Medicare insurers have felt the winds shift recently as word spread that CMS is preparing to release its Annual Notice of Change templates in the near future. When those guidelines appear, you will officially ANOC on your hands, and I have just one important question for you: are you ready?

For most companies, the honest answer is “no.”

This is because for an ANOC campaign to launch smoothly, on time and without threatening to knock your organization out of compliance with CMS, you have to be on top of it from the second the new templates are in your hands to the moment your revised books are sent to the printers. That’s about four months of undivided attention spread across numerous versions of your EOC, so it’s little wonder that even the best-intentioned companies find themselves hitting the panic button at some point in the process. The potential for error is just that large.

And there’s no need to remind you of why it’s worth panicking about. The government’s penalties for filing late are legendary—often thousands of dollars per plan beneficiary compounded for each day that it’s not in their hands. These fines have brought Medicare providers to their knees in the past, and even shuttered some health plans completely.

Perhaps you’re thinking, “I don’t need to be thinking about ANOC ahead of time because my company will be using an auto-compiling program to complete our contracts.” Auto-compiling software sounds like a great idea, but our experience has shown that it’s too good to be true. Clients that have used auto-compiling in the past have found the process to be riddled with errors as the software currently available is either too glitchy to do the job accurately or not flexible enough to account for the curveballs that invariably come up during the ANOC process.

Many groups have learned the hard way that there is no shortcut for manual compiling—we know because we’ve stepped in at the last minute to save many ANOC campaigns that were derailing as a result of auto-compiling nightmares.

So before you decide to take on the ANOC process in-house, we suggest that you ask yourself the following questions:

1)   Can you afford to dedicate personnel to ANOC?

Compiling and versioning your EOCs for ANOC is a full-time job. Your resources would be better spent preparing your marketing message for AEP, but ANOC has a way of overshadowing everything.

2)   Can you translate your contracts for the non-English-speaking population?

If 5% of the population in the regions you serve speaks languages other than English, you are required to translate all of your ANOC documents into those languages. Is your team up to the task of producing accurate translations, potentially in multiple languages?

3)   Are you planning on using auto-compiling software?

As we mentioned above, that would be a bad idea. If you still plan on going through with it, I’d advise bookmarking this page so you can contact us in September when the wheels are coming off.

At TRAFFIK, we are proud to have a pristine track record in ANOC fulfillment. We don’t just get our client’s ANOC materials to market on time; we get them there early. And because of our full-service capabilities, we can bring an ANOC campaign along with complete independence—from the CMS templates to translation to print.

So however you decide to proceed, just remember that now is the time to decide what peace of mind is worth to you this ANOC season—not after the wind starts blowing.

Related posts:

1. Coming Through in Crunch Time: CareMore

A big idea can be its own worst enemy. On the one hand, it’s the greatest thing to come along in years. It’s going to revolutionize your business. It’s going to buy you that vacation home in Maui with the yacht docked out in front.

On the other hand, the idea is too big! How are we going to make it work? Where do we even start? Never mind, let’s go back to business as usual.

This was the frame of mind our partners at Farmers & Merchants Bank were in when they sought us out for help on their latest “big idea.” They had the thought that they could package their business banking services in a way that would make sense for physicians and IPA members that ran their own practices. The idea floated around at F&M for three years without any traction until they called us up for some fresh inspiration.

I’ll let Andrew Miller, F&M’s assistant vice president media and production manager, tell how we came to work together:

“We reached out to TRAFFIK because of their reputation for approaching the challenges of a product launch in non-traditional ways. They already had the digital fluency to handle the online aspect of the campaign, and they came to the table with an outstanding creative vision for the project, too.”

The project he’s referring to came to be known as the F&M Physician Banking Suite, a way for F&M to reach an entirely new market. Our solution was an integrated campaign that combined a prestige-caliber direct mail piece with a custom-URL component that gave recipients a personal experience. We also facilitated their partnership with Monarch Healthcare to pilot the program. The success of our campaign was so immediate that F&M immediately began planning to adapt it for other industries outside of healthcare (ah, another big idea!).

