In today's healthcare and protection market, it is difficult to choose how best to market your products on a budget - Philip Wood explains
Using a variety of media in a thoughtful and connected way to reach any prospective targets means you have a greater chance of making that all-important connection, the first step in increasing brand awareness and improving sales whatever your size. So what does it take to develop a winning cross-channel campaign?
Successful cross-channel marketing requires a solid strategy. Campaign objectives can be formed by going back to your business plan – what do you want to achieve and in what time-scale? Do you want to improve your profits or your service levels? Do you want to increase your brand recognition and boost market share? Or do you want to stay focused on a niche area?
Research plays a strong role at the preparation stage. Whether you decide to use a market research firm or carry out the analysis yourself, you need to better understand your audience. It’s important for everyone within a business to develop a connected view of their target market so that messages can be threaded together through various media.
Use what you have
Healthcare and protection providers go to great effort and expense to produce high-quality marketing material designed to catch the attention of businesses. Use it to your advantage.
Providers have the capacity to reach out further to find out what your market and customers need. By utilising their stand-out material that contains exactly the right messages, your marketing campaign can become more cost-effective and considerably easier. This means better utilising providers’ literature, advertising, web copy and market research insights – all provided readily as part of the account management package.
Providers may also offer better connected marketing support to intermediaries who are selling health cash plans or PMI on their behalf. In effect, providers can make your job easier, no matter what size business you are.
Remember that in the digital age, channel boundaries are blurring. Customers do not distinguish between online or offline and neither should intermediaries, so remember to research your objectives before allocating a budget to any particular channel.
You may love to target companies via direct marketing, but think about the ‘total experience’. Each interaction should reference the same relationship and present a consistent brand expression, regardless of where it occurs.
Teamwork
A tactical marketing campaign, and more specifically any cross-channel promotional activity, is likely to involve various internal team members. If you are all agreed what you are doing from day one and play to your own strengths, then it makes everyone’s lives much easier and means the campaign runs smoothly and successfully.
Ideas must be fully developed (which is where a solid strategy comes in) and potential cross-channel conflicts should be raised early on. Set clear boundaries between your staff: it’s important to decide who will have ‘jurisdiction’ over which channel and keep in mind that you are all working towards one goal, success in the healthcare and protection market.
Increasingly, intermediaries are opting for cross-channel marketing campaigns because it allows them to deliver a simple and consistent message using a variety of different vehicles with content, images and offers remaining the same. This should ensure that no client receives more than one email, for example, per week.
By integrating information platforms, cross-channel marketing brings intermediaries one step closer to reaching the right person with the right offer through the right channel at the right time. It also reduces the cost and ultimately improves the effectiveness of your efforts.
Philip Wood is executive director – sales and marketing at Health Shield
