Building Connections on Nextdoor to Drive Referrals

The Nextdoor app gives insurance agencies an opportunity to connect with their local community and generate leads in their own neighborhoods.

Nextdoor is a popular social media platform that helps neighbors connect and share information about what’s happening in their community. It also has a local business page, which offers exciting opportunities to find leads and take your insurance sales to the next level.

Nextdoor combines the outreach tactics of social media with the familiarity of your own neighborhood. As a result, insurance agents get to make contacts and strengthen their relationships with people in their local area.

In this article, you’ll learn everything you need to know about this local social media platform, including the platform’s purpose, how to set up your page, and how to start generating business with Nextdoor.

What is Nextdoor?

Nextdoor was built to encourage communication within neighborhoods.

While borrowing sugar or chatting over the fence was once commonplace, contemporary culture prioritizes busyness—even polarizing different demographics. This is where the Nextdoor app comes in, helping neighbors get to know one another, exchange local news, and support their communities.

Nextdoor is a social media platform that’s restricted to certain geographic areas. When a new user sets up an account, they go through a verification process to confirm your address and identity. Then, the app places them in a group with people who live in the same neighborhood. As such, newsfeed and business posts will all be directly from verified neighbors

What is the Purpose of Nextdoor?

The core purpose of Nextdoor is to foster a sense of community among neighbors.

But each person and business uses the app in different ways. For example, some enjoy the social aspect of meeting their neighbors, while others use the ‘For Sale and Free’ section to buy and sell goods. Additionally, the app lets neighbors organize community events, create polls, pass along recommendations, and post alerts.

By creating a digital platform to forge connections, Nextdoor provides accessible and authentic information. Part of this includes helping local businesses contact their surrounding communities and helping larger brands offer localized services.

As an insurance agency, you can set up a local business page to promote yourself within your own neighborhood.

The platform is great for running localized ads and offering special deals. Moreover, Nextdoor helps insurance agencies foster relationships and develop leads within their own neighborhoods. Before you know it, you’ll be quoting insurance policies for the same people you see at the grocery store.

How to Get Your Nextdoor Local Page

Using the Nextdoor app can grow your business. However, to begin with, you need to get onto the same (local) page. From a neighbor’s perspective, your business page is their first interaction with your agency—and you want to make a good first impression!

Here are a few tips on setting up a memorable business page:

• Introduce yourself. As with any social media app, Nextdoor provides an opportunity to tell your story and develop your online presence.
• Provide up-to-date contact information. Make yourself easy to reach. The app has a built-in messaging service, but you can also include your business contact info, such as address, email, and hours.
• Add photos. Feature a cover photo, logo, and photos of you doing business. A picture’s worth a thousand words, and putting a face to a name goes a long way toward developing relationships.
• Add category tags. Help people find your business when they’re searching for insurance agencies. You can add up to ten tags for your business page.
• Interact with your community. Respond to messages, comment on relevant posts, and build your reputation. Many individual Nextdoor members use the app to recommend local businesses. Having an accessible local Business Page will make it easy for your followers to engage with your business and show their loyalty.
• Create an individual profile too. Join the app as a neighbor as well. This will help you keep a pulse on what’s important in your neighborhood and see how your business appears.

How to Get Insurance Leads From Nextdoor

Leads, leads, leads…most businesses rely heavily on them!

Developing business prospects is key to running a successful insurance agency. As you build relationships with your Nextdoor community, you’ll also start generating leads. Posting regularly, cultivating positive reviews, and keeping up with local news will help you connect with prospects and establish your agency’s presence and reputation.

Furthermore, when you’re up to date with Nextdoor, you’ll be more in touch with what’s going on in your local neighborhood. Use this insight on current events to frame your marketing campaigns. When you know what the issues are in your community, you’ll be able to craft content that directly responds to what’s on people’s minds. The result? Your neighbors will feel seen and understood—the first step toward building trust.

Next on the agenda is to post regularly. Use every opportunity to create a post, whether it’s in response to a local event, a poll, or even something that feels irrelevant to insurance (like sports or the weather). And after all this community engagement, you’ll be top of mind when a neighbor decides to switch insurance agencies or open a new policy.

The Advantages of Using Nextdoor as a Lead Source

As an insurance agent, working on marketing tactics, asking for referrals, and developing lead-sharing partnerships is a lot to balance.

Chances are that the idea of adding another potential lead source feels a little overwhelming.

However, because of Nextdoor's local audience and verification badge, it offers some key advantages. Let’s look at these in more depth.

Nextdoor Offers Verification

Much of Nextdoor’s success is based on the authenticity and trust that the platform fosters. Even individual members are required to complete a verification process to confirm their home addresses.

For an insurance agency, getting verified on Nextdoor shows potential clients that you’re a legitimate and trusted member of the community.

With a verification badge, you can make business posts that show up on your page and filter them onto your followers’ feeds. Nextdoor may be able to verify your business based on location and other signals. However, sometimes the app requires additional information to identify your business.

Locally Focused Version of Facebook

Today, it’s a given that companies will have a presence on social media. All you have to do is scroll to the bottom of a webpage to find links to Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. This isn’t just frivolity.

Social media is an essential tool to tap into your consumer base, learn what people want, and meet them where they’re active. Then, it’s all about engaging prospects by sharing posts and commenting away!

Nextdoor offers all the potential of other social media platforms, plus one major differentiator—it lets you connect with a hyper-localized audience.

You can target your posts directly to your audience. Share your expertise in policies that relate to the weather patterns in your town. Make a joke about that big raccoon that keeps getting into people’s trash. This tells your neighbors that you’re a part of the shared community.

Then, when they need insurance coverage, the first person they’ll think of is their friendly neighbor who runs a local agency!

It’s a Great Way to Implement Hyper-Local Marketing for Insurance

Hyper-local marketing tactics position your agency right in front of your target audience in a very specific area. Ever needed a caffeine rush and googled ‘coffee near me’? The options you found were a result of hyper-local marketing.

Using Nextdoor for marketing will give you a powerful return on investment (ROI).

It not only generates leads, but it also brings in prospects who’ll translate into positive local reviews.

The Nextdoor app has the advantages of both the trust gained by word-of-mouth referrals and the speed of digital marketing. A good review for your insurance agency will inevitably snowball into brand recognition and an enhanced reputation.

Advertising on Nextdoor

Nextdoor isn’t just about posting and engaging with your community. Businesses can advertise themselves to their neighbors at a reasonable cost. If you’ve already claimed your business page and taken advantage of the free business posts, the next phase is to grow your business with Nextdoor Ads.

The app makes it simple to run an ad campaign, with a clear, step-by-step guide to creating an ad, defining your audience, and setting a daily budget. Use the posts and ad space to demonstrate your community involvement and help the public get to know your team.

Clients resonate with insurance agents who give back to their communities and share information about themselves. Both of these tactics are humanizing, and they’ll help you to come across as a compassionate neighbor—not to mention a skilled insurance agent.

Convert More Leads with Canopy Connect

With Nextdoor, you’ll engage with your community and start generating leads for your insurance agency.

But what happens if you lose a lead during a sales call because they can’t access their policy information, or just get confused with all the industry jargon?

Canopy Connect streamlines the insurance sales process by importing users’ policy information directly into your dashboard and syncing it to your rater, AMS, or CRM. All your leads have to do is click on a link and sign in with their current insurance carrier credentials. Within seconds, you’ll see all the critical information on their declaration page and be able to give them real-time quotes for policies that will better suit their needs.

With Canopy Connect, you can better serve your neighbors!