What we were able to do for Andrew and the entire F&M team was actually very simple. We just needed to listen to their needs and what it was they wanted to accomplish. From there we able to craft a strategy that would fulfill their goals. I’ve found that being a good listener is every bit as important to a partnership as coming to the plate with the goods (which we are always happy to deliver, too). That’s why the Physician Banking Suite succeeded, and that’s why so many of our other clients are pleased with the results of our partnership, too.

So the next time that big idea is humming away in the back of your mind, desperate to get out into the world, you know what to do: pick up the phone and talk to us. We’re listening.

No related posts.

Sometimes we all get a little in over our heads. For Medicare health plans there’s a specific name for this phenomenon. It’s called “Annual Notice of Change.”

If you have ever worked in the healthcare industry, your eyes probably just went a little glassy at the mere mention of ANOC. For others, I’ll recap quickly: in a nutshell, ANOC is when the government makes changes to everyone’s Medicare coverage, which the Medicare plans are then responsible for communicating to their members in the form of updated Evidence of Coverage books.

If it sounds simple, it’s not—I’m just sparing you from the hair-pulling maelstrom of pain and agony that the ANOC process actually represents. The government takes ANOC very seriously. If you submit your materials even a little past deadline, you will be hit with huge penalties that are compounded by the number of members you serve and each day that you are late. For health plans with tens or hundreds of thousands of members, these penalties can be devastating.

Our client CareMore is one of the best Medicare Advantage plans in the business, serving tens of thousands of members in California, Arizona and Nevada. However, as they faced down the challenge of staying compliant with the government’s constantly shifting rules and regulations for ANOC, they needed a partner that could keep on top of the process and guarantee an on-time delivery so they could concentrate on other important stuff—like keeping their members healthy.

We stepped in following an ANOC season in which CareMore experienced dreadful results using an automated ANOC system that left them high and dry. For a little insight, here’s Dawn Maroney, CareMore’s senior vice president of sales and marketing:

“We were in danger of falling out of compliance last year, but TRAFFIK swooped in and saved the day for us, knocking out our ANOC documents in record time. This year, we turned the entire process over to them from the very start. They built out 40 different massive ANOC packages for our various plans and regions without any hiccups and got them out the door on time. During ANOC, there’s no higher measurement of success!”

Having been on the healthcare provider’s side during ANOC periods, I know this is a stressful time for everyone involved, which is we make it our mission to shoulder as much of the burden as possible. It’s the same with every high-impact fulfillment project we are entrusted to handle—our clients expect results, not to worry over whether their project is being completed accurately, on time and on spec.

Maybe your company is dreading ANOC—or your own version of ANOC—and need a partner to deliver in the bottom of the ninth. At TRAFFIK, we make our living exceeding expectations. So call us up—we’ll always come through.

Related posts:

1. 2012 Is Coming…Have You Started On Your Marketing Plan?
2. Five Signs it’s Time for an Agency Review

One of my biggest points of pride working at TRAFFIK is our total versatility. It’s truly satisfying to be able to be a sort of one-stop-shop operation for our clients, delivering not only the great creative and effective strategies that they’re looking for, but also many of the other components of a successful marketing campaign that would otherwise be farmed out to other companies.

For one of our valued clients, Southern California University of Health Sciences—a leading Chiropractic and Acupuncture & Oriental Medicine institution—this kind of flexibility is precisely what appealed to them. They saw value in the ability to bring the majority of their marketing needs under just one roof.

Here’s Dr. Hubie Chang, SCU’s executive director of marketing:

“My life is a lot simpler with TRAFFIK on our side. Dealing with a company that offers expertise in a variety of functions allows me to focus on other mission-critical needs at the university.”

What kinds of services are we offering? Above and beyond the creative and design work that we’ve staked our reputation on, SCU has tapped TRAFFIK for a broad range of services, including:

So you can see how our being the one-stop solution for SCU eases Dr. Chang’s mind quite a bit. Imagine having to coordinate four or five different agencies to manage all of these and other tasks and responsibilities. Talk about headaches—I don’t know how some businesses do it.

If you think your company could use some of TRAFFIK’s one-stop touch, talk to us. We always look forward to meeting new people and seeing how we can help to overcome their unique challenges in a way that is highly efficient, cost-effective and ultimately successful. Drop us an email or comment below.

