Wouldn’t it be nice if every time you got on the phone with a lead that the conversation started in the exact same spot and those leads knew exactly what they need to know to save you time and money?
Almost like you had already spent a couple hours teaching them the basics of who you are, what you do and more importantly, if they are a good fit for your business.
So you’re probably asking, how do you do that? I did it by creating a free educational course or mini-series about what I am trying to help them with.
How To Get Started
It’s actually pretty easy. Stop reading right now and list every step in your buyers' journey. Give that list a once over and see what topics can be combined.
Hopefully you should have around 3-6 steps in that process. This is going to be the foundation for your free video training series.
You are going to want to structure the series in the way that has the leads secretly qualifying themselves without asking for a ton of information upfront.
A Secret Qualifying Example
I’m a health insurance agent who is only licensed to do business in the state of Ohio.
As I figured out with a previous PDF guide "How to Understand Ohio's Health Insurance Marketplace." Someone who is downloading that information was 98 percent of the time from Ohio. Including Ohio in the title of the offer already qualified those prospects, without me having to ask for the information.
Yes, living in Ohio is the MOST important qualifying factor for me, so figuring out if they live in the great buckeye state is a must.
So I repeated this trick with my video series, which I titled “How To Navigate Obamacare’s Health Insurance Marketplace in Ohio.”
Again, it’s very likely anyone who converts on this offer is going to be from Ohio. Sure, there are probably a few who aren’t, but asking for that information again on a form is almost redundant and unnecessary.
The real qualifying action takes place in the material itself and subsequent forms on the pages behind the initial offer.
The Offer
The offer itself is a five-part video series that’s delivered over the course of five days through a workflow.
I broke down my series into the following parts/videos
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The Basics: An Overview of the Affordable Care Act
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The Individual Mandate
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How to Estimate Your Subsidy
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A Detailed Plan Comparison / Cost Analysis
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Healthcare.gov Walk-Through
Each video lives on a landing page of its own which also provides an opportunity for leads to reach out to me directly via phone, email or form submission for me to address their specific situation. Also, every video makes mention of this customized, let me do the work for you option as well.
Even if they don’t, the information provided through the five videos is designed to take anyone from start to finish to understand, identify and essentially apply for health insurance through the marketplace, ALL without me having to talk with them.
You will notice the “second” form on the video landing pages is a little more detailed and asks for their age and number of people in their family.
It allows me to make sure they are not over 65 (Medicare eligible) or too young (19-24 likely to be on a parents policy or don't make enough money to qualify) and since I'm paid a flat monthly commission per person, per policy, a larger family leads to more scaleable results.
Which means a family of 4+ is a lot more cost efficient than a single person.
The only other vital piece of information I need in the process is your expected annual income for 2014, but there's no way that’s happening on a form, without destroying any type of respectable conversion rate.
That's where the information comes back front and center for this last piece of the qualifying puzzle.
I was Silence-of-the-Lambs-like methodical in setting up this series, to allow leads to qualify themselves and contact me after the fact.
If you review my video breakdown again you will see video three “How to Estimate Your Subsidy” is the video that will allow them to figure out if their income qualifies them for “Obamacare” and essentially provide me an answer to that “unaskable” question.
By the time they get to the fifth video, which walks them through applying through healthcare.gov, the only thing that's left for me to actually bring them on as a client or "get paid" is for them to include my agent information on the application, which I provide a detailed explanation of how to do in video 5.
Video Breakdown
Let’s take a look at each video and their goals a little closer.
Video 1 - Warm-Up
The purpose of this video is to make sure, regardless of how far along someone is in understanding the new law, that everyone is on the same page at the start of video 2.
It’s a basic and simple overview of the new law and how it affects your health insurance.
Video 2 - Urgency
You have to give them a reason to take action sooner rather than later.
This video discusses the individual mandate or tax, which is basically the thing that’s going to make you buy health insurance this year or pay a fine for not having it.
Since that video was relatively short, I also included a bonus video that talked about health insurance companies in Ohio limiting your choices of doctors and hospitals you can receive treatment from, which also demonstrating my expertise and creates a need for more specific information about their doctors and hospitals.
Video 3 - Top Secret Qualification
As we already discussed, this is the primary video to allow people to discover if they are eligible or not.
Now since there are two types of potential clients that can emerge from this video, here’s where things got a little tricky and I had to do a little Hubspot hacking.
This will allow people who make too much money to again self qualify and tell me “Obamacare” won’t give them any money to help pay for their health insurance.
When they do, it removes them from the current video series and places them in a new workflow that delivers two different videos specifically for someone not buying a health insurance plan from healthcare.gov.
Video 4 - Confirmation
This video is a hardcore math lesson comparing the cost and showing what plan makes the most sense financially.
After this video they should know exactly what health insurance plan is right for them.
Video 5 - Application (Action)
Finally, the last video is a step-by-step walkthrough on how to actually sign-up for that health insurance plan I helped them identify through healthcare.gov.
The Key Tools
All the videos were hosted on Wistia. With the HubSpot-Wistia integration, seeing the engagement on the videos is embarrassingly easy and awesome.
Of course, HubSpot's Landing Page, Workflow and Email tool were vital in setting up this well oiled machine.
Additionally, the videos were shot with equipment that can be bought for around $200, no fancy production crew needed. You can read about my video setup in more detail here and watch a video on my lighting below.
I did all the editing myself on Adobe Premier Elements 12 and graphic design in Adobe Photoshop Elements 12.
None of this would have been possible without the incomparable Hubspot Academy team.
The Bottom Line
Setting up an offer like this will allow you to pull out all the “conversion stops” up-front to maximize the amount of activity at the top of your funnel.
If leads go from start to finish (without contacting me) and aren't a great fit, it doesn't matter because they will either include my agent information or not, either way I make money without spending time on an "unqualified" lead or they simply don't become a client.
Since this offer is only a few weeks old, I still have a little tweaking to do myself. My first order of business will be to probably slightly reposition/repackage the series as I don’t think it fully communicates what’s being offered and/or people don’t fully understand what it will help them achieve.
The most important thing is to just get started educating and qualifying your leads automatically.
Learn more about HubSpot's Wistia Integration
photo credit: Official GDC via photopin cc
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