The Insurance Marketing Playbook
The Insurance Marketing Playbook is your go-to podcast for insurance agents who want to attract more clients, close more policies, and scale their business with modern marketing strategies. Each week, we break down proven tips on digital marketing for insurance agents, including SEO, social media, email campaigns, Google Business Profile optimization, paid ads, and referral systems.
Hosted by Shelby McFarland, The Marketing Broker, who specializes in helping insurance agents grow, this show gives you actionable marketing strategies designed specifically for the insurance industry—no fluff, just play-by-play tactics you can implement right away.
Whether you’re a new agent building your book of business or an experienced producer looking to modernize your marketing, this podcast is your competitive edge. Subscribe to The Insurance Marketing Playbook and learn how to generate quality leads, build your brand, and grow your insurance agency with confidence.
The Insurance Marketing Playbook
Free Leads From Google, Explained
Most prospects judge your insurance agency before they ever call—by what they see on Google. We open the playbook for turning your Google Business Profile into a free, always‑on lead machine that builds trust, ranks locally, and converts searchers into inbound calls.
We start with the essentials: claim and verify your listing, choose the right categories, and add services that match how people actually search. Then we layer on the signals Google and humans love—fresh photos, monthly posts, accurate hours, and a clean description with local keywords like home insurance in Little Rock or life insurance near me. You’ll hear why reusing your best social content as Google posts compounds visibility, and how a simple cadence can push you into the map pack where decisions happen fast.
Reviews take center stage. We share a frictionless system for asking after every positive moment, complete with QR code stickers that drive customers straight to your review form. Learn how to respond to praise with specifics, defuse negative or bot reviews without losing your cool, and repurpose five‑star quotes into social proof that travels across Facebook and Instagram. We also talk about crediting team members named in reviews to boost morale and service quality. Finally, we dig into local keyword research, the Q&A feature that pre‑answers buyer fears, and the ripple effect across Maps, Apple Maps, Yelp, and more.
Ready to turn searchers into callers? Follow the steps, publish one new post and one new photo, and ask for three reviews this week. If this helped, follow the show, leave a quick rating, and share this with a fellow agent who needs more inbound leads.
Hey y'all, what's up? It's Shelby here with the insurance marketing playbook. I love that you decided to come back and listen to more marketing tips and tricks for your insurance agency, whether you're a nationwide franchise or you are an independent agent, or maybe you're someone that works for an agent and you're in sales. Today we're gonna talk about the importance of your Google business profile. It's literally the free lead magnet that you need. People will literally visit your website, they'll Google you, they'll do all the things before they actually call you to do business with you. And you should know this because I know you're the same way. I'm that way. I love to look at Google reviews, I love to look at websites and social media pages all before I actually visit like a restaurant or a business. And with my insurance agents across the nation, it's so important that our Google Business profile is optimized. It is a free tool, guys, literally 100% free. So if you're not utilizing it, when you get done with this episode, I want you to go create it and I will walk you through it in a minute. But we want to make sure our Google Business Profile is utilized. It is a free lead magnet. The main points of your Google Business profile is you're gonna claim and verify it. Boom, it's yours. You're gonna add your services to it, which is obvious, right? You're an insurance agency. We're gonna add photos as well as monthly posts. I like to optimize all of my business profiles at the end of every month. I'll take the information that we've shared on social media and I will add those graphics as photos and posts to the Google Business profile. This creates a consistency on Google and they see that you are active and trying to interact and engage with the people that are Googling you. Um, and then you also can ask for reviews. The best way to optimize our search engine stuff with our business is getting those Google reviews. Every time somebody comes into your office for a payment, every time you exchange a great email back and forth, I want you to ask for Google reviews. I actually have created stickers for a lot of my insurance agents, and it is a QR code that goes directly to their Google business profile. They have their clients scan it, sorry, customers, customers scan it, and they will go directly to Google and leave a review before they even leave the office. The importance of this is because we will always have those people that are skeptical, right? Nobody likes insurance, it's something we have to have, it's a boring topic. I know creating content