Like the idiom about “skinning a cat,” there’s more than one way to sell health insurance. There is direct selling, inbound marketing, social, Facebook ads, and countless other ways to attract customers. It’s not always easy to find the right tactics for writing more health insurance customers, though.
Your parent company is likely hounding you to increase sales. Under the weight of that pressure, it can be difficult to find breathing space needed to assess other methods of driving sales. So, you stick with old tried and tested methods hoping that things will “pick up soon.” If that sounds like you, read on. We will show you five of the best tactics, plus a few extras, to help you boost your health insurance book.
Here’s what you’ll learn after reading this post:
- How to increase your LinkedIn engagement
- Tips to leverage Facebook groups
- How to find valuable health insurance customers in the local community
- Tactics to set yourself apart from other agents
- Ways to make your website attractive to people looking for health insurance
Increasing Your LinkedIn Engagement Level
LinkedIn is the world’s leading professional network on the internet, a source that you can utilize to develop professional contacts as well as find potential customers. According to Metricool.com, LinkedIn is “the favorite social platform amongst recruiters, job seekers, and companies in search of new business opportunities.” This platform should become a favorite of yours, too.
One of your primary aims is to start building engagement level. That means establishing relationships and developing interaction with other LinkedIn users. More engagement leads to more opportunities as people grow to know, like, and trust you.
On LinkedIn, engagement is based on the relationship between your followers and your profile, as well as the perception of your brand amongst others in your industry. Starting and maintaining that engagement is not easy, however. There are several things that you must do.
- Make sure all the info that you put on your profile is accurate. Misleading information can be detrimental in this the information age. It is so easy for people to confirm the information you put on your LinkedIn profile and if that information proves false, your credibility will diminish severely.
- Regularly publish relevant content. You’ve probably heard it before, but the content is king. Publishing and sharing relevant content is a proven way to attract people to your brand in the digital sphere. The original you can be with your content publishing, the more likely you are to stand out. Try publishing episodic content from time to time. That is one way to keep people engaged and give them a reason to come back to your profile.
- Metricool.com recommends publishing around 20 times a month – more content often leads to higher engagement. But that schedule might not work for you. You must find your own sweet spot. Also, bear in mind that quality is more important than quantity.
- Take advantage of tools and training. LinkedIn offers several tools to help you boost brand engagement, including their cost-effective advertising network. Utilize these tools to your advantage, so you’re your agency can gain swift prominence with the platform.
Once you have the basics of LinkedIn mastered (well-written profile, company page, regular content schedule), it’s time to get proactive. For example, using LinkedIn to find CEOs of local or national companies could enable opportunities to write corporate health policies. Furthermore, being associated with influential CEOs can have a significantly positive effect on your brand leading to widespread recognition and elevation of your status in the eyes of potential customers.
Facebook Groups
No doubt, you already know that Facebook can be a powerful force in your marketing arsenal. Their advertising platform has become a mainstay in the many company’s strategies. That is primarily because achieving organic success on Facebook is now extremely difficult. The term now used by some marketers is, “pay to play.” It means that there are few options for getting in front of an audience on Facebook if you are not prepared to pay.
That doesn’t mean you need to hand over your entire marketing budget to Facebook. There are ways to reach people without going all in on the pay to play the game: Leverage groups. Joining or creating groups on Facebook allows you to cultivate an audience of your own and reduce your marketing spend.
Wikihow has a document detailing the steps required to find and join relevant Facebook groups. You can find out more here – http://www.wikihow.com/Join-Groups-on-Facebook
You can begin by joining groups created by other health insurance professionals. Not only with this tactic help you to gain insight into the running of social media groups, but it will also provide the opportunity to network and develop important relationships with your peers. A group such as Insurance Soup, for example, has over 10,000 members and is exclusively for insurance agents. The content posted in this group can drastically shorten your learning curve.
When looking for groups to join, you must think beyond insurance. That means anticipating what type of groups your ideal customers might be found. A group designed for medical professionals, for example, might be fertile ground for health insurance customers. Getting friendly with a few doctors could lead to a healthy supply of referral business.
