Customer hunt for health insurance companies: The end of the bear dinosaurs?

When it comes to lead generation for health insurance companies, digital dinosaurs mutate into bears. This article is a bit of a wild ride. It's about the annual hunt for new health insurance customers that has been going on on the Internet every fall for decades. After the hunt is before the hunt. The last dinosaurs are already baring their teeth and the bears are already making their way to the river where they will be waiting for the salmon. This game wastes millions of advertising dollars every year. Ineffective and pointless. A brazen robbery of the health insurance system. But there is hope, because the last salmon are getting smarter. What does that mean and what's the deal with bears and dinosaurs? Believe it or not, the dinosaurs are not quite extinct yet and are still alive and kicking among us. And that's not all. At the right moment, these dinosaurs run over to the bears and become bears themselves. An incredible story?The genus of bear dinosaursThe genus of the one (here inexperienced) dinosaur is usually a very young animal, either naive or arrogant in nature, with no real online experience/know-how or ability to reflect. He is usually dominated by a more senior specimen, who he probably idolizes somewhat and is known as the Macker Dino (the other kind of dinosaur). Having reached the zenith of his professional and financial success, the Macker-Dino is brimming with enviably unshakeable self-confidence. He likes to stage himself - as old dinosaurs do - and endears himself to listeners by passing on one online anecdote after another, without really understanding the context of online marketing or even convergence with offline. This is the kind of dinosaur that can trample through an untouched piece of primeval forest, trample down all the wood beneath it and at some point turn around to wonder who trampled down the primeval forest... Both types of dinosaur are extremely dangerous and, if they get their hands on advertising money, can cause a great deal of damage to advertisers and users. But at least there is hope for the young dinosaur that it will come to its senses and do better. The macker dinosaur is usually done for. Because he can't and won't do anything else. Why should he, as long as the customers listen to him and entrust him with money? But what both types of dinosaurs don't know is this: At the right moment, dinosaurs mutate into bears.Bears like to eat salmonI like bears. Bears are really cool. The biggest bears in nature are not only the strongest, they are also the cleverest. Because if you're clever, you can eat more and if you can eat more, you get bigger and stronger over time. The grizzly belongs to the largest bear species. You have to visualize this at salmon time. They just sit by the river all day and wait for the prey to fly straight into their mouths! What do our dinosaurs described above do when they are given a really tricky task, such as generating thousands of leads for a health insurance company? This is tricky because there are quite a few health insurance companies and ultimately they all want the same thing. Developing a new idea in this area is the Olympus of lead generation and not at all easy because the market and users have already seen and experienced pretty much every conceivable scam. Now, what do our dinosaurs do with such an assignment? instead of rising to the challenge, they mutate into bears themselves. Why should they rack their brains, since the task is practically impossible to solve anyway? And why should they unsettle the customer with new ideas or risk a setback? Our dinosaurs remember the bears. Bears are cool. We should do like the bears and let the fish fly straight down our throats, they think. Having mutated into bears, they can now turn to their own kind with confidence and without risk. They turn to the bears, who have been waiting for them, with their tricky lead generation request. The bears, who have a lot of traffic themselves and own various online portals, quickly conjure up an unprecedented idea out of their hat that is tried and tested. The new bears are assured. Can something that is tried and tested be unprecedented? No matter. The Bears propose the following deal (idea) to the Dinos: "Dear Dinos, as you know, we dear Bears have a lot of traffic and have many users to offer you that you would like to have and can have. All you have to do is provide us with an attractive car free of charge, which we can raffle off among the users in a competition and you will receive all the information (leads) from us about who has taken part in the competition. We make our users happy and you get what you want. Leads!" Attractive car instead of health insuranceWow, bears aren't just cool, they're also clever. The dinosaurs hadn't even thought of this idea themselves. Ingeniously simple and everyone is happy! The idea is implemented. The advertising client sponsors an attractive car for young people. A competition is produced on bärenminuten.ch and promoted so prominently that the beams crack. And lots of users take part. Taking out health insurance - the goal of lead generation in this story - is of no interest to the user. How can you blame them, they just want to win the attractive car for young people! In the end, the dinosaurs mutated into bears get lots of leads. Many more leads than they had promised their salmon... sorry, their customer. And the customer is also quite happy with the many leads he gets from the bear dinos. After all, they got much more than they asked for.Inferior leadsIn the end, it comes as it must. The inferior leads, none of whom have even the slightest interest in taking out a new health insurance policy, are dealt with directly by the health insurance company, but mostly by a call center. There are random hits and surrendering users who have offers sent to them just to finally get some peace and quiet from the cavalry that has been sent out. A great battle is waged with a lot of effort and many sacrifices, only to realize in the end that the entire campaign has not achieved much and has even proved to be very expensive. Not to mention the loss of goodwill and image among users! The dinos can be relatively indifferent to this, because dinos are dinos and therefore incorrigible and the customer sees no way out of the dinosaur relationship. You can't blame the bears either, because they delivered what they promised. In the end, the advertising client is also the loser. In the meantime, the bear dinosaur has completely transformed back into a dinosaur, posing and showing off to the best of his ability - once a salmon, always a salmon? Not at all. The advertising market is still a buyer's market. Decisions are made by those who invest. Once ripped off, always ripped off? No, because at some point enough is enough.