Can You Afford to Wait to Plan Your Medicare Marketing Campaigns?

Each year I ask my friends — colleagues who work at a healthcare-related entity — when does your Medicare marketing plan indicate that you should start evaluating the adjustments for the new year?

You might be surprised how many companies are behind schedule and waiting too long to ask some of the most critical questions to set up for a successful year. As datadecisions Group only works on a few of the issues involved in offering Medicare to the senior American, I will limit my comments to those topics.

Data

Before it’s too late, it’s important that these questions be asked upfront before the Medicare marketing campaign can be launched:

• Who has examined/audited the data hygiene and integration process for accuracy in identity resolution?
• What new audiences or triggers are you testing? Propensity or SNP or others?
• What comparison have you made for digital versus offline results? Web, mobile, social media behavior as opposed to direct mail.

Analytics

Raw data is helpful for a start, but you will want to dig a little deeper to give your marketing campaign more context:

• Did you commission a market research study to ask the consumers what they need or desire? Maybe conjoint for a product innovation, a segmentation to enhance personalization or simply A&U to judge your brand position.
• Are you still applying a one-size-fits-all methodology of predictive modeling? As we comment light-heartedly to those who do, “We’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Platform

Once you have the information and context you need to market, you need to know that you’re using the right marketing channels to get the job done:

• Can you prospect, grow, or retain in an omni-channel fashion?
• Do you respond in real time to the consumer queries, or do you still think once a week/month is OK?

Many of these efforts require weeks to complete, and then you must finally discuss and decide how you’re going to execute your strategy. So, if you haven’t started planning yet, now is the time to start answering these questions. Try to improve your approach from the last year.

Albert Einstein is widely credited with saying, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”  

Are you planning to simply repeat last year’s process? It’s not too late now to change course for better results.