Lead generation is an extremely important part of marketing yourself online, and that goes for Medicare leads too.

No matter what kind of niche you operate in, having proper Medicare leads is the main way to push your business towards success.

However, lead generation is not easy. Even if you understand the basics of how to get free leads for yourself, it can be hard to put that into practice without some heavy planning.

What Are Leads?

A lead is simply anybody who has an interest in something your business offers, which in this context usually means something like Medicare Supplement insurance plans.

They are somebody within your target market that is aware of your business.

Leads are the main group that you usually want to target if you are aiming to get potential clients.

Taking advantage of that interest in the proper way allows you to turn an internet lead into a paying customer.

What is Lead Generation?

The process of lead generation is all about attracting and converting strangers into internet leads, allowing you to then turn them into potential customers further down the line.

By working to generate Medicare leads, you are effectively earning yourself more business in the long term.

Lead generation is focused on bringing in more business and offering you more sales prospects, helping your Medicare business to grow beyond its current clients.

Lead generation can take a huge range of different forms, with most lead generation strategies using a variety of different tools and marketing options to grow a company’s client base.

When it comes to generating leads, no two companies approach it in the same way, even if they occupy the same niche.

Generating Medicare Leads

Getting your own Medicare leads can seem tough at first, but you really just need to understand the basics of marketing.

Lead generation is effectively marketing with a slightly different focus. Instead of promoting a Medicare service, you are trying to draw attention to your business, using lead generation to help with building brand awareness and creating potential clients.

From there, you can use each Medicare lead as a target for your own advertising, guiding them into your sales funnel and turning them into paying customers.

Here are some of the most notable ways to generate Medicare leads. Remember, using a variety of methods to generate Medicare leads can give you much more control over who you are targeting and how you convert those leads into customers.

Social Media

Social media platforms can be one of the best options to get Medicare Supplement and Medicare Advantage leads. Growing your social media presence allows you to market Medicare services and insurance directly to your target audience.

Not only does social media prevent you from having to compete directly with most other insurance agents, but you can sell insurance and other services directly to interested customers.

One of the biggest advantages of social platforms is the communication. If you need to sell prescription drug plans, then it is easier to do so with direct communication through message systems or social platform replies.

This level of interaction makes it much easier to gather internet leads, allowing you to engage potential customers with a sales pitch in a more personal and friendly way.

Not only can this save money, but it can snowball into you earning more leads through their own posts about the services.

Social Media Communication

Staying active on social media gives you a lot more chances to get Medicare leads generated and to close Medicare sales once you start them.

Interacting with popular posts, spreading awareness of the Medicare market, using relevant hashtags – all of it can make a difference.

Once you get in contact with somebody on these platforms, do not lose focus.

If they are a potential Medicare lead, keep communicating until you can nudge them into your sales funnel, or at least make them a more qualified lead that you can capitalize on in the future.

Social Media Promotion

Many social media platforms allow you to promote posts and share them like online ads. This can be an effective way of getting Medicare leads if you know what to put in your posts – you want something simple but suitable for drawing in a lot of attention.

Doing this well can allow independent agents to build a decent social media following quickly. Combine that with common e-communication trends and the openness of social media, and you can start generating leads a lot faster by leveraging the audience you are gathering.

Website Construction

Given how Medicare works, there are limits on how you can advertise things like the Medicare Supplement Plan. However, advertising your own Medicare business site can be your trump card – it builds a successful business and serves as a sales platform.

A good website presents you as a more professional Medicare insurance agent, keeps qualified leads from backing off due to a messy or dangerous-looking site, and could eventually make you an industry leader in your local markets.

Beyond that, a website serves as a great Medicare lead generation option. Not only can users stumble across it all on their own, but you can host a lot of Medicare sales pitches and service information there. If somebody reads it, they might spark up a conversation with you about what you can offer them.

There is also the fact that a website can allow you to gain customer information, like email addresses. If you generate leads this way, you can target them with personalized direct mail and a range of promotional details to draw them back in.

SEO

SEO, or search engine optimization, changes how high your website ranks on search engines. If you want to boost your lead generation, learn at least basic SEO options and techniques.

As a Medicare insurance agent, your advertising options are limited. However, you can earn far more leads through good SEO, making sure that your website appears whenever somebody searches up terms related to the Medicare services or niche.

If you are selling Medicare Advantage, you can try to rank for people using search terms like “gym and health insurance agency.”

