Solved: Advice on generating insurance leads with TikTok ads

Hi there,

Thanks for getting in touch. I saw your query about using TikTok for insurance leads and I'm happy to give you some of my initial thoughts and a bit of guidance based on my experience running paid ad campaigns for service-based businesses. It's a common problem trying to figure out which channel is right, and it can get expensive fast if you're on the wrong one.

What you're experiencing with TikTok isn't surprising, and you're right to question if it's the best place for what you're trying to achieve. Let's break down why that might be and what a more effective approach could look like for you.

We'll need to look at the channel choice...

First off, lets talk about the platform itself. TikTok is an entertainment-first platform. People go there to be amused, to laugh, to watch dance trends, and to switch off for a few minutes. They are in a passive, lean-back mindset. They are not, for the most part, in a mindset to think about complex, serious financial decisions like purchasing insurance. This is the fundamental disconnect you're likely running up against. Insurance is a considered purchase; it requires thought, trust, and a clear understanding of a present or future need. That's a very difficult message to get across in a 15-second video sandwiched between a dancing cat and a cooking hack.

The entire dynamic of TikTok is built on speed and fleeting attention. You have literally one or two seconds to grab someone's attention before they swipe away. If your ad isn't immediately entertaining, shocking, or visually spectacular, it's invisible. While this model can work wonders for impulse-buy e-commerce products or viral brand awareness campaigns, it's a massive uphill battle for a service like insurance. You're trying to interrupt someone's entertainment to talk about risk mitigation and financial planning. It's a tough sell.

I remember one campaign that had some success on TikTok, but it was for a very simple, low-cost gadget insurance, and the ads were structured as funny skits about breaking your phone. It was simple to understand and the commitment was low. If you're selling life insurance, critical illness cover, or complex business policies, you simply can't distill that value proposition into a format that works for the platform without trivialising it, which in turn can damage trust. So while it's not strictly impossible, I'd argue that your marketing budget and effort are almost definately better spent on platforms where the user's intent is more aligned with what your offering.

This leads to the most important concept in paid advertising, and it’s the one that should guide your entire strategy from here on out: user intent.

I'd say you need to focus on user intent...

Think about your potential customers not as one big group, but as two distinct camps based on their intent:

1. The Active Searchers (High Intent): These are people who have a problem and are actively looking for a solution right now. They've realised they need insurance, maybe due to a life event or a change in circumstances, and they are going to Google and typing in things like "life insurance for new parents," "public liability insurance for my business," or "best car insurance quotes uk." These people are golden. They are the lowest-hanging fruit because they've already done half the work for you; they've identified their own need. Your only job is to show up and convince them you're the right person to solve it.

2. The Passive Audience (Low Intent): These are the people you find on platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. They might be perfect candidates for your insurance products—they fit the demographic, they have the need—but they aren't actively thinking about it. They're scrolling through photos of their friends' holidays or watching videos. Your job here is much harder. You first have to interrupt them, then educate them about a problem they weren't thinking about, and then convince them to act on it. It's a much longer and more complex journey.

For most service-based businesses, especially one like insurance, you should always start with the high-intent audience. It’s more efficient, the cost per lead is often clearer, and the sales cycle is shorter. The best platform for this, hands down, is Google Ads.

With Google Search ads, you're not trying to create demand; you're capturing existing demand. You can bid on those exact keyword phrases your ideal customer is searching for. You can target keywords like:

• -> "Life insurance over 40"
• -> "Income protection insurance quote"
• -> "Business insurance for contractors"
• -> "Home insurance agent near me"

You can even add phone call extensions so people can call you directly from the ad, which is brilliant for generating immediate leads. I remember running a campaign for an HVAC company in a competitive area, and while their leads cost around $60 each, they are high-quality, high-intent leads that often turn into valuable jobs. Your cost will be somewhere in that spectrum, depending on the competitiveness of your specific insurance market, but these will be people who are actively looking for help. This is a far more reliable way to build a pipeline of leads than hoping to strike gold on TikTok.

