Hiring a marketer for an insurance agency: what to ask

Early March is a sensible time for an agency principal to sit through marketing pitches. January renewals are written, the Medicare Advantage Open Enrollment Period closes on March 31, and the spring run of home closings has not started yet. It is also when the pitches arrive, because every firm with a “financial services” package knows your calendar has a gap in it.

Most of those firms can build a website and run a Google campaign. Far fewer understand that insurance is one of the few local businesses where the ad, the form and the phone call each carry their own rules, and that a slip in any of them lands on your license rather than on theirs. Here are the questions we would want you to ask any firm, including us, before signing anything.

Who writes the consent language on your quote forms?

A lot of agents heard in early 2025 that the consent rules had gone away. What actually happened is narrower. On January 24, 2025, the 11th Circuit vacated the part of the FCC’s 2023 order known as the one-to-one consent rule, which would have stopped a single consent from covering calls by more than one seller.

The older rule stands. Under 47 CFR 64.1200, a telemarketing call made with an autodialer or an artificial or prerecorded voice needs the prior express written consent of the person called, which the regulation defines as a written agreement bearing that person’s signature. Your quote forms are where that agreement gets made, or fails to.

So ask the firm:

• Who drafts the consent wording on each form, and will they show it to you before launch?
• Where is the record of each consent stored, with its date, time and the page it came from?
• If you buy leads too, how will they keep bought records apart from the ones your own forms collect?

A firm that answers “the form tool handles that” has not thought about it.

What do they know about Medicare marketing rules?

If you sell Medicare Advantage or Part D plans for more than one organization, CMS treats you as a third-party marketing organization, and your marketing firm is working inside that status whether it knows it or not. The rules are specific:

• The disclaimer. 42 CFR 422.2267 requires the TPMO statement, with the number of organizations and plans you represent, on your website, in email and chat, in print and TV ads, and spoken on sales calls before any benefits are discussed.
• Contact. 42 CFR 422.2264 bans unsolicited calls, texts, voicemails, door-to-door visits and direct messages on social media, including calls based on referrals. Mail and email are allowed, as long as every email offers an opt-out.
• Records. Sales calls must be recorded in full and kept for six years, and a Scope of Appointment, valid for 12 months, has to be agreed and recorded before the sales conversation.
• Lead sharing. Since October 1, 2024, beneficiary data may pass from one marketing organization to another only with prior express written consent that names each recipient.

Ask the firm to point at the exact spot where the disclaimer will sit in your chat widget, your email footer and your landing page. If they need to look up what a TPMO is, they are learning on your book.

How will they run Facebook and Instagram ads?

Since January 21, 2025, Meta has required advertisers in the US to use its financial products and services special ad category for financial ads, and insurance products are named in it. Homeowners insurance sits under the Housing category instead. Either way, Meta removes age, gender and ZIP code targeting, along with lookalike and saved audiences.

That makes one pitch easy to spot. Anyone promising to show your ads to “people turning 65 in your ZIP codes” on Facebook and Instagram is describing targeting Meta does not allow for your ads. The workable approach is creative that people sort themselves into, such as a headline for people new to Medicare this year, sent to a page that carries the disclaimer and collects consent properly.

Do they know your state’s advertising rules?

Producers are licensed state by state, many of them in several states through NIPR’s licensing system, and each state’s insurance department has its own view of advertising. Two examples show how specific it gets.

California Insurance Code 1725.5 requires your license number on business cards, written price quotations and print ads distributed only in California, in type at least as large as the phone number or 12-point, along with the word “Insurance”. Emails about licensed activity must carry the license number too. Florida Statute 626.9541 treats untrue, deceptive or misleading insurance advertising as an unfair practice, bars life and health agents from calling coverage “free” or “no cost” in ads, and caps promotional gifts at a total of $100 per person in a calendar year.

A good firm asks which states you hold licenses in before it writes a word, and keeps your ads from running where you cannot write the policy.

What should the first 90 days and the monthly report show?

For an agency, the cheapest new business is usually in the book you already have, so a sensible plan starts there: renewal reviews, cross-sell to auto and home households, a referral ask and review requests. Then tracking and consent. Then your Google profile, because shoppers check it. In BrightLocal’s February 2026 survey of consumers, fewer than 20 reviews was enough for 47% to rule a business out, and 74% said only reviews from the last three months count. Paid search comes after that.

The numbers explain why the order matters. WordStream by LocaliQ’s 2025 benchmarks put the median Finance & Insurance search conversion rate at 2.55%, from a year of data ending March 2025, with a median cost per lead of $83.93. Clicks are not the hard part. Turning a comparison shopper into a bound policy is.

So the report should show, every month:

• Leads by source, split into bought, referred and your own.
• How many of each were reached, quoted and bound.
• Cost per bound policy by source, not cost per lead.
• For Medicare, how many calls were recorded and whether each had a Scope of Appointment.

What to do this month

1. Pull up every quote form on your site and read the consent wording out loud. If it does not say who may call and how, rewrite it.
2. If you sell Medicare, check that the TPMO disclaimer appears on the site, in your email signature and in your chat tool, with current numbers.
3. Put your license number in every email signature, whether or not your state requires it.
4. Write down the states you are licensed in and hand that list to whoever runs your ads.
5. Ask your current marketing firm for last quarter’s leads by source and how many became bound policies.

We have written up how agencies like yours find new households, and where the rules shape that, on our insurance agency page. If your Google profile is the weakest link today, start with how we handle the Google Business Profile work, since that is where most shoppers check you first.