What You Need in a Winning Medicare Marketing Strategy

Since its introduction in 2008, Medicare Advantage has been one of the fastest-growing segments of the health insurance market. Despite that growth, it’s a hotly contested space as insurance agents vie for policyholders. 

Help your team rise above the competition with a top-notch Medicare marketing strategy and sales process. Use these Medicare marketing tips to shore up your approach and successfully scale your insurance business.

Build a Foundation of Consent

In and out of enrollment season, your lead gen pipeline is your business’s lifeline. Building this pipeline on a foundation of consumer consent is essential to driving results in any health insurance business.

On the one hand, capturing and documenting success is important to supporting compliance with regulations like the TCPA. On the other, practicing consent- and permission-based marketing helps lead gen and marketing efforts to achieve sales efficiency.

Consider this: When you optimize lead forms and make it easier for consumers to give you permission to be contacted, you also make it easier to obtain actionable customer data that streamlines the sales process. And by contacting only those consumers who have raised their hand to be contacted, your team only spends its time on worthwhile efforts. It’s a win-win for you and your potential customers.

A Medicare Marketing Strategy to Capture (and Nurture) Quality Leads

How do you actually go about building that foundation of consent? Long before you start making calls and texts, it all starts with find the right mix of tactics for your Medicare marketing strategy.

Generating a high quantity of high-quality Medicare leads requires marketing materials that provide education and support through the complex process of getting or switching Medicare plans. Through trial and error, you can build a Medicare marketing strategy that uses these approaches to capturing and nurturing consenting leads:

Generating Medicare Leads

Educational Workshops and Seminars: Hosting informative sessions on Medicare benefits, plan types, and enrollment processes can help position you as an industry expert. These events can be held in community centers, senior centers, or even online as webinars.

Direct Mail Campaigns: Specifically targeting those about to turn 65 or those who could benefit from a plan change, these campaigns can offer information about Medicare and invite potential leads to contact you.

Local Advertising: Ads in local newspapers, radio stations, and community bulletins can be effective, especially when they address common Medicare questions or concerns.

Referral Programs: Encourage your current clients to refer friends and family by offering incentives or rewards for successful referrals.

Digital Marketing: Utilize pay-per-click campaigns, social media advertising (especially on platforms popular with older demographics), and SEO techniques to draw online traffic to your informational resources.

Community Engagement: Attend local fairs, health expos, and senior-focused events. Being present and available to answer questions in community events can generate interest and leads.

Nurturing Medicare Leads

Personalized Communication: Once a lead shows interest, personalized emails, phone calls, or even face-to-face meetings can help build trust and rapport.

Educational Content: Regularly send newsletters or articles addressing Medicare updates, policy changes, or general tips. Ensure this content is easily understandable and relevant to your audience.

Automated Email Campaigns: Segment your leads based on their specific interests or concerns and tailor automated email series to guide them through the Medicare decision-making process.

Feedback and Reviews: Request feedback from your existing clients. Positive reviews can be showcased to potential leads to build credibility. Moreover, negative feedback can provide insights into areas of improvement.

Consistent Follow-ups: Especially with those who’ve attended your workshops or seminars, consistent check-ins can help keep you top-of-mind when they’re ready to make a decision. Better yet, automate your follow-up—but more on that in a moment.

Client Onboarding Process: Once a lead decides to enroll, ensure the onboarding process is smooth. Offer guidance on paperwork, clarify doubts, and assure them of your continued support. This not only helps in retention but also in getting referrals.

Stay Updated: The Medicare landscape can be dynamic. Ensure you’re always updated on policy changes, new plans, or any other relevant information. This way, you can proactively reach out to leads and clients with crucial updates, further showcasing your expertise and commitment.

More Medicare Marketing Tips to Drive More Sales

The Medicare sales process doesn’t end once you have a steady supply of consenting leads. You’ll need to make contact and convert those leads with maximum efficiency to support growth. Use these Medicare marketing tips to boost your current Medicare Advantage sales strategy.

Optimize Outreach and Follow-Up Across (and Between) Channels

While sales may ultimately wind up happening over the phone and in person, these days Medicare marketing and sales teams need to be operating in a variety of channels to achieve desired results and growth. But your Medicare team doesn’t need a multichannel strategy. You need an omnichannel strategy. 

That is, all of your outreach channels—phone, SMS, email, smart voicemail drop—need to be working in tandem. You need to be able to create automated outreach workflows that automatically coordinate the right message, in the right channel, at the right time. 

Leverage Data at the Lead-Source Level

As your business grows, the number of leads in your CRM does, too. Things can get complicated. But that complexity can’t stand in the way of transparency, efficiency, and improvement. To understand (and then refine) the results of your sales efforts, you need contact center reporting tools that can give you real-time insight into your leads’ performance on a source-by-source level. That way, at the drop of a hat, you can shift your team’s approach, paying due attention to sources that are delivering—while turning off those sources that are eating into your bottom line.

Empower Your People with Automation

Being an insurance sales agent isn’t always smooth sailing. Luckily, there’s no shortage of contact center automation technology available to make tedious, manual tasks a thing of the past, while boosting contacts, conversions, and compliance support.

For example, today’s agents can find support from:

• Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) solutions: Prequalify leads—or even dial low-intent and aged leads—to save agents’ time and still move leads through your pipeline with the power of advanced conversational AI.
• Dynamic scripting software: Automatically pop Medicare sales scripts that update in real time, helping agents support compliance and conversions.
• Smart skills-based routing: Put your most important leads in the hands of your top-performing agents, and ensure that customers get in touch with someone best equipped to meet their needs.
• Answering machine detection (AMD) software: Save your agents from having to code for so many leaked voicemails with accurate answering machine detection. Filter out missed opportunities and increase agent talk time with this essential automated solution.

Conversational AI that drives more sales

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Protect Your Reputation and See the Results

No Medicare marketing strategy is complete without the ability to combat call blocking and flagging.

Call flagging has been on the rise in recent years, and if your numbers are coming up “Spam Likely,” your leads are not likely to pick up the phone. (One study estimated that around three-quarters of calls labeled spam are rejected.) 

In this environment, having a caller ID reputation management solution is a key component of any Medicare Advantage sales strategy.

Without it, your contact rates will likely suffer. So, equip your business with technology that not only identifies numbers that have been flagged so they can be rested or swapped out but also enables you to break up the call patterns that get you flagged in the first place. 

The Ultimate Checklist

7-Point Checklist for Health Insurance Sales

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Get There First with Speed to Lead

Coming out on top in the world of Medicare Advantage doesn’t always (or even frequently) mean you had the best policies on offer. Converting health insurance leads into policyholders often comes down to the simple fact of who gets there first. Plus, research shows that reaching a lead in the first 5 minutes after they’ve submitted a lead form boosts conversion rates by 391 percent.

Medicare sales teams need to center their lead response strategies around this crucial capability known as “speed to lead.” Of course, as with the other tips we’ve covered here, achieving speed to lead isn’t simply about thinking strategically—it’s about having the right technology partners.

Without the best predictive dialer software to bring all these tactics and tools together under one platform—everything from speed to lead and real-time reporting to caller ID reputation management and compliance support—your business is leaving efficiency and growth on the table. 

See how Convoso’s dialer can be a difference-maker for your book of business by scheduling a free demo today.