Author: Jump Team

Written By: Jump Team
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Positioning: A Powerful Play in B2B Marketing

The business-to-business sales landscape creates a number of interesting marketing challenges. From a finite number of potential customers to smaller product offerings, B2B marketing can leave the impression messaging possibilities are limited. But as often happens, when the picture appears smaller, a highly focused solution comes into view and creates the perfect opportunity for positioning.

More Specific than Branding

Although positioning is a strategic sibling to branding, its narrower characteristics allow it to be applied for just a specific amount of time or only to a singular product. In addition, it also has the potential to not only position the company’s product, but by extension, its competitor’s product as well.

Positioning “Proves” an Ideal Move

Recently Havco Wood Products – the industry leader for dry-freight trailer flooring – found themselves in a situation where positioning their flagship product became essential. Over 20 years ago, Havco invented the industry’s first composite floor – the Fusion Floor by Havco – which revolutionized the category. The floor combined a base layer of oak with a high-strength composite layer which made the floor stronger and lighter than a traditional wood floor.

In 2021, Havco faced a challenge as their patent for the composite floor was coming to an end; allowing their competitors to enter the market with competing products. To prepare, Havco utilized a powerful positioning to reinforce their reputation for innovation and their status as the leading manufacturer of composite floors. The undeniable fact was that Havco had the only floor with proven longevity and ROI. In fact, they had 20 years of documented proof. So, while the competitors might have been able to make claims of strength, they had no proof their floors would last.

Havco’s positioning, The Industry’s Only Proven Composite Floor, quickly communicated that the Fusion Floor was the original and the only proven investment available to the industry while at the same time positioning its competitor’s products as unproven copies of the original.

Jump Company’s positioning for the Fusion Floor by Havco came to life through a spectrum of digital and traditional marketing channels as well as editorial-length industry communication. By reinforcing the floor’s 20-year track record of documented performance, Havco was positioned to remain the industry leader.

Written By: Jump Team
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5 Tips to Maximize Medicare’s Short Campaign Window

Medicare marketing is uniquely difficult. Those companies who can successfully navigate the annual plan development, the governmental approvals, the marketing campaign development, the internal compliance reviews and the media planning and placement are given the reward of less than two months to market their plan, and they must do it at the exact same time every single competitor is also marketing their plans. Knowing how to maximize every moment of the annual enrollment period is vital to success, and from our experience, these are five tips to ensuring success.

Tip #1: Start with strategy

The best campaigns begin and end with a great strategy that allows for clear reporting. It’s tough to hit a target if you don’t know what it looks like. Starting with the end in mind will set the stage for future optimizations. It will also inform which tactics will give you the most bang for your buck. For example, if your goal is brand awareness, display tactics can help you reach the most people. If you’re looking for an action, tactics like paid search can put you in front of users who are actively searching for you and may be more likely to convert.

Tip #2: Get in market as early as possible

You may be faced with constraints that influence your time in market. Whether you’re dealing with regulations, limited information, or time-sensitive content, look for ways to prime the market before your campaign goes live. Having brand messaging in market prior to a campaign launch may be a good way to boost awareness. Consider teasing an upcoming release to generate interest before more details become available. In general, the more time you have in market, the better. Platforms like Google require time to optimize to benefit from machine learning. For paid search, we recommend at least one month in market before your campaign goes live to help maximize results.

Tip #3: Give yourself options

When time is of the essence, it helps to have a wide range of pre-approved options, especially in markets where regulation is high. Build twice as many digital ads as you need so you can layer in or remove the ones that aren’t performing. The more ads you can swap in, the more opportunities you have to learn.

Tip #4: Optimize effectively

Not all optimizations are created equal. Think through the underlying goal of each tactic to make sure you’re optimizing appropriately. For example, brand awareness campaigns focus on overall impressions. Optimize these for reach. For campaigns geared around conversions, optimize on user actions like clicking “enroll now” or “buy now.” Understanding what success looks like for each tactic will help you make game-time decisions so you can get the best performance out of your campaign overall.

Tip 5: Take good notes

One of the best things you can do to set yourself up for future success is to take good notes of everything you learned during the campaign. Any helpful findings should be shared out and saved in a way that makes them easy to reference as part of the strategy development process for the next campaign.

At Jump Company, nothing thrills us more than seeing campaigns deliver game-changing results. It’s amazing to see what is possible when you are intentional about how to make the most out of your time in market…no matter how limited it may be.

