Cornerstone Enables Sales with Personalized Marketing
Cornerstone Broker Insurance Services Agency is a privately owned general insurance agency based out of Cincinnati, Ohio that has been in business for over 30 years. Cornerstone deals specifically with brokers working in three distinct market segments: Senior, Group, and Individual health insurance and the ancillary products that complement those markets. In order to serve these areas, Cornerstone’s marketing team must provide unique marketing materials to employees, brokers, internal sales, and partners.
The Challenge
Prior to implementing MarcomCentral, the only way for Cornerstone employees, brokers, and partners to access marketing content was through the public website. This proved to be a problem for two reasons: first, content was available to anyone who visited the website, including competitors and second, the site was getting congested with the proliferation of content being added on a daily basis. Users had to wade through every marketing asset in order to find what was relevant to their needs, which proved to be an inefficient process. Users began requesting materials directly from Marketing and the team quickly became inundated with one-off requests.
Why they Chose MarcomCentral
Cornerstone needed a better way to distribute marketing materials to their clients, partners, brokers and employees. With MarcomCentral they were able to centralize all the information for a specific user in an organized manner. The Marketing team took that idea one step further by creating User Groups for each set of users. For instance, when a broker logs in to the portal they see a unique set of icons pointing to all the marketing materials used to sell their lines of business, while when employees log in, they see a different set of icons that lead to assets they use to be successful in their roles. This personalized setup allows users to get exactly what they’re looking for in minutes, without sending a request to the Marketing team or searching through the collection of content on the public website. An added benefit for the Marketing team is that they can see what lines of business are bringing in revenue and optimize a User Group to ensure the right materials for that business are in their portal.
Highlights
- Saved Marketing time and resources
- 24/7 access to compliant marketing
- Huge adoption rate upon launch
- Increase in sales with quicker time to market
The Results Speak for Themselves
In addition to marketing materials being available 24/7 and easily searchable, users could now personalize those materials on the fly to better target a specific prospect. Through MarcomCentral templates, the Marketing team provides assets that are already brand compliant, but that have editable fields users can update on their own, like a phone number, address, headshot, date- whatever needed to be personalized. This self-service feature is a huge hit. Internal sales and brokers can find, edit, and print a piece of marketing and take it directly to market. This freedom enables them to do business better and faster, while Marketing is freed up to work on new campaigns instead of fielding requests to constantly update outdated materials.
Brokers specifically, are also able to print and order promotional items (totes, golf tees, water bottles) through a vendor directly connected to the portal, so they can easily brand and grow their business.
Employee training was a critical part of Cornerstone’s effort to get the platform launched and proved to be a large part of their success. The Marketing team offered monthly webinars, a chat feature right in the portal, email campaigns, peer reviews, and video, all to promote the new platform to potential users. The effort paid off and more people than expected signed on and were active within the system in the first couple of months. Providing training and resources is an ongoing effort and a great opportunity to stay in front of users, especially as marketing content is updated and features are added to the platform.
While the initial goal of creating a single location for all marketing assets to eliminate the cluttered, unsecure, and public website was accomplished, Cornerstone realized so much more in their implementation of the marketing asset management platform. They saved tremendous time and resources on the admin side, enabled employees, sales, and brokers with on-demand marketing, and created an efficient new way for Marketing to keep all materials compliant and on-brand.
For more details on the Cornerstone story, watch their webinar.