Today’s Medicare marketplace is more crowded than ever. The average consumer can choose from 43 Medicare Advantage plans, an increase of more than 126% over the past decade. The competition among providers is just as fierce with more options for when and how to get care in person, virtually or at home. Studies show that consumers aren’t exactly loyal to providers, engaging with an average of four to five provider brands for their care.

In such a competitive field, any small differentiator can tip the scales. That’s where a collaborative co-marketing strategy comes in. Under a co-marketing arrangement, payers (insurers) and providers (primary care providers, clinics, hospitals and/or health systems) join forces to promote and elevate both brands in the hearts and minds of consumers. Here’s why Medicare payers and providers need to embrace co-marketing.

Co-marketing efforts can be a win for Medicare payers, providers and consumers alike. Here’s how.

Payers and providers:

• Share financial, talent and marketing resources.
• Increase visibility to consumers through expanded reach and frequency of messaging.
• Enhance consumer credibility of and association with both brands.
• Gain share of voice, especially when competitors aren’t advertising, or reduce the scale or scope of campaigns.
• Drive acquisition potential of membership and patient panels.
• Amplify individual brand marketing efforts.

Consumers:

• Feel they’re at the center of both brands’ efforts.
• See better communication between both brands.
• Appreciate more coordinated, personalized care from brands working together.
• Develop trust and loyalty from better healthcare experiences.

At the end of the day, consumers want a seamless healthcare experience from beginning to end. They just want their health plan and provider to work easily, affordably and reliably. Co-marketing helps to create the perception of a seamless experience. The shift from patient to consumer means that beneficiaries are exerting their purchasing power like they should. They’re no longer passive patients who accept whatever they get. They’re making choices to get the coverage and care they want and deserve even if it means navigating through more options. A co-marketing plan can help inspire consumers to switch to a plan and a provider that put them first.

It’s not just consumers who appreciate the enhanced collaboration; it’s providers too. When smaller provider organizations like clinics and primary care providers see the time, effort and financial backing that a national carrier puts into a co-marketing effort, it changes their perspective of that carrier for the better. Like consumers, providers will feel seen, heard, understood and respected. They feel like they have a carrier holding their hand, empowering them and encouraging them to contribute their ideas and points of view throughout the marketing process. They know that payer has their back. A co-marketing effort won’t eliminate operational challenges, but it can foster payer/provider trust.

Co-marketing Best Practices

Payer/provider co-marketing is at its best when it is centered on the consumer, aligned acrossthe organization and engaged at the community level. Here’s how to achieve all three.

Consumer Centered

Consumers won’t be convinced to become members or patients without knowing what’s it in for them. Exceptional co-marketing campaigns answer two questions: 1. why consumers should care about these brands and 2. why they are working together.

Consumers need to understand how their health and wellness could be improved by enrolling with a specific plan and using a certain provider. They need to imagine what it will look and feel like to have these complementary offerings in action. Payers and providers can make it concrete by explaining how, despite a chronic condition like diabetes, they improve consumers’ lives with the right care and a plan that makes managing their health simple.

Payers and providers can establish their expertise and position themselves in a humanistic way through thought leadership. Each can stay in their swim lanes yet offer a unique but compatible dimension to the topic at hand. When payers and providers outline these benefits upfront, consumers react positively.

Top-to-bottom Organizational Alignment

Strategy is often driven at the corporate level but executed at the local level. Don’t leave them out of discussions. Too often, brands forget about their local champions even when the local activations are an essential part of the strategy. Cascade the strategy down the organizational funnel, sharing the right communications at the right levels to build buy-in. This way, everyone is working toward the same goal rather than being at cross purposes with each other. With a top-down, bottom-up approach, payers and providers can streamline their efforts for maximum impact.

Community Engagement

Community engagement activities that give brands a physical presence and a local face boost consumer trust. Outreach can happen through health fairs, community events and even social gatherings at a healthcare facility. Brands can leverage grassroots marketing to target different audiences at culturally relevant festivals, senior-friendly sporting events or causes like veteran health. The local champions become brand ambassadors who create personal, face-to-face experiences. These experiences enhance consumer trust in brands and help sway payer and provider decisions in the short and long run.

Common Co-marketing Pitfalls

No two payer/provider co-marketing campaigns are created equal. Each one depends on the organizations involved and the goals of the campaign. Still, there are certain traps that can cause the plan to crumble:

1. Focusing only on the Annual Election Period (AEP), which could mean getting lost in the AEP noise. Yet 10,000 people turn 65 every day, and special election periods mean almost year-round enrollment. Plus, consumers can change providers whenever they want. Why wait to market for eight weeks a year when there are 44 other weeks?