Related posts:

1. How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Realize the Times They Are A-Changin’*

When the average person thinks of university life, they probably imagine large, sprawling campuses, students milling to and from class, a giant library filled with musty books, pep squads—the whole shebang.

There is another reality to universities, though, one that most people probably don’t consider, but that is the heartbeat of every major learning institution: the never-ending cycle of admissions that bring fresh tuitions—er, students—to the hallowed halls of learning.

For anyone working in the administrative side of a university or college, they know that the pressure is always on to generate leads and convert prospective students into tuition-paying future alumni. For those that are struggling to come up with new ways to engage these prospects, here are five strategies worth considering:

Of course, I’ve only scratched the subject of a very complicated subject. Consider this article food for thought, but if you are serious about kick starting fresh enrollment initiatives at your university, we at TRAFFIK would love the chance to bring our perspective to the table. Remember: it may only be February now, but the Fall Semester has a way of creeping up on you when your numbers are down!

No related posts.

Part of the beauty of Facebook is that the experience is different for each user. Users that “gather” friends and connections more actively tend to have a busy and active newsfeed experience, whereas those that focus on a smaller core of key relationships and brands may have a slower-moving feed.

For businesses that rely on Facebook as a tool for building their awareness, this dichotomy can be a source of frustration. Those users that follow a larger amount of friends and acquaintances may miss out on what key influencers are saying about their brand because what is being shared on their wall can get buried quickly or disappear from sight altogether if they aren’t monitoring their feed 24 hours a day. Such is the way of the dynamic newsfeed.

Facebook has recently introduced an ingenious workaround for this dilemma: Sponsored Stories. Under this program, companies can broaden their reach by increasing the visibility of influential newsfeed stories that relate to their brands or campaigns.

They’ve covered all of their bases, too, offering compatibility with many forms of Facebook-related actions, including:

While Sponsored Stories can be an effective marketing tool on its own, the program is optimal as part of an existing campaign that already includes standard Facebook ads. Because effective Facebook ads work to increase the number of actions that users take with your content (for instance, liking, sharing or commenting), Sponsored Stories adds the delicious counterpunch of making those actions visible for longer periods of time on relevant newsfeeds.

Sounds good right? If you’re not sure how Sponsored Stories can be integrated into your current social media marketing campaign, we can help to get you up to speed. Leave a comment below or contact us directly, and let’s set your Facebook presence on overdrive.

Related posts:

1. 7 Facebook Marketing Steps Summarized
2. Facebook Continues to Dominate
3. Facebook Places: Your Free Advertising

Have you ever heard of the phrase “Good, Fast or Cheap: Pick Two”? In the design world, this is a simple rubric that helps agencies to give clients an idea of what they can expect in terms of turnaround, quality and pricing. To break it down quickly, if they want something that is both “good” and “fast,” it is going to be expensive. If they want “good” and “cheap,” it’s going to take a long time. If they want “fast” and “cheap,” what they are going to get will be of inferior quality.

Now that you’re familiar with the concept, let’s reapply it to a hot topic facing many of today’s digital-savvy businesses: choosing an SEO and SEM vendor.

Over the last year we have seen a tremendous amount of growth in the realm of SEO and SEM with our clients. Normally we take on business in one of two ways: we take over an existing account from another SEO/SEM agency that showed poor results, or we are approached by an interested party and build their program from the ground up. Today, I want to address ways that you can avoid being in the position of paying for poor SEO results, as well as other ways to bypass wasting time, effort and a lot of money (if you’re not 100% up to speed on SEO/SEM and would like to learn more, check out my article about the basics of SEO).

Good: integrity and strategy

We recently took on an account that had an aggressive SEM budget for services with another company. Our predecessor was a nationwide SEO firm that has turnkey solutions. This company reaches out to local businesses through a huge corporate structure. Unfortunately for our new client, they were paying for the services for over four years and had not been receiving reports, communication or performance reviews. The SEM account had been put on autopilot and left to grow old.

Upon our initial audit, we pulled over 500 keywords that were being used in the previous campaigns, and concluded that about a third of them were junk and no longer relevant to the client’s services.

