How Genius Avenue’s Marketing Support is Changing the Game

Welcome

One of my jobs as a marketing professional is to identify Unique Value Propositions (UVPs) for a company, brand, product, or even an individual campaign. UVPs are basically a fancy way of calling out what makes an offering different and educating an audience about why that difference matters.

Oddly, for the first time in my career, my team and I have the rare honor of actually being one of the Unique Value Propositions that differentiates a Genius Avenue partnership from other options.

When you become a Genius Avenue partner, you have full access to our marketing, sales, and leadership teams. We don’t just set up a solution in the background and disappear. Instead, we work with our partners, wherever we’re needed by providing diverse marketing functions and augmenting existing teams to advance the strategy, close gaps, and create success.

Our team is structured as a full-service marketing agency and leverages an agile/scrum marketing and project management methodology. The result is an extremely flexible and responsive group that, like our platforms, can adapt to fit the needs of any product, company, group, plan, or market environment. We can do as much, or as little, as needed; and our engagements range from simple analytics consulting to full go-to-market product launches and ongoing advertising campaign support.

This blog is designed to introduce you to the broad scope of Genius Avenue’s marketing capabilities and share a few ideas on how we leverage our considerable experience within digital and traditional marketing to help our customers increase sales, drive enrollment, and improve retention to create lifetime value and accelerate growth.

We’ll be reviewing some of the primary marketing tactics we execute, in coordination with our various partners, as well as the channels and tools we use to help create growth. Our goal is to educate you on what’s available to you as a Genius Avenue partner, with a minimum of marketing speak, and explain why these tactics are effective.

Web Design

Most of Genius Avenue’s partners require web design support. This can take the shape of a full product, multi-page website to support group or individual sales, a micro-site to support a unique offering, a mobile splash page to support a distinct campaign, or the creation of optimized sign-up pages that focus on the user experience and compel a conversion.

We use the full scope of web design best practices and a leading tech stack that leverages proven tools and security; in addition, we’re proud to feature a site mapping, design, and programming team that has more than 50 years of combined experience and over 700 successful site launches under their belts.

Web Analytics and Optimization 

You can’t just build a website and assume that just because it’s live, it’s performing. Websites, landing pages, and portals must all be monitored, reviewed, tested, and ultimately optimized to achieve maximum results. In fact, the best web presences are never really “done” – they’re just an iteration awaiting the next round of improvements.

In addition to having the knowledge and expertise needed to help guide that optimization, we support this process of continual improvement with a complete tool stack. Our services include:

• Google Analytics – The Google Analytics Suite is the industry standard in website performance monitoring. Every partner website includes this suite of tools, and we’re happy to provide some guidance on how to analyze and interpret data.

• Google Webmaster Tools – Wherever relevant, our team can deploy these additional website tools from Google to increase visibility and analyze performance.

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – We use a partner tool called Deep Crawl to help continually scan our partner websites and make changes that align with top search engines and improve traffic and performance.

• Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) – Using Google Analytics, Ahrefs, and Crazy Egg heatmapping, we analyze how users are moving through a website and how and where they’re buying – or not buying. We then deploy measured tests to see if we can improve conversion rates and drive more sales.

Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation is a suite of tools that combine the traditional sales Customer Relationship Management functionality (think SalesForce) with advanced web tracking and intelligent digital marketing tools such as progressive profiling forms, calls-to-action, dynamic email campaigns, and lead scoring to close the loop on how a web visitor can become a customer.

We have an agency partnership with SharpSpring marketing automation and can deploy their full functionality on behalf of our partners. This allows your marketing team, or ours on your behalf, to leverage modern inbound marketing and create closed loop reporting.

Partner Marketing Kits

Every new Genius Avenue partner receives a full Partner Marketing Kit. This collection of various marketing pieces is designed to give your product a head start and show some examples of the various things we can do throughout our partnership.

The basic kit includes splash page designs, branded banners, various digital ads, social media posts, and flyers. The kits vary slightly based on the product needs and go-to market strategy, but most importantly, they act as a catalyst to get the ideas moving and kickstart engagement.

Sales Collateral, Print, and Enrollment Support Materials

We really believe that marketing should support the sales process, no matter how that process occurs. For many of our clients, it’s entirely digital, but for others, there is a physical component, and we make sure to offer those partnerships the same support and availability.

We routinely create print pieces that can be deployed as needed to support product sales or benefits enrollment. These include mailer templates, posters, signs, folders, flyers, and even stickers.

Advertising Creation and Support

Digital advertising on channels like Google, Bing, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter can be challenging for many of our partners. There’s a definite science to launching and successfully managing digital campaigns, and most of our partners have limited experience, or limited bandwidth, to leverage these channels effectively.

Our team is full service and can support any – or all – of these channels. Based on your marketing needs, we’ll make sure the correct pixels for each channel are in place, and we’ll work with you to get ads launched. We can even provide ongoing support, strategy development, and continual optimization.

2nd Chance Marketing

Remarketing or “2nd Chance Marketing” is one of the best tools to drive continual growth and sales for a digital product. The insurance and benefits space are unique, though, and require a unique approach.

The Genius Avenue marketing team can deploy traditional remarketing via Google, Bing, or Facebook; but we’re very excited about our latest partnership.

We’re proud to be working with El Toro targeted advertising to take “2nd Chance Marketing” to a new level. If a web visitor abandons their transaction, we can match the user’s IP to known public data. When there’s a match, we can trigger both follow-up digital ads and physical direct mail to engage the user with a follow-up offer or explanation of benefits.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is about using a variety of digital content types to engage prospects throughout the customer journey. This can include blogs, videos, infographics, eBooks, white-papers, and even webinars, just to name a few.

We work with our partners to create content marketing strategies and arm them with the various content pieces they need for launch and growth. We can even support these strategies in an ongoing fashion, as needed.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is not for everyone; in fact, it should be avoided by some product types. But most companies who avoid social media do it more because of bandwidth than identity.

If you have a product that would benefit from a social media push, we can help increase that bandwidth and define your brand in the channels that would provide results, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and even TikTok. We leverage a variety of tools to make scheduling posts and monitoring results easy, and we can deploy them on your behalf.

Video

Great videos create great results. We work with a variety of video providers to produce high-quality marketing videos that can support your product and speak to your target audience. These range from simple explainer videos to complex animation and even live action.

We can also work with you, or for you, to get these videos out to the world via YouTube campaigns.

Strategy

None of these techniques can reach their potential without being part of a broader strategy and execution plan. Part of our agency approach is that we’re here to support and refine your existing strategy, or work with you to create a new one.

Whether your marketing efforts are in their beginning stages or are already a sophisticated, well-oiled machine, we’ll work with you to achieve your goals.

Costs

The costs for our various marketing services vary depending on your needs and the level of deployment necessary.

Many of the listed services like website design, strategic support, web performance analysis, and partner marketing kits are included as a part of every Genius Avenue engagement. Others, like ongoing ad support, content marketing creation, and digital advertising costs, require an additional investment.

Your sales contact and our marketing team will work with you to provide the best strategic options and meet your unique needs to assure our mutual success.