• Relying solely on the co-marketing efforts for all an organization’s marketing needs. Co-marketing should be only one aspect of a bigger marketing plan. Both payers and providers need to drive their individual marketing efforts in tandem with their co-marketing efforts. This is especially true for providers who might have smaller budgets as compared to carriers.

• Lack of communication around roles, responsibilities, expectations and goals. Payers and providers need to work under the same information, assumptions and guidelines—and stay in their respective lanes. This goes for all decision-makers and influencers. Communication should be open, transparent and fair. Payers should speak to their expertise and providers theirs. Plans can scale up or down, but what matters is everyone agreeing to the plan on paper as a joint plan. It’s not the payer’s plan or the provider’s plan but a collaborative one. Key performance indicators should be set up front to be measurable and attributable. Payers and providers also need to understand that the benefits of their efforts may happen on different timelines. For example, payers mightsee an uptick in members first and providers later once beneficiaries start using their coverage.

• Thinking that just because organizations do business together means they can co-market too. Not every business partnership can lead to a successful co-marketing effort. Payers and providers need to ensure their values, reputations and messaging align with each other first. There must be brand synergy, not simply a business arrangement. It can’t be transactional. It must be relational.

• Not considering the marketing mix or level of investment. There are more marketing channels today than ever before. To get the right results, payers and providers need to pull the right levers and invest in the right channels. Those will vary based on the audience and individual markets as well as the organizations involved. For example, if a payer or provider doesn’t have the human capital to activate a grassroots community engagement strategy, they will need to pivot to more feasible tactics. Other times it is a matter of not investing enough in the strategy as a whole or in the right channels. Particularly on the payer side, co-marketing efforts tend to see a lower investment.

Legal and Compliance Considerations

Marketing in the healthcare space entails a lot of compliance work, especially regarding Medicare. And rightfully so. Misleading Medicare ads featuring celebrities like Joe Namath have caused confusion and chaos. According to Deft Research’s 2023 Medicare OEP and Disenrollment Prevention Study Executive Research Brief, some 20% of beneficiaries were “unwittingly switched” to a plan they didn’t expect.

Yes, there are compliance concerns with co-marketing against steering and anti-kickbacks. Yes, the rules from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) change from year to year. Yes, payers and providers will have tension between them, often with payers being more conservative than providers when it comes to interpreting CMS guidelines.

But despite all this, Medicare payers and providers can and should be able to navigate the red tape together. When payer and provider teams align on agreed-to rules of the road up front, they can make their brands jointly stand out from the competition. Vetting exercises with each brands’ marketing teams plus legal and compliance can help gauge both the strategy and tactics. Teams will know where they push and where they need to step back.

The Power of Partnership

Together, payers and providers can do more than they can individually. This is especially true in today’s healthcare landscape that often appears contentious thanks to rising costs along with prior-authorization and claims denials. Co-marketing efforts tell a different story, one of collaboration and cooperation with consumers at the heart.

#healthcare #collaboration #marketing

Let’s face it: traditional advertising can only take your healthcare brand so far. At some point, you need to go beyond advertising to build a local reputation—to see and be seen. This is what brands like Monster and Red Bull understand so well. They’ve got two concepts down to a science: 1. bringing positive associations; and 2. encouraging trial and affinity with their brand. That science is called grassroots marketing, and it’s about developing personal connections with potential audiences in the local community.
 

Where Healthcare Gets Grassroots Marketing Wrong

Too many healthcare organizations think grassroots marketing is about writing sponsorship checks or throwing together last-minute activations. But you can’t just provide a logo or a stack of brochures and call it good. Or scramble to gather some giveaway items together for an event that weekend. Either approach is a waste of time and money.

Just as dangerous for healthcare brands is ignoring and devaluing grassroots marketing all together. The lure of “tangible” results from traditional marketing and advertising channels can be seductive in contrast to measuring grassroots. Figuring out full-funnel attribution and whether leads converted into patients, members or customers can be difficult, but what your brand risks by not doing grassroots marketing is even more important: conveying your values and story. The best way to do that isn’t through tactics like ads or emails alone but also up close, person to person. Nothing beats that one-to-one connection, especially in healthcare where trust and relationships are paramount.