Because the previous vendor was not familiar with the exact details of their ex-client’s services and a did not have a detailed strategy, four years of unmanaged keywords, clicks and wasted traffic added up to approximately $75,000 of spending down the drain.

Every month, TRAFFIK produces reports and recommendations on spending and strategy, and sets mandatory meetings every quarter to align on the goals of your SEM strategy.

Fast: getting the right results, not results right away

When a company promises you top rankings and instant results, you should be skeptical. When things seem too good to be true, they usually are. SEO takes time to generate results, but the long-term payoff can be tremendous. SEM will generate instant data for you to review, but as I outlined above, if you’re not engaged, you loose value in the quality of traffic you generate.

Sometimes businesses outsource their SEO and SEM to companies overseas. As much as I support international business in a global economy, we have to be concerned about a few things:

Cheap: the lowest bidder is low for a reason

When a company signs up for an ongoing SEO/SEM strategy, there is nothing tangible in exchange for the monthly retainer they have just undertaken. If you are like most businesses, chances are that you have shopped for a good vendor, but that you’re probably going to go with the lowest bid.

In the world of SEO, since you’re paying for a service and not a commodity, you get what you pay for. Consider it like an employee you just hired. Do you want a minimum wage worker handling your finances?

With SEO, the lower you go, the more likely you will have poor content, a weak link-building strategy and messy tactics for posting content. Having a partner that can think through your product offerings, services and connect the dots to build real momentum is essential to growing your online presence. Additionally, using a disengaged vendor that uses unethical (or lazy) SEO tactics could potentially lead to decrease in rankings and a penalty from Google.

Now that you’ve heard about the good, the fast and the cheap as it relates to SEO and SEM, it’s time to make your most informed decision yet: pick up the phone and call TRAFFIK. We can continue this conversation and steer you toward a strategic program that produces results you can see at a cost that makes sense for your marketing budget.

No related posts.

The holidays are over and done with, the ball has dropped on Times Square and the Christmas lights are coming down in neighborhoods all over the country. It’s a brand new year, and smart companies are seizing this blank slate as an opportunity to rethink the way their business communicates with the world around them.

By now, you’ve probably heard for years about the gradual shift away from “push marketing” and the way that social media has upended the way we try to reach our targeted customers. In a recent AdAge article, writers Doug Levy and Bob Garfield have identified our current marketing landscape as “the Relationship Era,” which falls right along the same lines of thinking that we’ve been preaching at TRAFFIK for a while now: establish trust and truly engage with your audience.

How to do it is another ball of wax, but here are a few thoughts to get you rolling.

Embrace Conversation. One of the earliest tenets of social media marketing is truer now than ever before: people are talking about you whether you like it or not. Make 2012 the year that you start listening to the chatter instead of just tuning it out if it isn’t positive. Ignoring it doesn’t make it go away.

Who Are You? If you can’t say what your business is all about in five words or less, how do you expect your customers to know? Get to the essence of who you are as a company and make that the cornerstone of your communication strategy. Give people something that they understand and that works for them.

Inspire, Don’t Influence. Today’s consumer is surrounded by marketing messages to the point where they may just shut out anything that looks remotely like a pitch. Even something as innocuous as “Follow me on Twitter” sounds fishy. If you give people something to talk about instead of just telling them what you want them to know, big things can happen.

So is 2012 the year that you begin to leave the “old ways” behind? I hope so. Give me a call or hit us back in the comment section below and let’s talk about the ways that we can inspire trust and build a truly engaged, emotional connection with your customers. It’s a new year—anything is possible.

Related posts:

1. 2011: What a Year!
2. What an iPad can do for your business.
3. What Your Chop Stix Say About Your Business

ROI can be a tricky thing. Here at TRAFFIK, it is the basis of our entire client-services model. We want our partners—who are investing in our expertise—to see the maximum return possible on their marketing expenses.

At face value, it is usually fairly easy to identify where ROI is occurring in a campaign. Lots of click-throughs on a particular e-blast message? We know it’s working there. Not enough QR code scans on a print collateral piece? Maybe we need to make adjustments there.