Also, there are support groups for people who suffer from every one of the various chronic illnesses diabetes, fibromyalgia, lupus, cancers, etc. Be sure to remain respectful of their spamming guidelines, but groups such as those could be a treasure trove of new customers.
Local Networking Groups
Modern life does, indeed, seem to revolve around the internet. Many agents who are looking to drum up new business, rightly, focus the majority of their efforts on digital. But that does not mean some of the traditional tactics are completely ineffective. Far from it! In fact, you might now have less competition in the physical realm as more people throw all their resources at digital marketing.
One good way to build your book of business away from the computer is through local networking groups. It’s not the flashiest way to drum up business, but it remains effective. Meetup.com is a highly successful operation based on the idea of promoting in-person meetups. On that platform there 100s of groups organized around different interests. The site gets almost 43-million visits per month, according to SimilarWeb, which indicates a high level of interest in physical networking events.
All of that to say, don’t discount local networking events. They can be a great source of direct and referral customers. Check the newspapers, Craigslist, and the aforementioned Meetup.com to find relevant group meetings to attend. Like your online approach, however, you must make sure you attend these events with a mindset of helpfulness rather selling at all costs. Both online and offline, the time spent nurturing relationship will be more beneficial to you book of business than the hard drive for sales with every interaction.
Get Your Name Out There
- Do something that gets you talked about – Start a charity drive for a health related charity and pledge $1 for every like and $2 every time somebody shares the fundraiser on their own social media pages. This effort can generate some buzz around your brand and enhance your credibility as a charitable business. You can help out a great cause while getting your name spread around social media.
- Position yourself as the go to person when there is a local insurance related story – It can help you develop contacts in the press corp, and that in turn can lead to free marketing and greater exposure. Press coverage can boost the perception of your agency as experts in the field.
- Get out there and get involved in the community – Sponsor a float for local parades, volunteer with a cause you can get behind, and donate money to the local Chamber of Commerce for community improvement.
- Be different – Keep your office open later than everyone else; open all day Saturday; give customers your cell phone number and tell them to message you anytime they want – do whatever you can to stand out and do more than the competition.
Bonus Tips
There is no-one-size fits all solution to writing more health insurance customers. The key is to incorporate several tactics into your marketing strategy. While the ones mentioned above gives you plenty to get off to a great start, I thought it worth adding a few bonus tips to help solidify your efforts.
Check out services such as Merit Direct which offers, amongst other solutions, rented marketing lists. That enables you to acquire a list of contacts that have been pre-vetted. It can be a great time-saver and could lead to you writing more customers faster. You should use this in conjunction with the tactics mentioned above, though. List rental is not a suitable long term strategy.
I mentioned Facebook briefly earlier. It is worth setting aside a small budget for this purpose. It is another avenue for sales which has a proven track record. With some 2-billion active users, it highly worthwhile setting up an ad campaign on Facebook.
Be creative with your marketing materials. Put your contact info on stethoscopes, tongue depressors, and pens shaped like syringes and drop them off at local doctors’ offices. Better yet, have it printed on the back of appointment reminder cards that patients will take home with them.
Send birthday cards to your clients. Write handwritten thank you notes for referrals. Advertise in church bulletins and on placemats for local restaurants. The key is to establish recognition amongst your target market. Then, when people think of health insurance, they will think of you.
Conclusion
Writing more health insurance customers might mean doing something different. Developing engagement on LinkedIn, being active in Facebook groups and talking to people face to face are all great tactics for finding and writing more customers. The key is to be strategic in everything you do. Use LinkedIn to find CEOs and other influencers. Connect with them, and find ways to associate your brand with theirs. Some of their influence will rub off on you. In the end, your ultimate aim is to become an influencer yourself.
Influencers enjoy the luxury of having streams of clients/customers coming to them. They no longer have to go in search of prospects. No one is born an influencer, though. Most started off using tactics like the ones mentioned in this article. They used social media and other digital tools to build an audience; they shared valuable content and helped people where necessary; they combined their online efforts with physical networking events and adopted the same helpful attitude in all their interactions.
That’s pretty much all there is to signing more customers. Use the tools available and focus on helping people. Eventually, you will become recognized as a trusted expert in your field. Then, your book of business will practically write itself.
