able to take control of your lead generation and be able to market yourself and grow your business all under your own control. I know because I have helped thousands of agents and worked closely with hundreds of agents who have gone from not considering themselves tech savvy to being able to fully take control of their marketing. It just takes the desire and the willingness to learn this skill set, and I'm here to tell you that you can do that. I promise. Lead vendors, they're not doing Anything special that you can't do. So if you have any questions, drop them below. I read every single one, and I'll see you in the next video.