for insurance companies is not my absolute favorite thing in the world to do, but it is a necessity for all of them to have a great business and to bring in leads. So to add to those Google reviews, I want you to make sure that you're responding to them. And let's talk about if we get a negative review. We all know they're coming. If you've already dealt with one, then you understand the hurdle that you have to go over to make sure that you are nice to them. There is nothing more in this world that I love to be, and that is a Karen, y'all. I love to be a Karen. In fact, we all know about the Karen ball snacker thing that went on a TikTok. Yeah, that's kind of my nickname with my friends. Um, but I absolutely love to be a Karen, and it's hard for me not to be whenever someone leaves a negative review about one of my clients. I actually have to go to ChatGBT, write all my thoughts out, and go, okay, I need you to write this in a professional manner so I can copy and paste it to a Google review. Because I need to make sure that we are always professional, and you have to be professional too. With some of my state farm agents, I have seen where there are some scams, and the scammers, for some reason, they love to go on there and leave negative reviews for no reason. Some of them will just leave like a one-star, some of them will be like a one-star, and then like a complete lie of a story that doesn't even make sense. Uh, the first time it ever happened, I thought it was like one of our competitors, but then I realized after researching a little bit, there's actually bots out there that do that stuff, and I'm not really sure what the reason is, honestly. Um, but it happens. So, even to those bots or fake reviews, we have to be kind. And the ones that give us five-star reviews, we definitely want to be kind, right? So then we take those reviews and we share them to social media. You can create a cute graphic, you can put it on your page, on your Instagram, on your Facebook page, so people can see like those good things that are coming from your clients and customers. If you are an employee of an insurance agent, ask your people to name you directly. That's always really cool to see people's names in a Google review. I know that if I have a waitress that is an amazing waitress at a restaurant, I will ask for her name and I'll go to Google and name her directly. I've also done this with a bank before. Um, I had a credit server or credit union that helped me with a loan a few months ago, and the guy was amazing. He was brand new to the bank, and I was bragging on him, and he was like, Thank you so much, I appreciate it. And so I went to Google and named him directly, and they ended up like giving him credit in like a sales team meeting. And so, if you're an agent listening to this and you see an employee name on a Google review, I definitely recommend giving kudos to them during a sales agent meeting because if you don't, then it doesn't seem as important and it really, really is important. So let's go back to our Google business profile and how we can optimize it. You want to add keywords to it like life insurance, health insurance, um, if you do health insurance, or um homeowners insurance, but I want you to add the city. So I'm located in Little Rock, Arkansas. So life insurance in Little Rock, Arkansas. There are unlimited amounts of keywords that you can put on your Google business profile. I'll even give you a free little tip here. You can chat GPT keywords that are going on, like keywords that are popular in your area for your industry, or you can search Google Keyword Finder and you will see the industry keywords that is working in your area. So I recommend using those keywords on your Google Business profile to um claim those keywords and to actually get them in your area because the Google Business Profile also connects to like Apple Maps and MapQuest and right MapQuest, yes, it's still a thing. Um, Yellow Pages, uh Yelp, all that kind of stuff. It connects to all of it. So I want to make sure that we're using the right keywords so that way everything is bleeding into the search engine like we need it to. I will say from a personal experience, optimizing my agents' Google Business Profiles has been amazing. In fact, it's a free service that I give them on top of social media management. One of my clients even doubled their inbound claw uh calls just by optimizing it. It was within the first 60 days of me adding pictures, which I told you are the graphics to the um Google Business profile itself. You can also do like a question-answer type situation when you when you're on there, you can look around and play with it. But if you have any questions that people ask you a lot of, you can answer them on there so that way people can see even more information because they want as much information as possible before they call you and they want to make sure that they're not getting screwed over. You know what I mean? So I hope this kind of educated you a little bit about your Google Business profile and how it is a great free lead magnet for you. People are gonna check it out before they even um give you a call, and so I hope you take the time to do it now. It'll take 15 minutes and we will talk to each other on the next episode. Bye guys.