AEP 2018: 6 Key Factors to Finding the Right Medicare Marketing Agency

• Published on April 11, 2017
• Senior Vice President Strategy at KERN - an Omnicom Agency

You’re a Medicare marketer. You know how stressful AEP can be. You have 68 days to launch the campaign you’ve strategized all year. And, you have 68 days to make the numbers. In some cases, for some insurers, you will be measured for 365 days (a full year) on the performance of your team in those 68 days.

Trusting a new Medicare marketing agency to help you make those numbers is stressful. A lot of agencies will tell you they know all about health care, or that Medicare can’t be that complicated -- you’ve heard it all. But you know the complexities involved. So as a health insurer seeking to select a Medicare marketing agency to support your 2018 AEP goals, there are 6 critical factors for long-term, true partner success that must be considered.

6 Important Critical Factors

1. Skill Set
2. Medicare Marketing Expertise
3. Philosophy
4. Culture
5. Compensation
6. References

Skill Set: When your health plan needs to drive response and applications to hit your revenue targets, you need a skilled high performance multi-channel, direct-response agency. When considering Medicare marketing agencies, you have to determine whether an agency:

• Really understands how to drive response
• Has the training and skills in all the principles and disciplines of direct marketing and Medicare
• Has an organization that understands what it takes to succeed every single day
• Brings the latest testing along with strategic and data analytic approaches to help optimize your investments 
• Can rapidly drive member acquisitions every day of AEP 
• Understands how to run your Age-In program day after day, and month after month while flawlessly driving high-performance
• Offers data modeling so that targeting can be pin-pointed and efficient
• Is experienced in Direct Mail (It is the workhorse of Medicare) So find out how many pieces per year do they send, and what have they learned?
• Has channel expertise
• Is nimble enough to adjust tactics to maximize your goals.
• Is savvy with digital marketing
• Knows how to make DRTV creatively compelling?

Medicare Marketing Expertise: Industry Expertise is very important. A direct marketing agency with Medicare marketing experience and expertise will be able to be a valuable partner right out of the gate, as opposed to an agency that has little or no experience in Medicare marketing. So, determine whether the agency:

• Understands the intricacies of Medicare marketing
• Has a staff that’s well-versed in CMS compliance
• Is good at meeting deadlines. Miss your CMS deadline, you miss your in-market date.
• How timely and organized is this agency?
• Has a creative team that understands the Medicare audience. The team should know how to connect emotionally as well as rationally with the kind of messaging your audience can believe and relate to. Do they know how to design around senior vision issues? Do they know how to write clearly, simply, yet compellingly? And are they able to select the right imagery for this audience?
• Is capable of developing a strategic plan for Medicare marketing that includes media planning, creative development, targeting, execution and testing
• Has expertise with audience segmentation. A lot of people think the Medicare audience is all the same, but it’s comprised of different segments. And how well does the agency understand the Medicare buyer’s journey?
• Can create materials that are easy to read, easy to understand and that truly resonate with the Medicare audience

An agency with industry expertise will understand how to apply the principles in Medicare marketing to their strategic approach, and will not waste your time or money with mistakes due to inexperience.

Philosophy: Understanding the marketing philosophy of your prospective agency, and how it aligns with yours is important for goal setting, strategic alignment, and overall clarity. So it’s helpful to learn:

• What is the marketing philosophy of the agency? 
• How do they measure success? 
• What’s their expertise in various media channels from a philosophical standpoint? 
• Whether you both value strategy?
• Whether you both value creative innovation?
• Do you both value testing and optimization?
• Whether you both feel that data and analytics are vital to drive the business forward?
• Whether you using the same metrics to measure success?

Culture: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” a quote attributed to Peter Drucker, speaks volumes about the importance of culture. When choosing a partner for your organization, culture is extremely important. Culture encompasses the emotional IQ, work ethic and taste level.

A like-minded culture is a critical alignment between your two entities. If your organization has a hard-driving, numbers-oriented, get-it-done yesterday, not-a-minute-to- waste culture; and you're talking with an agency that’s more cerebral and needs more time to think things over and contemplate options, this is an obvious cultural mismatch.

Discussing the culture of a Medicare marketing agency and understanding how it meshes with yours is of paramount importance in the agency selection process.

Compensation: There’s a big difference between price and cost. The low price you pay an inferior agency may end up costing your organization dearly if the results are poor. Agency compensation is heavily based on the people within the agency, whose “inventory goes down the elevator every night,” as David Ogilvy once said. 

No one hires an agency to maintain the status quo. In most cases, you hire an agency to sell stuff. This is why Ogilvy used the phase, “We Sell or Else.”

Ogilvy was a huge proponent of having clients understand the importance of agency compensation. He believed that if you want to get great work, you want your agency to make a fair profit. Spending the time with the agency leadership in finding the right win-win solution whether it be on a project basis or retainer based relationship is important.

References: In order to foster success with a new agency, and to assure yourself that you will be getting the quality work that you need out of a new agency, it’s always a good idea to speak with an agency's current clients.

When speaking with an agency's clients ask these questions:

• Does the agency truly know and understand Medicare marketing?
• Do they understand all of the segments of the Medicare audience?
• How does the agency approach CMS compliance?
• Are they fun to do business with? Are they enjoyable to work with?
• Will they make your life simpler? Or will they make more work for you?
• Does the agency work hard to help you achieve your goals?
• How are they on delivering results that they promised? 
• Can you tell me about a situation where they went above & beyond expectations?
• Did they ever let you down?
• Would you hire them again?

If the answers meet your expectations, you know you’re looking at a good agency.

Summary: Take your time with the agency selection process and consider “dating” before marriage. Don’t hesitate to start with a project or two which gives everybody a chance to get to know one another before launching a large scale engagement. The right Medicare marketing partner is an invaluable resource that can help you develop compelling marketing materials, Show you cost-effective solutions, aid in streamlining your approval through CMS, and ultimately help you have the best AEP ever. And isn’t that exactly what you want?

KERN Health has a specialty focus on large-scale Medicare member acquisition through our expertise with Medicare and competitive acquisition industries. We have a strong foundation in developing progressive personas for Medicare populations and using them to target consumers at the right time with the right information.

We strive to develop creative that makes an emotional connection. From digital display ads to DRTV commercials to direct mail, our creative is designed to resonate with your Medicare audience to achieve your immediate marketing goals and support your long-term strategies for building brand awareness and membership advocacy. KERN Health brings healthcare insurers a powerful agency partnership for large-scale Medicare member acquisition.  

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/aep-2018-6-key-factors-finding-right-medicare-marketing-scott-levine