Written By: Jump Team
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Jump Director of Client Solutions Joins FOCUS St. Louis Women in Leadership

Jump is proud to congratulations to Alexandria Reed, Director of Client Solutions, on being selected to join FOCUS St. Louis for the spring 2023 cohort of Women in Leadership. This program connects women of diverse backgrounds so they can refine their leadership competencies and deepen their understanding of the region.

“It is an honor to be accepted into a premier leadership organization committed to cultivating stronger leaders that in turn create a stronger St. Louis region,” said Alex. “I’m excited to have the opportunity to learn from diverse perspectives, connect with incredible women leaders, grow my own leadership skills and find ways to better help serve my teams, clients and community.”

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How To Stand Out in Community Banking

Many industries pit national brands against regional or local competitors, but none is more competitive than banking and finance. National powers have the scale to offer the widest variety of products and services and the resources to advertise and promote themselves. Regional and community banks are often at a disadvantage with fewer locations and smaller marketing budgets. For this reason, these banks also run the risk of becoming commoditized in the eyes of their customers believing one regional option is the same as the next. When tasked to stand out in community banking, these are three necessities.

Define Your Brand and Push It to the Forefront

What makes your institution different from your competitors? What characteristics can you confidently promote? What are the unique reasons a customer would receive a better experience with you over one of your competitors? Defining the core of your brand and then aligning not only your advertising, but your business approach, philosophy and experience around your brand is the clearest and strongest way to bring distinction to your bank in your market. But most importantly, resist the urge to settle on generalities and make sure your brand is differentiated. If you have defined your brand in a way that others could also claim, then you haven’t dug deep enough. Your brand is ultimately why you are the only choice for your target customer’s banking needs, not just a definition of reasons someone needs banking services.

Offer Easy and Modern Digital Experiences

Has your bank enabled customers to handle all their banking transactions online from opening new accounts to applying for loans? And more than just online, what about through mobile devices? If your process begins online but has steps that require printed documents or physical signatures, then you run the risk of losing customers to national banks or digital-only institutions. Today’s customer looks completely different than a customer 20-years ago and your digital presence, services and experience should reflect how things have changed. A digital experience isn’t only through your website or on your app, but it’s also how you interact on social media, how you distribute information and content and how answer questions and fulfill requests with your customer services team. 

Omni-Channel Campaigning with a Geographic Focus

The most successful community banks use all the same tactics and outlets employed by national campaigns – just limited to the geography of their target customers. A regional banking campaign doesn’t just mean billboards and sponsored community events; television, radio and especially search, social media and online display all need to be incorporated into your marketing campaign. A robust campaign balances ongoing brand awareness that establishes a community leadership position with the necessities of lead generation for your key financial services to drive business growth.

Jump Company has successfully partnered with regional financial institutions to define brands, reach target customers, and drive growth for the last two decades. And we aren’t just a marketer of community banks, we are also a customer.

Written By: Jump Team
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Jump Company Supports The Angel Band Project

The Angel Band Project is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit created to use the power of music to provide healing, raise awareness, and promote positive social change for survivors of sexual violence and intimate partner violence. Angel Band believes music has the power to change hearts and minds. Through album projects, concert events, speaking engagements and music-based arts initiatives, Angel Band educates people on the survivor’s journey, while advocating for the rights of all survivors.

For the past five years, Jump Company has partnered with Angel Band to develop their website and promote their events. This year, Jump is providing promotional marketing for their raffles in advance of their annual event on November 4, 2023, including flyers, social media posts and targeted emails as well as event communication to attendees.

For more information on how you can support the mission of The Angel Band Project, visit https://www.angelbandproject.org.

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Jump Partners with University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy

Jump Company is pleased to announce our newest partnership with University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy in St. Louis, MO. The University is working with Jump to develop a new marketing campaign to promote the school’s recent rebrand and drive enrollment. 

“Jump has a long history partnering with educational institutions and this is perhaps the most challenging environment they have faced in the last twenty years,” said Jon Tiede, President and CEO of Jump Company. “The challenges being faced by higher education today are daunting between rising costs, enhanced competition from online sources and legislative actions. We believe that branding and positioning is vital to be able to develop a message which targets the right students so that those who enroll feel they have found the right school for them, go on to graduate and ultimately become successful in their career and dedicated alumni to their school.”

Over the course of the first-year agreement, Jump will work with the University to create omni-channel marketing materials including video, audio and online to launch and optimize an enrollment campaign targeting all programs across the University – both undergraduate and professional paths.

