Traditional marketing and purchasing leads data are still the main sources of generating medical insurance leads in most companies. However, their use and how you can get the best results from them will vary depending on how you build your marketing strategy.
This is why you must keep this in mind: Lead generation strategies are more than just copying other people and especially your competitors. They take time and great planning to ensure the desired qualified leads for the company.
With this in mind, strategies should be chosen carefully to determine which ones are the best for your company in specific. In the case of medical insurance businesses, we will help by providing the tips and methods you should consider:
Focus on the IoT in Lead Generation
If you aren’t family with it, the Internet of Things is a network of objects that can exchange and collect data. These objects can include wearables such as smartwatches and fitness trackers. These gadgets collect and store health data, and many people are familiar with them today.
The number of devices connected to this network has increased dramatically, considering everyone wears a smartwatch today, for instance. And we don’t need to necessarily dive into all the elements and new devices available today.
Wearables are becoming more popular, which means that there is more data to your advantage. This data can be used to tailor and collect pertinent information, and it will allow you to present your insurance policy and address the needs of your prospects without having to do too much.
You will be able to get to know people’s issues in terms of health and how you can help them based on their statistics and results. To give a clearer example, just think about someone having some heart problems.
In this scenario, data derived via IoT-enabled devices will be unique. This allows insurance companies to offer policies with greater accuracy based on actual risk and means you can design and structure a policy that benefits the prospect.
Consider Outsourcing
You can get more organic data by outsourcing your lead generation process. This ensures you get high-quality leads at a low cost. Well, if you find their right source.
It is possible to pay for your lead generation process to be handled, but choosing the right company will be crucial for this in order to get the best results. If you decide to aim for outsourcing, you won’t have to worry about the entire process of converting visitors into leads.
Instead, you can focus more on nurturing and engaging leads knowing that your Lead Gen process is in safe hands. Focus on other aspects of your function, such as the management of the Lead generated through the agency or sales conversion.
Work on Your Referrals
Referrals are another important strategy in lead generation. This is where you can showcase your service to other people and companies. This allows you to use the most effective marketing method that remains at the top despite the Internet: word-of-mouth.
When using this strategy, both you and your prospects tend to win because companies and insurances, in this case, offer a benefit in exchange for the referrals.
This is as simple as asking for referrals to people you know or previous clients. Keep them all and ask the referring party if they would mind allowing you to use their name when contacting these leads.
It can be a bit hard to manage referrals, but you can just set a list of people who reached out to your insurance company thanks to a friend, close person, or family member. Then, you can offer a discount or gift to this referral to encourage them to do the same to others.
Keep in Touch with Your Prospects
They are a great tool for lead generation and cost little. You will be able to meet many new people and have easy access to them when they need assistance comparing insurance companies.
Sharp business cards can help you. People will respond more quickly to people who have contact information when it comes to buying medical insurance.
Some companies offer low rates on a variety of marketing materials, with business cards being the most popular and least expensive. You must always give your card to the person you are taking their card and make sure to distribute them as well.
Some people suddenly find themselves in a position where they have to purchase health insurance. You want to be their first choice after giving them your card, and even when some might just throw it somewhere, they will find it when they need it.
If you want to market your referral program to each prospect and client, staying in touch can be a great lead generation strategy.
For every referral who asks for a quote, offer a cup of coffee or just pay attention to them. You don’t have to give away publicity. Referrals can be more difficult to close than new leads who may not know much about you.
However, they will bring high-quality leads that are worth the effort and time.
Active Listening
Listening to customers is essential for two reasons: You can gather as much information as possible about your customers’ mental and physical health and any high-risk behaviors and show them how interested you are in them.
You’ll find important information if you listen to enough people. For instance, someone named Sarah may be able to talk about his love for skiing or her dislike of wearing her helmet while practicing the sport.
You may help this person by providing the right medical insurance and even adding an extra policy if you offer more than this insurance option in your portfolio.
Advertising Will Always be Vital
While referrals are wonderful, they don’t always provide the best leads or, more like, not enough ones.
Advertising is timeless. You should use both traditional and new methods to promote yourself to a wider audience. We know what you will say if we focus on traditional advertising first: It is too old to invest. But you are wrong.
This method still works for services similar to yours, and you’d be amazed at how many leads this method generates for medical insurance companies.
Although you don’t need to try them all at once, it’s possible to pick some and find what works for generating leads you otherwise wouldn’t have. So, take both new and old options, and we have listed some you might ignore most of the time:
- Newspaper advertising.
Despite all the information available online, people still trust newspapers to be their most reliable, inspiring, ethical, and engaging media source. Good sources will always be used by a well-known and respectable newspaper. This is why businesses shouldn’t ignore them.