That increases the chance that they will stumble across your website and become new Medicare Advantage leads generated entirely through SEO.

Site Usability

Using your site as a marketing platform is a great option, but it needs to be a good marketing platform. You want it to look nice, function well, and be free of any viruses that might threaten your potential Medicare leads.

If you want to impress Medicare leads, you need to do it with a platform that they can use and that they respect.

There is no point gathering Medicare Supplement leads if you are just sending them to a bare landing page that will not load properly on their phone browser.

Do your best to build a good site with the resources that you have. Most site-building platforms will allow you to market your own products and services, meaning that you can promote yourself as part of an insurance agency to draw in more Medicare leads.

Video Marketing

Video marketing for Medicare leads does not need to be some complex advertising system. You can host a video blog or post your own product reviews and updates, pitching Medicare Advantage plans or Medicare Supplements insurance at your own pace.

This can be a good way to earn Medicare leads from specific audiences while also producing something memorable. The best way to earn prospects is to stick in their minds, and video content can be a good way to achieve that goal.

Blogging

A blog, newsletter, or other space for custom-written articles can be an incredible advantage when it comes time to generate Medicare leads.

Not only can you promote your own products and services within your content, but you can draw in a lot of traffic if you create the right kinds of content.

Do not overthink things – people visit blogs for information first and foremost. An informative blog can be an excellent solution that offers low-cost lead generation, all while providing an escalating benefit to your website’s SEO.

Blogs do not start generating sales instantly, and it can seem time-consuming to write the content at first, but the end result is well worth it.

Even if you are just one agent, a simple information blog can double your prospects within a month or two.

Email Marketing

Email systems are very useful for advertising, especially if you already have a lot of customer data lying around. If your prospects are already giving you email addresses, you may as well use them.

Email can be a good way to try closing sales that were accidentally abandoned, drawing in prospects that forgot about your business, or getting sales testimonials from past customers that you can use to bolster your site’s reputation.

Best of all, email is free, making it an affordable way to follow up on leads. The only thing you need to worry about is spam – it is hard to retain leads if you accidentally drive them away by sending too many emails or flooring their inbox with low-quality content.

Direct Mail

If email does not work, then direct mail might. While more expensive – since you need to create physical Medicare sales material – you can use it as an effective way of claiming prospects that just need one more small push over the edge.

Direct mail usually gets read more often than email messages, meaning that it can be a more effective last-ditch sales attempt. It also works very well as a way to contact bigger prospects, ones where the cost of creating the mail is negligible due to their value.

Client Referrals

Pushing your past customers to refer friends and family can be simple but effective.

In the Medicare insurance business, it can be tough to keep the ball rolling once you use up all of your existing qualified leads – so getting more for free can always be a useful option.

A happy client is generally going to recommend you to a friend if they get a chance, and nudging them to do it after a sale can be a good incentive.

Many agents in the insurance business do this, and it is easy to see why – it is completely free and very effective.

Print Advertising (for Seniors)

Print advertising tends to be most effective when aimed at seniors. As such, selling Medicare Advantage and Medicare Supplement services in publications aimed at seniors can be the perfect way to capture that seniors market with minimal direct effort.

While there are going to be limits on how you can advertise when you are selling Medicare services. However, it only takes one good ad in a local publication to earn yourself a lot of Medicare leads, mostly from that seniors market that is otherwise very hard to target.

Remember that you can always approach community publications within a specific niche for a more targeted lead generation attempt.

If you want to target a certain market, then you can choose a magazine or monthly newsletter that relates to that audience.

Print Advertising (In General)

You do not only have to target seniors with print mediums, though. Information booklets and lead stands are quite a common tactic among insurance agents, and their value depends on where you place them.

A lead stand in one area of a town might only attract seniors, while others might attract a more diverse audience. These can be a great follow-up to your online marketing options or even a method of introducing people to the idea of Medicare before they find your online business.

Telemarketing

Telemarketed leads are tricky to do since you need to actually consider the National Do Not Call List, as well as any CMS regulations related to getting prospects for Medicare.

However, once you get basic precautions out of the way, you are free to start telemarketing for Medicare Advantage leads, and Medicare Supplement leads as often as you want.

Just remember that not every customer responds well to telemarketing. It will not always be the most effective of lead generation methods, but it can be a worthwhile tool to keep in mind if you ever need it.

