Five Tips for More Creative Marketing with Constraints
Medicare marketers have known for years that market disruption may force harder choices, tighter budgets, narrower targets and less room for guesswork. What that discipline looks like may vary from plan to plan, but constraints and limits may actually unlock better thinking. David Epstein’s new book, “Inside the Box,” makes the argument that too much freedom paralyzes creativity more often than it frees it.
For marketers, this concept is a useful reminder. While the discipline of working within constraints is not a new idea, as budgets and campaign resources grow, some can drift away from the creativity limitations bring. Epstein’s argument is a prompt to marketers to build creative discipline into your thought process, and benefit from what that brings.
In many cases, the strongest marketing tends to come from teams willing to narrow the field before the work begins. Guardrails narrow the scope and keep work on strategy, with fewer messages, audiences and goals. Sharper creative makes a bigger impact.
Here are five tips, based on Epstein’s argument, for marketers to explore.
Tip 1: Consolidate Brand Positioning
Health plans compete on the same fundamentals, benefits, provider networks and access to care, among other attributes. Standing out in a saturated market requires subtraction. Instead of attempting to claim leadership on every item, choose your most valuable services and build campaigns centering them. This is a step in the direction of “useful constraint.” The messaging in your brand positioning should reflect your strongest attributes, not every attribute your plan has. This gives members—and potential members—touchstones to recognize in the market.
Tip 2: Pretend Your Budget Is Smaller Than It Is
A useful experiment for marketers is to look at your existing budget and divide it into thirds or quarters. This can help your team be creative with fewer resources. Don’t think of this in terms of stages and execution—instead, ask yourself this:
- If you only had a fourth of your budget, how could you reach your ultimate target?
- What channels would you prioritize?
- Where’s your ROI coming from?
This reframes your thinking and helps you discern where your money can go for the biggest bang. Then, take that thinking and expand it to the next chunk of available budget. With your priorities out of the way, what else can you do to build out a campaign? This step-by-step process forces marketing teams to consider their best options first while getting as creative as they can within faux limitations.
Tip 3: Sharpen Your Funnel
A campaign with one funnel job is a sharper campaign. Most marketers know this, but AEP has to cover every stage at once. Each year, you have to drive awareness with prospects who’ve never heard of the plan, fuel comparison shopping and convert warm leads in the final stretch. The constraint isn’t picking one job and dropping the rest. It’s giving each stage its own brief, creative, and KPIs, built with the same focus you’d bring to a single-purpose campaign. Each piece is sharpened by virtue of the attention the team pays to it, uniquely, within the larger scope of the campaign.
Tip 4: Tighten the Brief
Good strategy starts with the brief. Clarity will guide your team to success or failure. Vague or overcomplicated briefs cost your team focus before creative even begins. Applying the idea of constraint here pushes for a radical compression in the sections that matter most. Clarify your assignment, your key message and your call to action.
Practice describing each item with one sentence, instead of paragraphs or multiple bullet points—even if it’s just the goal of each item. Concision keeps your team focused on what matters, and it gives you the guardrail to point back to when creative and messaging start to get too broad. The brief is your source of truth in your planning. If those single sentences aren’t crystal clear to the team, then the strategy isn’t ready yet. This rigor applies whether working from the brief a client provided or when crafting your own.
Tip 5: Simplify The Message
One message to guide creative isn’t a new idea. There is a temptation in healthcare marketing to load every postcard, email and landing page with the full lineup of benefits and brand hallmarks—like your brand positioning; every line of copy should be focused. Instead of getting lost in the sub-messages, try to write each tactic under one overarching message, even if it’s just a thought experiment to see what new ideas your team can come up with.
The Emerging Pattern
At every layer of the work, from brand positioning down to the final line of copy, the same discipline can be applied. Getting into the practice of doing more with less can help you prepare for marketing in even tighter periods. The most strategic marketers, especially in regulated, risk-averse categories like healthcare, recognize the pull toward keeping every door open. They also recognize that sharp creative comes from being willing to close the ones that don’t work.
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