Print newspapers have a higher advertising score than other media and can be used for new insurance leads.
Many factors are important to consider, including the ability to reach your target audience as well as the distribution and size of the newspaper. These factors all have an effect on the cost and effectiveness of your ad.
- Yellow Pages Advertisements
Yellow pages have been considered obsolete for some time, but they can still be used to reach certain leads, especially senior market leads, who aren’t inclined to go online much of the time.
They are also very affordable as you only need to add them once.
- Radio advertisements.
This is something we know will be difficult to believe. Radio advertising is still more popular than the Internet, as at least 80% listen to local radio programs each week.
Radio advertising sales representatives can provide segment and time demographics in order to narrow down their time slots.
To ensure that you get qualified leads, it is important to choose the right time slot.
Radio ads are effective, but they can also be expensive. You should consider investing in your medical insurance company to ensure you get the best results.
- Television ads.
It’s not necessary to mention that TV viewers continue to watch TV despite the availability of Netflix and other online options.
Therefore, advertising on TV is more expensive than advertising in print or radio, but it does have some advantages.
It has been shown that while people remember 10% of what is said and 20% of the information they read, their retention rate for what they see is up to 80%.
This option is recommended if you have a large medical insurance company or have been in business for more than two years.
- Freebie distribution.
People love to get free stuff and will give it back if they are given something.
Producing pens, pencils, and notebooks with your company name, contact information, water bottles, lighters, and other items is a great idea. People will be more likely to inquire about the service.
Although they may not be giving you anything in return, it is possible to get them as leads or clients.
Digital Marketing Is Important!
Online marketing is the only way to make a living for most companies, and we don’t forget about it in this case, as previously mentioned.
Every day people are online, so if you want leads, you must be there.
It makes perfect sense to compare Internet stats with the other options. You are an excellent example. Didn’t you use the Internet to find this information?
People search online for local businesses, especially medical insurance services, in general.
9 out of 10 people call or visit a local business when they find it online. The best thing about this marketing is that it’s usually free.
What are the steps to make it successful? To generate insurance leads, we have listed several factors and strategies that you can use.
- Internet presence.
Building your online presence is not something you can do in a few days. It will take weeks or even months, and for it, your website is your first step towards establishing your online presence.
It will contain all information regarding your company and services.
Some websites may only contain contact information or a value proposition. Others will need to include relevant and engaging content in order to encourage leads to visit the site.
You won’t be able to generate leads if you don’t invest in your website.
- Manage your reputation and local directories.
This is one of the very few methods to increase online visibility that doesn’t require you to have a website. However, it is more of a compliment than a method in its own right.
What does it all mean? Your NAP (Name, Address, Phone) needs to be added to several social media platforms and online directories similar to yellow pages. This will make it easy for potential clients and others to find you while looking for medical insurance companies.
You may need to pay fees to add your information to some directories, but you can also rely on free directories.
They are also great for local SEO. This means that you will rank higher in local searches for insurance, and your website will appear at the top of those searches.
- Content marketing.
Engaging, relevant, and interesting content such as text, images, or videos can help you make people stay with you and get them to visit your website.
Content creation is only half the battle.
Engage in active marketing and influencer outreach to maximize your content creation efforts.
Prospects will be more likely to find the information they need and book an appointment to talk about what you can offer if you use all of the available options to improve the content.
- Search engine optimization.
SEO techniques can help search engine results rank higher for specific keywords. It can be difficult to understand all of the factors involved.
Anyone can optimize their website with a little effort and some time. If time is limited or you need to have it done quickly, an SEO professional might be worth your consideration.
- Advertising via pay-per-click.
We are back in advertising, but it is now all online.
Sponsored listings will appear ahead of organic results when you search for something on Google, Bing, or another search engine. These are the ads that we will be referring to.
PPC advertising systems such as Facebook Ads and Google Ads are mainly bid-based.
This means that your ad will appear higher in search results pages if it is priced higher for a keyword.
They work in the same way as SEO to bring you organic traffic. It will not be organic. Instead, it will pay and focus for your medical insurance company to help you rank higher in search engine results.
These platforms can help you target your ideal audience by allowing you to search for specific keywords or demographics. These platforms can be used to retarget past visitors to your website.
- Banner ads.
Banner ads are still a viable form of online advertising. Remember what we mentioned earlier about visual information’s effectiveness?
These concerns are important as you want to make sure your ad appears on a site that attracts users that match your target audience.
Most likely, you will be paying for impressions and not clicks. You can only get a handful of clicks on your ad, so you need to consider price and response.
- Blogging.
Content marketing is incomplete without a blog. Through the use of keywords, relevant and valuable blog articles can help you attract the right audience via search engines and links.