Sometimes, though, it’s not quite so cut and dry. If the marketing elements of your marketing campaign are not easily trackable, you may have a much harder time putting your finger on why something is not working as well as it could or should be.

So what went wrong? Here are some likely culprits.

Right Message. Wrong Target. If your campaign is bombing, this is probably the first place you should look. Having the perfectly crafted message to communicate your brand, service or product’s benefits is next to useless if you’re talking to the wrong people (why your agency missed your target audience is another relevant question, but we’ll let you ask them why that ball was dropped).

Missing the Mark. The opposite of the above. In this case, your message is either unclear to your audience or is somehow putting them off. Re-examine your campaign vehicles—it may not be too late to fine-tune them in such a way that good ROI is still achievable before the life of the campaign expires. A new, more effective headline on your existing creative can do wonders, for instance.

Out of Date. Out of Touch. Advertising legend David Ogilvy once wrote, “If you are lucky enough to write a good advertisement, repeat it until it stops selling.” Indeed, many of the best and most memorable campaigns you can think of have stayed in use for decades (how long has Nike been telling us to “Just Do It”?). However, that’s not to say that your campaign shouldn’t evolve with the times or even change radically if it’s starting to wear thin. The California Milk Processing Board, for instance, has recently launched a campaign announcing that “Real Milk Comes from Cows,” edging the familiar “Got Milk?” tagline to the margins. Perhaps they were seeing a trend of poor returns and decided, “enough with the milk mustaches!”

Still not sure why your ROI is falling flat? We can help with that. As a full-service advertising agency with a wide range of ROI-illuminating analytics at our disposal, we can make a tangible difference for your marketing dollar in the short and long run. Let’s get your ROI moving in the right direction in 2012.

No related posts.

Remember that old saying, “you can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink”? This article preaches the opposite—and is just as easy to understand.

Companies that have great products and services sometimes have a Facebook presence that is more of a ghost town than a thriving community. It’s easy to build a social platform, but using it to generate profit is hard—like trying to force a horse to drink just because the water is there. If you have a great product, they’ll drink—hypothetically speaking, of course.

Let’s also establish another factor: ROI, or return on investment. If you don’t spend money, you wont make money. Because Facebook is free, businesses often believe that creating a page and getting their colleagues to “LIKE” it will lead to converting a huge sale. Where people strike gold is when they invest money into a strategy that will generate interest from someone else’s pool of water and bring people in through viral interest.

Let’s look at an inclusive private jet charter that flies private groups to Vegas from LA and San Diego with hotel, limousine and meals for around $2,000 per person for the weekend. Great deal right? They have a Facebook page—so why is it empty? No one knows about it.

Now, let’s spike the water. We can design an effective turnkey campaign that promotes your private flight service via Facebook LIKEs. Example: 1,000 LIKEs unlocks a 20% discount within a given timeframe. Everyone who LIKED your page within the offer’s window of opportunity (say, 15 days) receives the coupon. Furthermore, we can integrate reposting functionality that broadcasts the promotion to each individual’s wall when they like the deal (this is the viral wave).

You will also have to spend advertising money for people to know about the campaign. For example, let’s spend $5,000 on Facebook advertising for the deal’s 15-day duration and geographically target LA and San Diego users within a 30-mile radius. Putting ads on profiles will generate interest among consumers that fit your demographic. Let them get the exposure to your ads, click on them, land on your campaign and sign up. Wait for the promotion to expire and see how many conversions you get.

In addition to sales and LIKEs, you will gain an email database out of your promotion—which can be just as valuable for future promotions, incidentally—so make sure to schedule two to three follow-up emails before the campaign expires (“This is your last chance,” etc.).

When we come full circle, you can see there is a strategy to bring people to your campaign (ads), a reason for them to engage (the deal) and then an opportunity for them to share with their friends in order to get the deal (must reach 1,000 LIKEs). .

Like the idea? We have plenty. Call us and let’s turn your Facebook page into a profit-generating machine.

Related posts:

1. Turning Fans Into Brand Ambassadors 101
2. Head to Facebook on Black Friday
3. 7 Facebook Marketing Steps Summarized