With the goal of providing a seamless benefits platform experience to Employers, Health Plans and Brokers, Benefitfocus launched a quick-to-market demand generation campaign. The demand generation accelerator campaign positioned Benefitfocus as a single platform, top-of-mind, low-risk technology leader for benefit management in order to generate marketing qualified accounts for both Employers and Health Plans. Without current marketing efforts in place, the accelerator program filled the top-of-funnel pipeline for sales to be generated in late Spring of 2021. The original goal was to generate 200 Marketing Qualified Accounts for Employer and 20 Marketing Qualified Accounts for Health Plan. This set benchmarks for future demand generation efforts, and through a test-and-learn approach across multi-channels, the campaign was optimized and relaunched in Q1.
The ultimate objective was getting the right message, at the right time and with the right content, to each of the respective audiences. Through collaborative workshops, message maps were built at the persona, campaign, and program level. Additionally, current content was audited against best practices and past performance metrics, to align which content should be served to the respective personas at each stage of the buyer’s journey. These strategic insights set the foundation for the creative brief.
Through the planning process, the overall business goals were translated into media objectives and strategies designed to accomplish results. Through a media mix recommendation, the media consumption, historical performance and costs were evaluated to determine the most efficient media mix best suited to impact the target audience and achieve goals. For the Employer campaign, this included launching: ABM content syndication programs, paid media (LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Reddit), paid search (Google AdWords and Bing), display retargeting and a virtual event sponsorship via a webinar. For the Health Plan campaign, with a more focused target account list, the channels included ABM content syndication, LinkedIn (ABM tactics) and display retargeting. Each campaign had unique email nurture strategies and landing pages created to pull leads through the funnel. Per the media mix recommendations, creative was executed across each of the channels and platforms. At the end of the Q4 campaign, channels were evaluated for effectiveness, and the plan was optimized to drive results in Q1.
Of the three creative concepts, we explored and presented, “It’s Time” resonated with the sales and marketing teams at Benefitfocus as being future-focused with a thought leadership approach. The creative concept statement, which guided the creative executions, was: “We all know things haven’t been easy, but that doesn’t mean they have to stay that way. It’s time to plan for your success tomorrow, to make a change that will finally modernize the outdated tools and systems that cause so much frustration. Now’s the time to start harnessing data to work hard so you can focus on making an impact. Our single-solution, future-focused benefits platform removes the burden and adds more valuable time back into your, your teams’ and your customers’ day. Let’s change the benefits experience for good. It’s time.” After launching this campaign in-market, and seeing how the big idea generated leads, this theme was continued in the Q1 campaign re-launch.
The program established benchmarks over a 2-month sprint to build Employer and Health Plan pipeline for sales. This determined MQL velocity and conversion rates to set up future KPI models and success projections. In order to move new leads from Awareness to Consideration, the timeline needs to be longer than 7 weeks. Although by the Q4 campaign end, the Marketing Qualified Leads were not achieved, the Marketing Qualified Leads to Marketing Qualified Accounts showed a 90% conversion for the Employer campaign. From the learnings of Q4 of 2020, we created an updated KPI model and optimized creative and channel mix, that was re-launched in Q1 of 2021. By leveraging brand awareness messaging and channels, as well as driving demand, Benefitfocus was promoted across their target account lists for both the Employer and Health Plan campaigns. Although the primary objective was engagement (form fills), the campaigns also generated over 2 million impressions.
