Anyone who has ever put effort into running a marketing campaign to promote a health insurance company will be quick to tell you success stories are few and far between. Selling health insurance is not an easy task and what’s more, promoting this type of business can cost a fortune.

Most health insurance agents have given up on the pay per click advertising, as with the introduction of the Google quality score many of the campaigns started to cost a lot more due to inefficient optimization of the agent’s landing pages and websites. The times of simple Adwords campaigns is unfortunately over.

Paid advertising is hard when you have to compete with all the big corporations. There is only a limited amount of high traffic keywords, so chances are that the small type health insurance business will not be able to keep up with the bidding. Prices of $9-15 per click are not unusual.

Traditional search engine optimization (SEO) holds no guarantee of the eagerly anticipated ranking in the organic listings in the search engine and it takes a long time to get where you want to go. The competition, even in the organic listings is sometimes quite brutal and the small health insurance company will find themselves in a dilemma facing well established domains belonging to huge insurance corporations, thousands of back links and so on and so forth.

With the introduction of universal search in the search engines everything changed a little bit. There is a whole new Internet world out there, that has tons of traffic. The best example is You Tube which even though it is a video sharing sites has surpassed Yahoo as a search engine.

You will find shopping, video, blogs and news sources as a result of carrying out a universal search and these come in all manner of formats for the benefit of the consumer.

As a result health insurance marketing these days has to focus on more than search engines. It needs strategies to market health insurance agents and plans by way of blogs, videos and social networking sites as well as other Web 2.0 properties. The combined traffic from these sources is much greater than search engine traffic so the way forward for small health insurance companies is to get a blog underway, show some videos and let the consumer become aware of what you have on offer in innovative and exciting ways.

Two Ohio Health Insurance videos from John Harvey: Ohio Individual Health Insurance and Ohio Health Insurance Quote