What Healthcare Can Do to Increase Grassroots Marketing Scale and Effectiveness

Create a Strategy
Healthcare brands need to be intentional with their grassroots marketing efforts, starting with key questions of why, where, when and how:

• Why are you doing grassroots marketing? To announce a new location, to grow our patient panel or membership size, to deepen connections in the community?
• Where will your target audience be, and which events make the most sense for you to have a presence at?
• When will you focus on grassroots marketing? Leading up to and during an opening? As an ongoing effort?
• How will you ensure brand consistency and maximum efficiency? How will you empower local markets, especially in rural areas? How will you compliantly track leads?

Here are some tried-and-true tips:

1. Develop criteria that establish which types of events you do and do not want your brand associated with.
2. Ensure events are close enough to your location/market that they make sense, and they are something your target audience will attend. Let’s say your practice is located about 20 miles south of a large metro area, and most patients live within 3–5 miles of the clinic. While a large festival downtown is a large draw for those who live throughout the area, chances are you’ll meet more people who live further from your clinic than those who do. You may have more luck with a smaller, but more local event instead.
3. Consider whether owned events, events you host yourself, make sense for you or not. For a provider with a community space, you could leverage health and wellness talks from providers as a regular, ongoing series.
4. Develop event kits, programs in a box and other templates for turnkey, grab-and-go activations. Your materials (signage, collateral and giveaways) should be simple and sturdy enough for a wide range of activations. Be sure your collateral will work for the event location. For example, digital activations may not make sense for daytime outdoor events where sun and glare can defeat the purpose.
5. Be sure to think through what types of activities and giveaways will most attract visitors. Freebies are a must. Try to think beyond the usual lip balm and pens that everyone else is giving out. Think about the locals and what they do and love. For example, Denverites are all about their dogs, so dog-themed items that also relate to your brand can help you stand out.
6. Think long-term versus one and done. Be willing to tweak and re-evaluate your efforts as things change.

Examples of Success

Clinics Designed with Community Rooms

Grassroots marketing can’t be an afterthought for healthcare providers. Hospitals and clinics aren’t always places people go to casually, but, if you design the space to have a community room that’s welcoming and comfortable, attendees see how nice the space is and how friendly the staff is firsthand. Those positive interactions elevate the provider in the minds of the community. In a time where loneliness has become an epidemic, these communal spaces are more and more important. The provider’s location then isn’t just for medical care but for overall well-being, too. These spaces can be used for those owned doctor-talk events, social activities or third-party activations like Medicare 101 educational events for insurance agents. Many senior-focused primary care clinics Heinrich works with not only have such spaces but also see the value they bring to their patient panels and community reputations.

Retail Collaborations

Health happens everywhere, every day, not just in the exam room. That’s why it’s important for healthcare organizations to be front and center where people make decisions about their everyday health and well-being. There’s perhaps no better place than a grocery store. Heinrich has helped Medicare insurance agents nationwide host tabling events in store and we’re also helping to connect the dots between Medicare Advantage spending allowances and local retail chains. We’ve developed messaging to help eligible shoppers better understand how to use the spending allowance in store but also generate increased interest in the carrier, simultaneously boosting the store’s basket ring, average ticket, and overall incremental revenue.

Leaders Deeply Engaged with the Community

Before Heinrich, I worked with a large academic healthcare system on the Front Range. When opening locations in new markets, the leadership team’s involvement in the community through local events as well as nonprofit boards was a huge arbiter of success. That kind of work helps build leaders’ personal reputations and the organization’s as well as one that is invested in giving back to the local community.

Why You Should Work with an Agency

Working with an agency partner can help you establish the strategy, align key stakeholders and not only develop the creative, but help you execute it. Agencies can leverage their experience in other industries to help influence external stakeholders and position the grassroots marketing effort as a win-win. For example, Heinrich works with both a Medicare Advantage carrier and a national grocery retailer, which means we can help position in-store tabling events to both brands.

A fully integrated agency is especially helpful when it comes to in-house print production. Your creative team may come up with the best event activation idea in the world, but when it comes time to think about fulfillment, it’s over budget or items are backordered for weeks. With an in-house print production team, creative and print can work together to come up with the most creative, realistic solution in line with current trends that also arrives on time and on budget. Heinrich’s print department, for example, is deeply involved in the creative process, bringing innovative solutions from print vendors to the creative team.

It’s Time for Healthcare to Embrace Grassroots Marketing

Healthcare is on the precipice of massive change, thanks to technological and scientific breakthroughs and a shift to true prevention at a population health level. Grassroots marketing can be the conduit for these changes to be shared with the community and to re-build the trust the pandemic broke. Now’s the time for healthcare to take the grassroots marketing spotlight from sugary, unhealthy drink brands that claim to support health and fitness but actually undermine it. Now is the time for healthcare to lead, not follow.