The ACA and the rise of consumerism in healthcare has brought direct-to-consumer marketing into focus, and along with serving that influx of inexperienced, new consumers has been the need for education.
Further, with the third enrollment period of the Affordable Care Act underway, the changing health insurance landscape has necessitated changes in companies' strategies to gain market share, which have contributed to everything in the past year from fluctuations in premiums, to the failure of numerous co-ops, to the rise of the potential megamergers among several of the industry’s largest players.
Embracing B2C marketing
As noted by insurance marketing firm TPG in their December 2014 report, "Mastering Health Insurance Marketing in the Age of Health Care Reform,” this has necessitated new strategies in areas including:
- Identifying and profiling each segment of the new market;
- Targeting their needs;
- Drilling down into their drivers and motivations;
- Tailoring communications;
- Auditing the competitive landscape; and
- Implementing analytics.
“Analytics ensure that you are keeping your forecasted costs in line—or, better, reducing them—while getting in front of the right audiences through the best-performing channels,” TPG writes.
Tahoe Partners similarly shared its insights this year with a focus on the new consumerism and a specific point toward prioritizing mobile platforms.
“Thinking about your digital experience on the mobile platform is no longer optional, especially as we look at the largest growing segment of new insurance buyers – 19-34 year-olds,” the company writes.
Overall, Tahoe Partners stresses differentiation, transparency, analytics, and a continued improvement of the customer service experience. It also suggests a renewed look at content marketing with an eye toward reducing “digital noise” and increasing visual storytelling in addition to content that sparks emotion and action.
Selling narrow networks
Another driving force in change is the trend toward narrow networks.
A Robert Wood Johnson Foundation report earlier this year suggested insurers should adapt how they market narrow network plans to help consumers really understand what they cover. It found at that time that 41% of silver exchange plans had small or extra-small narrow networks.
It suggests insurers could help these plans succeed through marketing adaptations, such as network size descriptions of extra small, small, medium, large, etc. It argues narrow networks will only thrive through transparency and strict maintenance of adequacy.
"Provider network size and composition has become an important part of how insurers price marketplace plans and attract consumers, but, so far, consumers do not have usable information about provider networks," RWJF’s Kathy Hempstead told FierceHealthPayer.
Not all new marketing is coming from health plans themselves.
Duke Medicine has made waves by launching a unique marketing scheme, “Plan For Duke,” that promotes plans that include its practices and physicians. Duke says the intent is to educate consumers and illustrate different plans limit access to certain health systems. The ads don’t discriminate between plans in any other way, with Duke saying they were left “intentionally broad.”
Is it working?
HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell has reported an estimated 10.5 million people remain uninsured and eligible for ACA coverage, and one in four of those people are expected to sign up during this enrollment season.
Current enrollment data suggest additional consumers are indeed continuing to purchase plans through HealthCare.gov, despite this year’s average 7.5% increase in premiums. However, the proportion of new customers compared to returning customers during the first week of enrollment was down to about one-third of enrollees, compared to nearly half at that time last year.
On top of that, the rising premiums suggest market share is now a lower priority to insurers than reducing their risk in participation. The new question may be whether every insurer actually wants to increase their market share.
UnitedHealth Group put that debate in the national spotlight last week when it abruptly pulled back marketing efforts and announced uncertainty about its future participation in the marketplaces as a result of data signaling higher risks and more difficulties, and its own projection for up to $500 million in losses in 2016. If UnitedHealth is questioning its marketplace role, warns Fortune, “it raises the prospect of an exodus by insurers out of the Obamacare program.”