You probably should rethink your social media approach...

Now, this doesn't mean you should abandon social media entirely. Your instinct that Facebook is a better channel than TikTok is correct. Facebook (and by extension, Instagram) offers far more sophisticated targeting tools that allow you to reach that 'passive audience' in a much more intelligent way. But you need to go in with the right strategy. On social media, you are an educator and a problem-solver first, and a salesperson second.

The key to success on Meta (Facebook & Instagram) is building a proper advertising funnel that guides people from being unaware of their need, to considering a solution, to finally becoming a lead. I typically structure this using a ToFu/MoFu/BoFu approach (Top of Funnel, Middle of Funnel, Bottom of Funnel).

ToFu: Reaching New, Cold Audiences

This is where you find new people who've never heard of you. Your goal isn't to sell them a policy on the first ad. It's to make them problem-aware. The targeting here is everything. You don't want to just target "everyone aged 25-55." You need to get specific. This is where Facebook's detailed targeting comes in. You can build audiences based on:

• -> Demographics & Life Events: This is huge for insurance. You can target people who are 'Newly Wed', 'Newly Engaged', 'New Parents', or 'Recent Homebuyers'. These are all major life triggers for purchasing insurance. I remember when I was running a campaign for a life insurance client, we saw great results focusing on new parents aged 30-40. It just makes sense; they have a new, powerful reason to protect their family's future.
• -> Interests: Be careful here. Targeting a broad interest like "Finance" is useless. It’s too big. You need to think about the specific pages, tools, or public figures your ideal client might follow. For example, instead of "Business," you might target people who have an interest in "QuickBooks" software or are administrators of a "Facebook Business Page." This helps you narrow down to actual business owners. For personal insurance, you could target interests related to high-end property websites if you're selling home insurance, or parenting blogs for life insurance.
• -> Lookalike Audiences: Once you have some data, this becomes your most powerful tool. You can take a list of your best existing customers and ask Facebook to find millions of other people who share similar characteristics. You can also create lookalikes of people who have become leads, or even just people who have visited your website. The more high-quality your source audience, the better the lookalike will be.

MoFu & BoFu: Nurturing and Converting Warm Audiences

This is where the real magic happens, and it's something many people neglect. Not everyone who clicks your first ad is ready to become a lead. In fact, most won't be. That's fine. The goal of your ToFu ads is also to build your retargeting pools. These are your MoFu (Middle of Funnel) and BoFu (Bottom of Funnel) audiences.

These are people who have already shown some interest. They've engaged with you in some way, and your job is to stay in front of them and gently nudge them towards taking action. Your audiences here would be:

• -> People who have visited your website in the last 30/60/90 days.
• -> People who watched a certain percentage (e.g., 50%) of one of your video ads.
• -> People who engaged with your Facebook or Instagram page.
• -> Crucially, people who started filling out your lead or quote form but didn't complete it (often called 'abandoned carts' in an e-commerce context).

The ads you show these warm audiences can be much more direct. You can show them testimonials from happy clients, remind them of the benefits of getting a quote, or even address common objections. Because they already have some context about who you are, these ads are far more effective and typically have a much lower cost per lead than your cold, ToFu campaigns.

You'll need ads that actually connect...

Targeting the right people is half the battle; the other half is showing them the right message. Your ad creative (the image/video and the text) needs to be tailored to the audience's temperature.

For your cold (ToFu) audiences, your ads should focus on the 'why', not the 'what'. Don't lead with policy features or industry jargon. Lead with the emotional benefit, the peace of mind. Your ad should answer the question "What's in it for me?". The goal is to stop their scroll and make them think.

For your warm (MoFu/BoFu) audiences, you can be more direct. They already know they have a problem; your ad should position you as the clear solution. This is where you can build trust and urgency.

