Whitney Boyer is a dynamic force in marketing, with high-impact roles like Chief Marketing Officer at LHD Benefit Advisors, Vice President of Marketing & Driver Recruitment at Celadon Group Inc., and Director of Marketing at Quality Companies, LLC. She expertly manages marketing budgets, creates lead generation campaigns, oversees social media teams, coordinates trade shows, and optimizes Google Analytics and Adwords.
Key Takeaways
(00:01-08:39) Empowering Employee Benefits: How a Small Team Drives Big Impact
(08:39-14:25) Transforming Employee Benefits: A Digital Guide for All Generations
(14:25-22:22) How AI is Making Employee Benefits Easier for Everyone
(22:22-27:45) Using AI Chat to streamline the RFP process
(27:45-34:05) Tracking employees' preferences with RELAYTO Analytics
📱 Apple Podcasts | 🎧 Spotify | 🔗 iHeart
View the Episode's Podbook™
Democratizing Benefits Information
Whitney Boyer is a forward-thinking marketing professional in the employee benefits sector, dedicated to simplifying complex information and enhancing user experience for both employers and employees. At LHD Benefit Advisors, she spearheads the creation of accessible and interactive digital benefit guides, leveraging innovative tools like RELAYTO and AI-powered chat to democratize information access and streamline communication, particularly during critical periods like open enrollment and the RFP process. Her focus on clarity, transparency, and user-centric design empowers individuals to confidently navigate their benefits and make informed healthcare decisions.
1. Empowering Employee Benefits: How a Small Team Drives Big Impact
Whitney Boyer shares insights into the challenges of communicating complex benefit plans to employees, especially in a world where understanding healthcare options is crucial but often overlooked until it's urgently needed.
Whitney explains that her marketing team is responsible for a broad range of client-facing deliverables, from financial documents and renewal information to employee-facing communications. She emphasizes the importance of continuous education throughout the year, rather than just focusing on the typical open enrollment period. Whitney's team is dedicated to making sure employees understand their benefits, can access information easily, and feel confident in their decisions—ensuring that both employers and employees are well-served.
The conversation also touches on the significant role of benefits advisors and brokers, who influence a staggering $1.2 trillion in insurance spending in the U.S. Whitney highlights the need for ongoing efforts to educate employees, addressing their questions, and helping them become smart healthcare consumers.
I think one of the biggest issues is communicating your benefit plan and employers' benefit plan to their employees and making sure that they understand what's available to them. Because the majority of consumers don't really, they aren't really concerned about their benefits until they need them. And then it's like you want to get in front of them and educate them before they need it, to make sure they're on the right plan, to be sure that they're a smart healthcare consumer, knowing how to shop for the best care for the best value, making sure they know where to go, how to live a healthy lifestyle. (Whitney Boyer)
2. Transforming Employee Benefits: A Digital Guide for All Generations
LHD Benefit Advisors has developed a digital benefits guide that caters to diverse learning preferences, ensuring that all employees—and their decision-making family members—can easily access and understand their benefits.
Whitney Boyer highlights the importance of making benefits accessible online, not just for employees but also for their spouses, who often play a key role in decision-making. To achieve this, LHD created digital benefits guide websites that offer an intuitive, web-like experience. These guides are not just static PDFs, they are interactive, easy to navigate, and designed to meet the varying needs of different generations in the workplace.
To streamline the process, Whitney Boyer's team designed a PowerPoint template specifically for creating these digital guides. This approach allows their account managers, regardless of their tech-savviness or design skills, to easily produce these guides for over 200 clients. The result is a seamless, user-friendly experience for employees and a manageable workload for LHD's small marketing team.
Definitely have the benefits available online and digitally for all of these employees. The first goal that we had was to make something like a benefits guide more accessible not only to the employee but also to their spouse at home who is the decision maker. So how can we do that? And that's really where we would lean on RELAYTO because there are so many different privacy levels depending on what the employer is comfortable with. But the majority of the time, the link is only available to everyone. They can send it to their families at home, they can bookmark it. A lot of employers will then put it into their HRIS system. So giving them digital access was goal number one. (Whitney Boyer)
3. How AI is Making Employee Benefits Easier for Everyone
Whitney Boyer explains how her team has "democratized" marketing by empowering individuals who never saw themselves as content creators to produce high-quality, marketing-grade digital benefit guides. These guides are designed to be accessible, interactive, and tailored to the diverse needs of employees and their families.
