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Why Co-Marketing is a Senior-care Growth Engine
Key takeaways
- Coverage and care are inherently connected for senior consumers, but too often, they feel caught between the two.
- Compliant senior-care co-marketing can boost consumer confidence and build increased trust.
- Co-marketing aligns carrier and provider messaging with actions that put seniors first and makes that a coordinated team effort.
Senior-care marketing, like healthcare itself, is fragmented. The problem is that while consumers remain deeply dissatisfied with healthcare fragmentation, their experiences are unified. Seniors are the main character in their healthcare journey, while carriers and providers are the supporting cast.
For consumers, coverage and care go hand in hand. In their minds, buying a health plan is about buying a network, not just benefits and premiums.
When things go well, everyone reaps the rewards of a happy, satisfied senior. When things go poorly, seniors might penalize carriers and providers for each other’s mistakes. Here’s how it plays out.
- They had a bad senior primary care experience, which is the insurance company’s fault because it’s their network, and the carrier decided to let in a lower-quality provider.
- Their claim is denied, and the provider also gets blamed because they ordered the procedure that wasn’t covered at an out-of-network facility.
As healthcare insurers and providers increasingly take opposing sides, pointing fingers over rising costs, pharmacy benefit managers, fraud, and privatization, seniors get the short end of the stick.
Co-marketing, when senior-care carriers and providers compliantly market together, can help. Here’s how.
Senior-care co-marketing multiplies consumer confidence
As I’ve said before, it’s not enough to provide coverage and care—senior care needs to give consumers confidence. Co-marketing sends a unified message from two trusted entities. Rather than experiencing different marketing touchpoints with unrelated messages, seniors experience cohesion, which boosts their confidence in their coverage and care.
They know they won’t be used as the rope in a game of tug of war. Instead, they’ll have confidence knowing their plan and provider can not only work together but, more important, put their needs first.
Senior-care co-marketing reduces the burden of building consumer trust
Consumer mistrust in the healthcare system remains deep-seated. That mountain is too high for any one organization to climb alone. Co-marketing gives senior-care payers and providers lighter loads. They not only have their internal teams to lean on, but they also have external partners.
When insurers and providers work together, they can better solve a patient’s needs by doing what each does best. Co-marketing helps explain that story and why it matters to consumer health and well-being. And that enhances trust in healthcare, which remains in short supply.
Senior-care co-marketing aligns messages and actions
Co-marketing isn’t a cure-all for healthcare’s challenges. But what it can do is get more carriers and providers talking and working toward the same goals by using the same messages and abiding by the same principles. That encourages more meaningful alignment between their actions where fragmentation previously existed.
While messaging can attract new members and patients, actions retain them. Seniors look for patterns, not promises. The smaller the gap between the words and actions between the insurer and provider in a co-marketing campaign, the more a senior consumer will trust them.
Think of co-marketing as one layer of your infrastructure. It’s just one part of the bigger system, but it’s an important one that can attract new members and patients while increasing the loyalty and satisfaction of existing ones.
Co-marketing creates a flywheel effect that gathers more speed with every turn. It’s a no-brainer and your ultimate growth engine. What are you waiting for?
Your leader in senior-care co-marketing
We’ve executed senior-care co-marketing campaigns across the nation to drive patient-panel and member growth. Learn how we converted over 4,800 patients during one Annual Election Period for a top Medicare carrier and an alliance of local and regional providers.