Your plan's ability to communicate effectively internally and with members is key. While marketing technology stacks aim to make complicated processes easier, each stack should be built around a core of commonly approved solutions. A centralized communication management system is an excellent example of this.

It improves productivity, efficiency, and compliance in the following ways:

• Productivity— Access to the right communication, at the right time, and through the right means ensures everyone is on the same page throughout the entire lifecycle of a project. This increases productivity since employees are not duplicating work and are generally more in sync as they complete tasks and pass information along.
• Efficiency— When teams can access centralized information, the extra time required to get individual stakeholders up to speed on project status is eliminated. Therefore, tasks and projects are managed much more efficiently.
• Compliance— All team members are continually updated on the latest conversations, documentation, and information, which leads to more compliant brand alignment.

Managing a well-organized marketing communication technology stack is an example of a centralization effort — bringing order to the chaos by grouping technologies to better plan, execute, and measure the variety of communication efforts present in most plans.

The larger your plan, the greater the number of disparate systems you likely need to manage, making centralization even more beneficial to your organization. A centralized approach to managing multiple systems is also a cost-effective way to simplify system administration and integrations that promote efficiency. For example, one central login via SSO (single sign-on) to your marketing collateral through your CRM means internal sales and brokers won't be spending time trying digging for updated sales support and marketing won’t waste precious time creating one off materials.

Here's an example of an insurance provider who decided to begin consolidation of multiple platforms and suppliers of marketing assets into what they termed their one “workbench tool.” The primary drivers to consolidate platforms were:

• an inefficient and poor user experience in the field, and
• the need to effectively manage all marketing assets.
• ensure compliance with brand guidelines as well as state regulations and requirements.

Brokers had difficulty finding relevant materials, and/or materials that were compliant with the latest revisions. As a result, marketing was bombarded with phone calls that wasted significant time dealing with material requests.

The firm researched single source, integrated marketing portals that could provide a “digital briefcase.” The goals were to offer a superior user experience, reduce costs by consolidating assets into one repository and create efficiencies for sales and marketing.

The firm selected Toppan Merrill Connect™ (“Connect”) Storefront to consolidate thousands of marketing assets, including printed materials, electronic downloadable content, video, kits, and interactive documents. The new Storefront, (referred to by the firm as their single source of truth, the golden repository), maintains all history of these items, along with logic to manage user suitability, geography, revisions, effective start dates, pre-ordering capabilities, special messaging for content–and it provides the ability to feature and sunset items.

As a result of centralizing their marketing assets, marketing can now control, update and filter all marketing assets from a single workbench, ensuring that all branding and compliance standards are met. Through user provisioning, all content is controlled in the field, including print, static and dynamic kits, electronic and mobile content. With these controls, only the most relevant, compliant, and updated content is available for the field; and field reps can find the content they need through a unified shopping cart that allows them to order personalized items along with bulk print. Additionally, everyone better understands what content is being used, and its effectiveness through robust business intelligence tools.

The main benefits marketing and sales realized with a single source platform were:

• Eliminating multiple marketing asset platforms
• Provided geographically dispersed sales teams with a single access source to order relevant content, and streamlined marketing support
• Automated digital asset creation and approval
• Provided business intelligence to maximize ROI

Successfully managing campaigns, sales support and marketing collateral, can be challenging especially when dealing with the compliance and regulations of the health insurance industry. The inherent challenges are only compounded when plans are utilizing different tools in their marketing technology stacks. Whether centralizing similar functions or your entire martech stack, centralization helps solve these issues by providing businesses with one centralized source of truth.

To learn more about leveraging the power of centralization and automation to improve productivity, deliver consistent messaging and increase revenue by leveraging the power of centralization and automation, download our new eBook today.