When blogging, it is important to remember your target market. Google searches are likely to bring up the same concerns, questions, and objections in your target market as face-to-face prospects.
These topics are important to earn the trust and respect of search engine users.
If you want to generate leads, make sure that each piece of content contains at least one call to action.
- Guest blogging.
Post your content to relevant websites. This is a great way to generate new leads.
First, you’re reaching their communities. People will click your link if they find your article helpful. Inbound links from guest posts should result in higher search engine rankings and website traffic.
- Requests to link.
Backlinks are a ranking factor for SEO. These links to other websites link to your website, blog articles, or both.
To attract other authors to your site, it is not enough to have high-quality content. Sometimes, you just have to ask.
- Social media.
Social media usage by small business owners is twice as common as that of those who use it less than five hours per week.
Social media has many benefits, such as increased visibility, traffic, and better search ranking. These factors all have an impact on how you can generate high-quality leads for your company.
- Podcasts.
Podcasts are a great way to impress potential leads, especially if they live far away.
To establish yourself as an expert on a topic, start your own podcast. It doesn’t take much to start a podcast or have your own business. Instead, look for a place as a guest on a podcast that has a large audience.
If none of these options suits you, you can find an advertisement spot.
The Local Lead Generation Process for Your Medical Insurance Business
All right! So, everything is about building properties and generating leads. But how does the process actually take place? Are there other steps I need to know?
The steps I mention below are what students from our local lead generation program follow to generate leads for businesses like yourself. So I’ll help you see what we do. And how if you join our program, you can simply generate leads for your own business (unless you want to start a side hustle and build a laptop lifestyle business).
Essentially, our lead generation can be divided into four steps:
The first is prospecting. You need to take the time to do market research on a niche (industry) and determine how many phone-driven businesses are there.
Keep in mind that this is local research as you need to know how many companies need leads. For example, you may search for “plumbing services Youngstown OH.”
You will find dozens or even hundreds of businesses trying to get themselves in front of the customers by ranking on Map Listings, organic results, and even Ad.
The second step, building. When you find a niche (plumbing, tree services, a software company, real estate…), you will need to start building your digital properties. You don’t need to be an expert in HTML or coding. It can be easy with the right tools.
The third step is now taking time to rank your lead gen website. With the site done, you need to work on SEO strategies and start dominating those Google search results. If you’re new to SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization.
To keep it simple, it consists of the entire process of growing a company’s visibility on search engines like Google and generating organic traffic. And remember this, local lead generation is part of the strategies.
Moving on to step four, once you rank the site, you will start getting your ROI and profits. You only need to rent it out to a local business interested in the leads the site generates. You can offer a couple of free leads to their move on with the actual pay per lead.
To review steps 1-4 above, I described it to a normal student who is building a lead gen business to help local service providers generate more calls. But replace the student with you as the business owner. And replace sending the leads to a business to simply siphoning the leads to your personal business.
By the way, fun fact, about 20% of our students in our local lead gen program are actually business owners who went through the program. And they use the skillsets we teach to generate leads for their own business.
An Example of Lead Generation: Home Advisor
You must be thinking, “if lead generation sounds so good so far, how come I haven’t seen any company?” That’s the thing; there are many out there. You just don’t know they are dedicated to it.
HomeAdvisor is one of the best examples you can find on the Internet as it is a top lead generation company that has spent millions building its brand but also earned even more zeros for this same reason.
They started small as everyone else but invested in building their brand awareness to make people who are looking for home services go to their website and find what they need. They are over 75% of people’s first choice when they need those services.
If you don’t get HomeAdvisor that much or need a refresh, users need to submit their information to request a service and get a professional or expert who can provide it.
HomeAdvisor’s job is to share your information, which makes you a lead, with local companies so they can contact you and offer the service you’re requesting. For sharing this lead information, HomeAdvisor gets paid by the companies. This happens for every single lead they send to multiple businesses.
Business owners who don’t have marketing skills or don’t even know how to have any online presence will always rely on those pages to list their services. They will save time and effort, but companies like HomeAdvisor can make them spend lots of money as leads aren’t exclusive (one lead is sent to multiple companies after all).
Using Facebook Ads aka Paid Ad Platforms: Do They Generate Leads?
They DO generate leads. If not, no one would use them.
However, you need to remember two facts:
- Paid ads or platforms can be expensive.
- They don’t generate “natural” leads.
Whenever someone sees or clicks in one of those ads, over 80% of them did it by accident or are trying to close/report it.
Why? Because they aren’t looking for those services. At least not at the moment.
What those ads do instead is interrupt their time on the platforms. Users aren’t there to find companies or businesses unless they are searching for a specific company’s user, and for that, there’s a search bar. This is why it is hard to convert them to actual customers who will show interest in the companies’ services. Also, you’re limited by a budget.
