For more than 37 years, COSE (The Council of Smaller Enterprises) has been a resource for small businesses in Northeast Ohio. While the organization offers a multitude of programs for its members, including networking events, savings programs and educational seminars, their main draw has been their attractive health insurance rates.
But with the dynamics of the health insurance industry changing, COSE’s cost advantage wasn’t as strong as it had been. Compound that with the onset of a deep recession, and it was becoming more and more challenging for COSE to garner new members with a health insurance message alone.
Instead, it had to demonstrate the value of its membership by emphasizing its many other offerings. With a complicated message to tell, a new strategy had to be developed that would eliminate confusion, minimize message dilution and provide maximum impact.
“Historically, COSE has been reluctant to give away memberships even on a trial basis. But given the economic situation and the competitive landscape, Point to Point convinced us it was the right time to try it.”
To get small business owners to truly understand the benefits of membership, we thought it was important for them to experience it. To facilitate this, we launched a Free Trial Membership offer. As 7-week members, prospects would be able to sign up for educational and networking events, attend benefit review sessions, use COSE member discounts, receive COSE communications and use COSE business spaces.
The goal of the campaign was to entice prospects to interact with COSE. With this in mind, we devised a media plan that led with digital communication. This medium would allow prospects to connect to COSE immediately, explore COSE on their terms and begin to get a sense of what the COSE experience would be like. Even before they signed up.
To maximize the effectiveness of the lead generation efforts, a program was set up to track the communications using unique phone numbers and URLs. This system would allow COSE to understand which media vehicles drove the most leads. Data collected from this campaign would be not only be used to refine the messaging on the fly, it would also be used to help develop the 2010 media plan. In addition, information learned from this program would set the foundation for a Membership Engagement process that would be developed the following year.
With the membership campaign breaking in the midst of one of the most serious recessions in decades, we developed messaging that positioned COSE as a resource to help small businesses survive – even thrive – during the economic downturn.
“There were a lot of moving parts to this campaign. Point to Point was instrumental in keeping them all coordinated to help us reach our goal.”
The campaign, which generated over 4 million impressions in the marketplace, was instrumental in helping COSE get its message out to prospects. In addition to building direct inquires, the campaign also helped increase traffic to cose.org by 67% and increased the time prospects spend on the website by an incredible 85.9%.
In short, interest in COSE, even without a health insurance cost advantage, was reignited.
We helped COSE reach their goals. We’re ready to do the same for you. Contact Mark Goren at (866) 979-5822 or mgoren@pointtopoint.com.
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