Playbooks/Marketing plan
Not a list of ideas. A cost ceiling derived from your own commission, and a way to test every channel against it.
What should a life insurance marketing plan include?
A target cost per issued policy, derived from your own first-year commission; the sources you will use, ranked by what each actually costs; the conversion rates you currently achieve at each step between contact and issue; and a date to review it. A plan without a cost ceiling is a list of activities, and a list of activities cannot tell you which one to stop.
Most marketing plans for insurance agencies are lists of tactics with a budget attached. The trouble with a list is that it has no stopping rule. Everything on it can be justified, nothing on it can be cut, and at the end of the year the only available conclusion is that more should have been spent.
A plan built the other way round — starting from a number and testing channels against it — makes the same decisions answerable.
Take first-year commission on a typical policy. Decide what share of it you are willing to spend acquiring the client. That share is a judgement about how long policies stay on your books: an agency with strong persistency can spend more, because the renewals arrive.
If a policy pays $1,200 in year one and you will spend a third, the ceiling is $400 per issued policy. That number does the work for the rest of the year.
Almost every agency measures one conversion rate — spend divided by policies — which hides where the money goes. There are three steps and each divides independently:
A funnel that looks tolerable in aggregate usually has one step doing all the damage, and you cannot fix a step you have not separated. This is also the cheapest measurement in the plan: three counts a month.
Now every channel has a pass/fail rather than an opinion. Run the numbers for each and compare to your ceiling.
Paid search is the clearest example, because its price is public. Across 88 life insurance lead keywords in Google Keyword Planner for the year to August 2026, the median top-of-page bid was $16.81 a click. Carried through a 1% click-to-policy funnel that is roughly $1,681 per issued policy — four times a $400 ceiling. The figures are here.
That does not mean paid search is unusable. It means one of three things has to change before it is: the conversion rates, the commission, or the channel. Which is exactly the conversation a plan is supposed to produce.
With a ceiling in hand the sequence stops being a matter of taste. Ranked by cost, the order is roughly: your existing book, orphan accounts, referrals, professional partners, organic content, paid leads.
The first two sit so far under any reasonable ceiling that they are hard to argue with — the media cost is zero and the contact details are already on file. Most agencies reach them last, because they arrive only when someone goes and looks.
One page. A ceiling, a ranked list of channels with a measured cost against each, the three conversion rates as they stand today, and a review date. Anything longer is usually describing activity rather than deciding anything.
September is Life Insurance Awareness Month, and it reliably produces a spike in published marketing ideas. It is a genuine hook for outreach that needs a reason to exist, and it costs nothing to use.
It is not a plan. A month of activity against no cost ceiling produces the same unanswerable question in October that it did in August — which is whether any of it worked.
Four things: a target cost per issued policy derived from your own commission, the sources you will use ranked by what each costs, the conversion rates you currently achieve at each step, and a review date. A plan without a cost target is a list of activities, and a list of activities cannot tell you when to stop doing one.
Work backwards from first-year commission rather than forwards from a percentage of revenue. If a policy pays $1,200 in year one and you are willing to spend a third of it acquiring one, your ceiling is $400 per issued policy. Every channel then either fits under that number or it does not.
The question is usually asked one level too late. Most published ideas work for somebody; the useful filter is which ones produce a policy under your cost ceiling. Ranking channels by cost per issued policy turns an unorderable list of tactics into a sequence.
Organic content does, slowly and compoundingly, because it answers questions people are already typing. Paid search works but is expensive — a median top-of-page bid of $16.81 across life insurance lead keywords — and should be entered with a known cost ceiling rather than a monthly budget.
Not advice. This page describes how these situations generally work. Policy terms, carrier rules and state regulations vary, and the governing document is always the contract. Confirm anything you act on with the carrier, and take compliance questions to your own counsel or compliance officer.
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