Whitney Boyer shares how LHD uses RELAYTO to create these digital guides, which resemble websites and provide a seamless user experience. This innovative approach allows their small team to produce customized benefit guides for hundreds of clients in a short period, especially during the intense open enrollment season.
A key highlight of their strategy is the integration of AI-powered tools. Whitney discusses how AI not only enhances the user experience by allowing employees to quickly find answers to specific benefit questions but also supports HR teams. The AI-driven chat feature can search through extensive plan documents and provide instant, accurate information, relieving HR teams from the burden of sifting through thousands of pages or waiting on lengthy customer service calls.
We can do a lot of setup in advance. This spring we started doing a lot of it. Early summer we start doing a lot of it. But a lot of our clients—actually, the majority of our clients—won't get their renewal until October. Then maybe in early October, and then maybe in late October is their open enrollment. So we have a one-week period in which we get their numbers, we get to them, and they approve them. They come back to us, and we finalize them, confirm with the carrier, and then get them updated in the benefit guide. We have to make it live for all their employees to see. So there's a lot on the day before open enrollment starts. We're trying to get stuff done as fast as we can, and that's really like 200 custom websites in a day. (Whitney Boyer)
4. Using AI Chat to streamline the RFP process
Whitney Boyer shares how her team uses AI Chat to streamline the RFP (Request for Proposal) process, turning what used to be a cumbersome 50-page document into an easily navigable experience. This AI tool not only helps prospects find the information they need quickly but also empowers employers and employees to get the right answers fast, especially when making crucial health and benefits decisions.
The conversation highlights how AI is being used in real-world business applications to enhance transparency, improve communication, and provide a seamless experience for both clients and employees. Whitney Boyer explains how this approach sets her company apart from competitors by offering a practical, hands-on demonstration of their AI-powered tools during the sales process, making it easier for clients to understand and trust the technology.
We feel like being transparent right from the get-go really gets them comfortable with us, and they will trust us. So we're like, “Hey, here's our entire RFP. We have it on this. Use it through here, view it through here, and use this AI Chat. All of our report examples are here. You guys have full access to that.” So they can click on different appendix items that we have also stored within RELAYTO. Then, we talk about them in the document. So it's a whole, really seamless experience without having to read through a 50-page document. (Whitney Boyer)
5. Tracking employees' preferences with RELAYTO Analytics
Whitney Boyer's team leverages AI Chat and analytics to streamline the benefits process, from responding to lengthy RFPs (Request for Proposals) to tailoring communication strategies based on real employee interactions.
They discuss how AI not only simplifies the way information is presented but also provides valuable insights into employee engagement. By analyzing how employees interact with digital benefit guides, companies can customize their communication plans to focus on the most relevant topics, ensuring that important benefits are understood and utilized. This AI-powered approach doesn't just improve the employee experience—it also enhances the company's competitive edge by offering a smarter, data-driven way to manage and present benefits.
I have a lot of different gated content that lives in RELAYTO, and people are required to put in their email addresses. I could see how many views it's getting and how many leads it's generating, all through RELAYTO. And then we can send employers their financial information and we can see. Usually, those are password protected, so then we can see the exact individuals who are looking at the plan performance information. Then, we have the benefit guides, and we can see how many employees spend the most time on this HSA page. (Whitney Boyer)
Check the episode's Transcript (AI-generated) HERE.
Other Episodes
Godard Abel | CEO of G2
S 01 | Ep 6 Where You Go for Software: Reach Your Peak
Dean Stocker | CEO of Alteryx
S 01 | Ep 8 Turning Your Customers Into Your Biggest Champions
Peter Fader | Co-Founder of Theta CLV
S 01 | Ep 10 Turning Your Marketing Into Dollars