You can also get others to telemarket for you, using live transfers to pick up the call when a lead is almost guaranteed. However, this can be costly and hard to set up without help.

Other Factors to Consider when Generating Medicare Leads

If Medicare leads are your ultimate goal, then you need to be prepared for the unexpected. The insurance industry can be a confusing one, especially if you are trying to get Medicare Advantage and Medicare Supplement leads all by yourself.

Competition Other Agents

Remember that the Medicare annual enrollment period often creates a lot of new agents, many of which will be scrambling to get started on their own lead programs.

Whether you are both following the same book of business or not, you will eventually cross paths, and that can mean competition. The important thing is to stay calm.

While other agents may cost you other lines of lead generation, there is always more than enough to go around. A fine-tuned business plan can be unbeatable, so planning for competition ahead of time always helps.

Collaboration with Other Businesses

Most agents forget that leads are a universal thing. If you find leads that are not valuable to you, consider finding a business that they would be useful to and collaborating.

Swapping leads like this can be a great option, providing you with a new lead generation option as long as you can provide your unwanted leads to them.

This kind of partnership is especially useful if you have friends or family with their own business leads or even another business of your own that has a set of leads worth picking through.

These leads cost nothing to get, provide you with more lead options to pursue overall, and allow you to get rid of unwanted leads that you would otherwise just forget about and throw away.

Medicare Supplement and Medicare Advantage Leads

Remember that the leads for a service like this are going to be different from the leads for Medicare Supplement, despite them being the same general service.

Medicare Advantage is the more in-depth of the services, combining both “halves” of Medicare into a single Medicare plan.

This makes Medicare Advantage a specific thing that requires its own leads, separate from any other Medicare plan.

Compared to Medicare Advantage, Supplement (or Medigap) is a unique kind of insurance polity that sits outside of the main Medicare system to cover areas not covered by the main program.

Agents need to remember this when doing basic lead generation. These two services may be similar in some ways, but they are dramatically different as a whole, and your lead generation work needs to reflect that – as does your marketing material.

Varied Strategies

It is common for a lot of Medicate agents to find a level of success they are happy with and settle down with it, assuming that the lead generation will be a constant factor. This is not always the case.

Everything about your leads, from the cost of an average lead to the amount you earn each month, can change on a whim. Good agents are prepared for that.

Even if you find a “safe spot” where things are trending upwards, be prepared for sudden downturns. You want to be sure that you can endure any market shifts or demographic changes that will influence your overall success.

Unconventional Strategies

Sometimes, insurance agents can benefit from thinking outside the box. Whether you are creating a business card to leave with potential customers or offering them more ways to learn about Medicare, there can be countless unique methods of generating more leads.

Remember that there is not a single structured way to guarantee effective lead generation, and that every single lead comes from a different customer that may have completely different wants and needs.

Sometimes unusual or unconventional strategies can work incredibly well for capturing markets that normal lead generation can’t reach.

Of course, you also want to make sure that these strategies do not cost so much that they put you at serious risk. Be smart about the strategies that you use, and spend some time going over all of your options to see what kind of methods might work best.

The most important part of tackling Medicare leads is to not panic. There are thousands of leads out there and hundreds of ways to get them invested, so you can always slow down and explore your options at your own pace. The less you worry about the way you are getting your leads, the better.

What Now?

If you are ready to start looking into Medicare lead generation, then take a little while to plan out your first steps. You want to be absolutely sure that you know how you are going to approach the first steps of your full-scale lead generation and what kind of results you are looking for.

Even if you do not end up following your plan that closely, it can still be an important part of making sure that you are on the right track.

Having some kind of guideline allows you to see how well your entire lead generation process is going and what kind of future pitfalls you might need to avoid.

Keep in mind that leads are a confusing concept as a whole and that there is no perfect strategy to gather them up. Every single agent uses their own systems and techniques to make that possible, and you need to find the methods that work best for you.

Whatever you decide to do, it never hurts to reconsider your options or look into new strategies that could supplement your old ones. Using multiple strategies and techniques that all interlink can allow you to do some very creative lead generation work, all without spending more than absolutely necessary.

Medicare leads are quite common, but good Medicare leads are a lot rarer. Do not rush into anything, and take the time to build up an excellent marketing strategy that you know you can rely on.

Useful Guides

Please see some useful guides related to generating more business leads.