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Selling Is Hard; Hiring Is Harder

When people think of marketing, they most often focus on branding campaigns or advertising campaigns designed to sell products. However, systemic changes in the job market, especially resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic, have made recruitment campaigns an increasing focus for industries that depend on a large, skilled workforce. Our experience working with healthcare clients has taught us the hardest thing to market in healthcare might just be a job. What changes when the thing you are selling is a career? These are four lessons to keep in mind when you must grow your healthcare team.

Know your audience

Say you are trying to hire nurses. No one nursing position is alike and neither is your talent pool. To achieve your hiring goals, it is critical to conduct research to understand the unique roles you are hiring for, what candidates are likely a good fit, and what would likely interest and motivate prospective hires. Knowing your target audiences on a more personal level allows you to tailor your campaigns to better cut through the clutter.

Ensure your value proposition is actually valuable

Let’s face it, the available talent pools are incredibly low in relation to available positions. On top of that the competition is fierce and healthcare workers are even being lured away by different industries. Your offer not only needs to be competitive, but you also need to be able to authentically articulate what you can offer a candidate beyond salary. This is where a solid employer brand is critical in addition to being able to highlight your culture, benefits/perks, flexibility and variety as well as training and advancement opportunities.

Personalization is key

You not only need to know your audience, but you also need to personalize your campaigns to meet them where they are. Take a hard look at what your talent pools care about and where they spend their time. Create personas that align to what motivates those individuals. And then leverage data, personalize your communication strategy, and tailor your outreach and response strategy to ensure your message is relevant, reduces barriers to conversion and cuts through the clutter.

Brand + Lead Generation

The “secret sauce” for successful healthcare recruitment is the right balance between brand and lead generation. Stay top of mind to avoid getting lost in the noise and keep critical channels always-on while layering in targeted campaign strikes that drive action. Reduce friction across the recruitment journey and think about your brand as more than just a campaign. Conducting experience audits for our clients have proven to be incredibly valuable to diagnose where gaps in the experience may be to ensure you aren’t losing valuable prospects.

Achieve alignment across the organization

Marketing’s success can only go so far without collaboration with the HR department, hiring managers, system leaders and colleagues. Getting input on the positions you are hiring for, current priorities, quality of leads, and what led to an offer being accepted or declined keeps marketing authentic and provides the opportunity to constantly improve. Additionally, sharing the messages in market and the personas you’ve developed with recruiters and hiring managers can help prepare teams and aid them in better connecting with candidates.

Jump Company has not only helped our healthcare clients generate leads, but more importantly, exceed their hiring goals. We attribute our success to not only our strategic, performance-driven approach but also our own successful recruitment of great employees.

Written By: Jump Team
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5 Keys for Ag Websites To Convert Visitors into Leads

Often in the agriculture industry when a potential lead visits your site, they likely already know a bit about your business. Whether through trade show appearances, industry publications, word of mouth or cold calls, your first impression is often elsewhere. And because of that fact, it’s even more reason your website should go beyond just making a good impression and guide visitors through the buyer’s journey until they’re a highly qualified lead.

Website needs will vary depending on your specific business – such as seed company, equipment manufacturer or ag retailer – but we’ve found there are at least five factors everyone in ag should consider when it comes to their website.

Establish Consistent Branding

A strong visual brand ties all the finer details of your ag business together, but a recognizable logo isn’t enough. After getting to know your company, a customer should be able to identify and have a brief understanding of your elevator pitch. Tight and modern overall brand positioning not only builds market awareness, but trust in your company.

Optimize Web Content

A mistake many make when approaching website creation is prioritizing search engine optimization, or SEO, above all else. It’s certainly an important consideration, but your site should benefit a human first and algorithms second. Website content and navigation should break down complicated processes into easy-to-understand pathways and address the target audience’s industry-specific knowledge levels and needs. It’s vital to develop relationships with your sales team, talk with customers, attend conferences, and read product manuals so you understand exactly who you are talking to, what needs to be conveyed and how they need to hear it.

Keep the Website Flexible

It can be tempting to design a flashy website with heavy animations and complex graphics, but often that makes it harder to adjust your website later as your ag organization’s priorities shift and products evolve. Selecting the right content management system (CMS) for your specific company and website will allow for easy access to make updates and optimize the journey for your visitors.

Create a Simple and Effective Contact Form

If you’re relying on customers to reach out only through phone or direct email, you’re not leveraging your ag site to its full potential. In our experience, a user visits a site for multiple reasons from purchase intent to customer service requests to job opportunities. To ensure all leads are funneled correctly and to remove barriers from the process, a contact form plugged directly into customer relationship management (CRM) software makes for faster and more efficient processes from lead to conversion.

Invest in Paid Search Support

Even if a company attains category dominate SEO, boosting your ag website with paid search will improve discovery and protect your company against constantly changing search engine algorithms and platform updates. Search and social media companies and device manufacturers can change their practices at any time and without notice, and that has the potential to alter search position and impact organic discovery. By maintaining an always-on paid search campaign you can lessen the impact these unexpected changes have on your company and gather a wealth of analytics that can be used to optimize your marketing efforts.

Jump Company recently implemented these strategies in a website redesign for an Ag client resulting in a record 10% increase in visitors and over 60% increase in monthly conversions. With over twenty years of agriculture industry marketing experience, Jump has enjoyed watching our partners’ companies grow alongside their crops.

Written By: Jump Team
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Not Your Grandma’s Medicare

Did you know that by the year 2034, seniors will outnumber children in the United States? Medicare is undergoing a massive reorientation as it prepares to serve larger numbers of people, and that is being felt specifically by Medicare Advantage plans and the heated competition to identify and convert prospects each year. It’s an exciting time to be in the Medicare business.

A few weeks ago, Jump joined over 500 leaders and senior executives in the managed care space at the RISE Medicare Marketing & Sales Summit. This marquee conference focuses on insights, strategies and tactics from industry leaders to deliver in this rapidly evolving marketplace.

The next generation aging into Medicare looks very different than what you would typically expect. It includes Madonna, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Barak Obama. What has worked well with Medicare marketing in the past may not be the right approach for these bold, tech-savvy individuals who are now reaching retirement age. Here are a few of the notable takeaways from this year’s conference as you prepare for the annual enrollment period only seven months away:

Personalization and Targeting are Key

People want to feel seen. With technology developments, it is now more important than ever to meet prospects where they are online and show up with messaging that is relevant to them. Consumers are looking for more conversational and personalized interactions with businesses. 

Authenticity Wins

The market is saturated, and it is tough to stand out from the competition. Authentic brand storytelling is the best way to break through the noise. Be real about who you are and offer comprehensive and dynamic journeys that demonstrate you truly care about them. 

Marketing Mix Matters

Direct mail has been the historical workhorse of Medicare marketing, but the tide is turning, especially as new generations age into Medicare. The marketing mix needs to evolve. Consider omnichannel marketing with tactics that build on each other in a strategic way.

Playing by the Rules Has Never Been More Important

CMS is cracking down on marketing activities. Rules are being enforced, and penalties are steep – sometimes even including suspension of enrollment activities. Now is the time to be more vigilant than ever to ensure you are following all the regulatory guidelines.  

These are exciting new days in the world of Medicare. The opportunity is rich, but the competition is steep, and regulations are strict. If you’re looking for a marketing partner who understands the dynamics of this market, we’d love to help you tell your story in a way that will make even Madonna open her heart to you.

Written By: Jump Team
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Your Office Holiday Party Should Be Visited by 3 Ghosts

Perhaps the greatest sign of the business world emerging from the long shadow of Covid-19 is the return of the office holiday party. No longer a logistical nightmare of trying to send a happy hour basket to every employee for a virtual toast, the office can once again gather in person to celebrate the season. Whether your office trends more toward cookies and coffee in the conference room at 11 a.m. or rents out a local watering hole for karaoke and beer pong on Saturday night, it’s very important to honor the Dickens tradition of welcoming the Past, Present and Future into proceedings.

Reflect On the Past Year

Whether your company had a year of challenges or a year of rapid growth and success, it’s important to remember that it isn’t a mystery to the team so there’s no reason to avoid it. Acknowledge what kind of year it was and celebrate that you all lived to tell the tale. Whatever kind of year it was, it is the foundation for the year to come.

Celebrate the Present Moment

It’s a party. It doesn’t have to turn into an epic night that no one can remember, but it should include some food or treats and some laughter and smiles and merriment.  (Announcing an annual bonus never hurts either.)

Look To the Future

While there’s great debate over whether the holiday party should include a PowerPoint for next year’s goals and objectives, it’s absolutely an opportunity to inspire and excite the team for what is to come. The New Year – and the next fiscal year – are around the corner, and there’s no better time to get everyone excited about what you can accomplish together. 

Jump Company recently celebrated our office holiday party and while we honored the lessons of this post, we also included ample amounts of pinball, dance floor antics and an original murder mystery game…because…it’s a holiday party.