When using lead generation, everything is organic. You aren’t forcing others to pay attention to your business but rather being there when they need you. This is why Google’s organic traffic will always beat paid ads, and the reason companies continue investing in it, which is a lot cheaper as well.
What Is Local SEO?
Don’t worry… I didn’t get it at first either. Following the short explanation, local SEO focuses on scaling businesses’ visibility on search engines. However, this is only for those who serve their communities face-to-face.
What does this mean?
Experts and professionals like painters, plumbers, and dentists (but not only them) offer their services to their local customers. Why? Because they can’t deliver them unless they are located in the same area of their customers.
To make sure those businesses get more leads, you need to rank them locally by claiming the business listing on Google to place them on Map Listings. Local SEO also involves online reviews, citation management, and how you manage your entire online presence in the local area.
If you are going to bet on lead gen, you need to adapt yourself to today’s world: The Internet.
Keep in mind that although traditional channels and methods like billboards, warm calls, and pamphlets still work, they aren’t part of your tools. Whenever someone needs a service, they go to Google and search for it.
“Dentist in Miami” or “plumbing services in Orlando,” etc. And you can keep coming up with services or professionals people need and look for. Thus, you need to make sure you’re using Google to get the companies in front of their clients.
Users will always click on the first search results (those near the top), and many of them will be either Ad links (people paid to place their websites there), Map Listing, and then you get websites. Almost all of them are your goal and where you should always aim to place yourself.
Can My Medical Insurance Business Utilize a Local Lead Generation Strategy?
If you want customers, you better know you need it. Following the previous explanation, lead gen is all about placing businesses in front of their customers, choosing them over their competitors.
Put it simply – it’s all about closing deals and having clients for those companies to make money. The main difference with the usual methods companies use for this is how lead generation approaches different channels to get them in the right place of the market to get customers.
Those channels are all focused on the Internet as most people are searching for products but also services across the net. The issue is that the Internet is way too broad, and businesses don’t know how to place themselves. They usually try, but they get one common result: losing money and time.
How Powerful Are Organic Medical Insurance Leads from Google?
For companies looking for customers, it’s everything. For you? Pretty much the same. When you build a business with digital properties, you get to make thousands of dollars a month.
This isn’t a “get started today and get rich tomorrow” thing, but it is HIGHLY scalable, and ROI + positive results are guaranteed. Learning a fairly decent and very needed set of skills to create your digital properties and start ranking them on Google is required.
I have invested in several online businesses over the years, and if there’s something uncertain, whether you will get your ROI or not, even more than the actual profit.
However, this business moved my earnings from five figures a year to a month in ONLY passive income while sitting comfortably at home.
On my laptop. Anywhere. Anytime.
You can look at one of the first sites I built back in 2016, and it continues making me over $1.000+ every month. The best part is that I don’t need to touch it or the rest I’ve built over the years, just like this digital property.
What Makes Lead Generation SO Alluring?
Here it goes: you can work from home.
The main issue with regular business opportunities is how much you need to invest in staff, equipment, or rent to have a place to sell your products or offer your services.
We all know the hassles of traditional businesses that involve regular expenses, which are extremely high. Can you afford it? I don’t think so, and even if you can, is it worth it? Now, it isn’t only about the money. You also need to put in a lot of work, and it isn’t only during the first couple of months or years. Usually, it is as long as you continue running it.
You can save yourself those headaches and bone-breaking tasks and expenses with lead gen since it is more about generating leads with digital channels—mainly websites.
Websites can be VERY cheap to build, and with many tools online, you get to do it in a couple of hours instead of days. Any virtual or digital business is scalable and won’t need constant maintenance.
So, let’s summarize this:
- You save money in regular expenses with traditional and most online businesses as what you need is yourself and digital properties (websites).
- You can bet on passive income.
- There’s no need to hire more people to get started.
- You can generate leads in multiple industries, which allows you to work on any niche you want.
How Can I Get Started in the Local Lead Generation Program?
Anyone can start and learn. That’s the beauty of this business model. I knew nothing about SEO, Map Listing, and everything I’ve mentioned so far. It is all about learning the skills, gaining experience, and deciding to take the step.
Remember that this business model will never get old as business owners are always looking for leads. They need to do business and scale their companies. Why not do the same while helping others and still making money?
You can start with this local lead generation course highly recommended for anyone wanting to grow in the business. It is a close training that will take you through each step and make sure you are able to get your ROI, profits and take control of your life.
You will be added to an incredible lead generation family ready to help you 24/7 when asking questions on the group. Anyone is welcome who’s willing to put in the work. Click here to watch the lead gen webinar.