The Obamacare era is officially here.
Looking ahead to the second full year of the Affordable Care Act, the agents and companies who sell insurance have had to refine their tactics and overhaul their strategies.
The insurance landscape has been radically redrawn, but people still need insurance - and more customers than ever need guidance in buying that insurance.
From marketing insurance to marketing home products to marketing websites and more, marketing professionals need to always look at how they can take their marketing and make it better and better.
Old Tactics in a New Era
An executive interviewed by Advertising Age revealed that marketing health insurance in the age of Obamacare is not much different than marketing soap or cereal or any other consumer products.
Insurance companies and agents are relying on old-school consumer marketing tactics to move them forward into the new age of healthcare.
But they're mixing those tried-and-true tools with new techniques that are designed to build long-term relationships. The goal is to earn customers for life by offering them a product that never goes obsolete.
Great Search: Finding Customers
For insurance agents and companies, the first hurdle is finding potential customers. This is inherently tough.
Since new customers, by definition, are uninsured, insurers don't have internal data on them. This means they have to buy data from companies such as Dun&Bradstreet or Acxiom. Like so many other industries in the digital age, the modern insurance business is tied directly to the data business.
Mobile Marketing
The insurance industry is no different than any other in that they're becoming more and more reliant on mobile marketing. This is especially true for the vast and disproportionately uninsured Latino population.
Latinos, insurers are discovering, are less likely to work at jobs where they're glued to a computer, but they are just as likely as the larger population to have cell phones. This makes SMS marketing especially useful.
YouTube, Young People and New Mobile Marketing
Buying massive lists of phone numbers and blanket texting doesn't work.
As described in the article "Saving on family health insurance," individual health insurance needs are, well, individual.
A much more effective strategy has been to incorporate branded videos linked to YouTube.
So many people - particularly young people who are disproportionately uninsured - search YouTube for information on health insurance, that video marketing and SMS marketing work hand-in-hand for the insurance industry.
For insurance agents and companies, the future appears to be in mobile marketing. This isn't much different than every other industry.
But the twist is that with the addition of branded video, insurance agents don't need to search for customers.
They merely need to corral the customers who already searched for them.