Here are a few examples of how you could structure your ads for different stages of the funnel. You'd want to test different combinations of images, videos, and copy to see what resonates.

The key here is testing. You'd run multiple versions of these ads within each campaign to find the winning combinations that bring in leads at the lowest cost. And always, always optimise your campaigns for 'Conversions' or 'Leads', not for 'Traffic' or 'Engagement'. You need to tell Facebook exactly what you want people to do.

We'll need to look at your conversion process...

This is a point so many people miss. You can have the best ads in the world, targeting the perfect audience, but if you send them to a confusing or untrustworthy website, you will waste every single penny. Your website's landing page is the final and most critical part of the puzzle. Its only job is to convert that visitor into a lead.

When someone clicks your ad, they should land on a page that is a seamless continuation of that ad. If the ad promised a "Free Life Insurance Quote for New Parents," the headline on the page should say exactly that. The page needs to be clean, professional, and built for a single purpose. This means:

• -> No Distractions: Remove complicated navigation menus, sidebars, or links to other parts of your site. Give them one path forward: filling out the form.
• -> Persuasive Copy: The text should reinforce the benefits you mentioned in the ad. Use bullet points to highlight the key advantages of working with you or the policy you're offering.
• -> A Simple Form: Only ask for the absolute minimum information you need to generate a quote or start a conversation. Name, email, phone number. That's it. You can gather more details later. A long, intimidating form is a massive conversion killer.
• -> Strong Trust Signals: This is vital for insurance. People are giving you sensitive information and trusting you with their financial security. Your page must build confidence. This includes a professional photo of yourself, testimonials from happy clients, logos of any official bodies you're accredited by, and clear contact information. Without these, your page will feel anonymous and untrustworthy, and people will leave.

Think of your ad spend as buying traffic. Think of your landing page as the net you use to catch that traffic. If your net has holes in it, you're just pouring water (and money) right through it. Fixing the landing page can often have a bigger impact on your cost per lead than any changes you make to the ads themselves.

I'd say you need realistic expectations on cost...

So, what should this all cost? It's the big question. As I mentioned, the answer varies. For B2C services, we see a wide range. A lead could be as low as £10 or as high as £60+, especially in a competitive market like insurance. Your actual Cost Per Lead (CPL) will depend on your specific insurance products, your location's competitiveness, and how well you implement the targeting, creative, and landing page strategies we've discussed.

The important thing is to approach it with a clear budget and a data-driven mindset. Don't just throw £20 a day at it and hope for the best. I usually recommend a starting test budget of at least £1,000 to £2,000 per month. This might sound like a lot, but it's the minimum you need to get enough data back from the platforms to make intelligent decisions. With a smaller budget, you'll be waiting weeks to know if an ad is working or not, and you can't test things effectively.

Let's do some simple maths to illustrate:

From here, your return on investment depends on your internal numbers. If you get 30 leads, how many can you speak to? Of those, how many can you convert into a client? And what is the average lifetime value of that client? If you can close just 10% of those leads (3 new clients) and each client is worth £2,000 over their lifetime, you've turned £1,500 into £6,000. That's the power of a well-oiled advertising machine.

This is the main advice I have for you:

To pull this all together, here’s a summary of the strategic shift I'd recommend for you. This is a framework that moves away from speculative, low-ROI tactics on platforms like TikTok and towards a reliable, scalable system for generating qualified insurance leads.

So, where do we go from here?

I hope this has given you a clearer understanding of why TikTok might not be the best fit for your insurance business and how you can approach paid advertising in a more strategic and effective way. It's all about understanding user intent, targeting the right people, crafting compelling ads, and optimising your conversion process.

If you'd like to discuss this in more detail, I offer a free initial consultation where we can review your current strategy and account together. This usually gives potential clients a taste of the expertise they'll see going into their project if they decide to work with us.

Let me know if you'd like to set up a call. I'd be happy to help you build a paid advertising system that generates consistent, high-quality leads for your insurance business.

Best regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh