Liz Bedor: Marketing Accessible And Affordable Healthcare

If there is a central lesson to be taken from an event as unpredictable as the Covid-19 Pandemic, then it is the willingness to adapt. Many businesses practiced this approach, and from a marketing perspective, the massive digital integration many underwent proved to be both beneficial, and pioneering. Not only did this move accelerate a trend that was already growing within the business sector. But it also exploded many technical deficiencies that needed to be addressed in order for businesses and the services they provided to be accessible as well as affordable. Liz Streuri Bedor understood this concept, and her three years of working for a company like Sesame have further given her the opportunity to advance American healthcare and deliver transparent medical pricing to consumers that are either uninsured or under-insured.

Who Is Liz Bedor?

Liz Streuri Bedor is the current Director of Product Management for Sesame. Sesame is a healthcare company that provides convenient, high-quality, full-scope medical care at affordable prices. Sesame replicates the type of digital marketplace dynamics that have helped define the modern standards of customer service and quality in areas that include online retail, travel, vacation rentals and more.

Sesame’s Healthcare Services

Sesame operates as the go to healthcare superstore. The company provides consumers with a greater scope of choice, convenience, and quality at a great price. In Liz’s time working for Sesame, her team’s work has involved collaborating with doctors for prices of specific medicines, prescription refills, and the management of specific doctors that patients are searching for. Sesame has proven to be extremely helpful for consumers that are either uninsured or have healthcare with high deductible prices. Not only does it function from a much cheaper price perspective, but Sesame provides transparency to what is without a doubt a very complex industry where even the idea of an MRI can make a patient hesitate when it comes to their budgetary limitations, despite the urgency of their health needs.

What Liz learned From 2020?

By now, calling the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic “The New Normal” seems like a bit of a cliche, which it is in many ways. Now, being in the year 2021, it’s important to look back at the unpredictable nature of what was surely a game changer in the business sector and learn from it. In Liz Bedor’s case, it helped the launch of the Telehealth platform become a more efficient factor in marketing Sesame in its affordable healthcare services.

In her Pinchforth interview, Liz Bedor spoke about how Telehealth was launched within just a couple of weeks of the pandemic. The Telehealth platform helps address the needs of consumers, and much of this revolves around the fact that a lot of the healthcare providers on Sesame are independent doctors. Because these independent doctors do not have the luxury of big business to market themselves. Telehealth allows these same doctors to not only work as an option for patients looking for affordable care, but it also allows them the additional option of receiving non-traditional healthcare services such as a dermatology consultation or even a virtual medical check up.

Liz Bedor’s Views On Data

There isn’t anyone who operates within the marketing space that doesn’t deal with the dilemma of data. Liz Bedor understands both the up and downside of this area. On the one hand, data is a valuable commodity for advertisers, who can better engage and provide their services to their consumer base. These same advertisers can also provide free content in exchange for that data. Now, privacy is important, and that’s the negative side of a consumer giving too much consent with their data. Even the advertisers can’t truly comprehend the full scope of the direction it will go once they use it and pass it along across what is a vast digital network.

Liz Bedor and the Sesame marketing team’s approach to reviewing data is both responsible and equally efficient. Liz detailed how on Mondays, she and the marketing team do a channel data review where the channel owners go over metrics. One example she gave was how new campaign metrics are taken into account in relation to the trajectory of their pacing. When it comes to the more bi-weekly aspect of the data review process, Sesame shares key insights with broader organizations, and this works in that it allows for them to learn from past test results. The monthly review aspect operates more as a full recap of the data, which helps steer the marketing plan of what is needed for Liz and her team to see what needs to be changed.

Sesame’s Recommendations For Growth Leaders

The success of a company’s marketing strategy can no doubt serve as a great lesson for many business leaders across the business sector. But, it still depends on the industry. Sesame's primary focus is in healthcare. Sesame is also a regional/location based business and this limits the scope of the services they can provide, despite being affordable. Sesame’s services are dependent on where consumers are located. Liz spoke about how these types of parameters entail how many different areas and consumers operate with many different vaccine regulations, which essentially affects the types of responses Sesame can make in regards to the consumer base it focuses on. That is both the up and downside of the pandemic, which has highlighted a variety of structural limitations across the country. Liz Bedor advises that marketing and growth leaders should pay attention to this aspect. It will not only broaden their cultural perspective, but it will also allow for them to further generate a more swift reaction as opposed to the more long term campaign approach many marketing departments had pre-covid. 

It’s important to have long-term goals for a business. But, Liz Bedor and the team at Sesame understood that swift reactionary behavior was the optimal business strategy to implement. This isn’t simply the case of just the unpredictable nature of a global pandemic. It’s also in regards to the limitations they have, as well as many businesses that aren’t as large as others suffer from. Limitations aren’t fun, but they certainly help business leaders adjust their thinking and even arrange the operation of their business to a much more open landscape that is both flexible and accessible to their consumer base.