Shauna Thoresen recommends Meta lead-form ads over direct-to-Messenger ads for insurance agents. Lead forms let you collect phone numbers, sync leads into your CRM automatically, and follow up by call or text instead of keeping prospects on the platform. This feature launched mid-2025 and only works through Meta's Ads Manager, not third-party tools.
Chapters
This agent asks, have you seen insurance agents have success with DM ads? He has seen my YouTube videos. Thank you for watching. And he's seen that I primarily teach agents to utilize Meta lead forms, and he's just curious about DMs. Here's kind of the thing about social media ads. So it is all disruptive marketing, right? So people are just minding their own business, normally watching some stupid videos. We're watching cat videos, we're watching baby elephant videos, maybe even some jumping spider videos. I went through a phase. And all of a sudden we disrupt them and we get their attention and we want to start talking about whatever it is that we have to offer. It's almost like we are in a noisy nightclub and we need to do what we can to capture their attention. Now, a direct-to-Messenger ad is kind of sort of like trying to have a sales conversation while you're out on the dance floor. There's so many different distractions. We are now locked into having to stay on the Meta platform, We can't do any other different sequence follow-ups, and it's gonna be a little bit more confusing and convoluted. A Meta lead form is like saying, hey, we've connected on the dance floor, can I have your phone number? I'm gonna call you tomorrow. We can still kind of hang out and connect on the platform, but now I can reach out to you and we can have a private conversation, not in the middle of all of the craziness that happens in a nightclub. DM ads can be somewhat effective if we're working at the very top of the funnel. So it's probably people that have already heard of you, or we have a really hard-pressing incentive. So it's like near the end of AEP and it's like you need to reach out or else you're not going to be able to get your Medicare plan all worked out. What is so much better is to use a Meta lead form. We make sure it's SMS verified and Meta has a newish feature that happened in the middle of 2025 where we can check a box and once the user completes the lead form, we have their information now in our CRM and in our system. It then opens up a Messenger chat. So now you have a lifeline. If we can't get them to answer the phone or to answer a text, we can actually reach out to them via DM that way. This is a feature that you can only use if you are running ads in the Ads Manager. If you're running your ads and GoHighLevel through your CRM, which I do not recommend, you have lots of little limitations. It's like you're riding a bike with training wheels and you'll never be able to take those training wheels off. So I teach agents, we want to grab their attention. We want to remind them of the pain that they're going through. We want to share how we can remove that pain for them, collect their information for the lowest cost that we possibly can, and then we can start marketing to them off the platform. If you have any other questions, don't hesitate to ask.
