Tag Archive for: Branding

Healthcare Marketers: Align your Marketing Budget with the Organization’s Strategic Initiatives

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DHG-blog-ProTips-#4 With healthcare costs rising, hospital marketing executives must scrutinize spending more than ever. To strengthen the chances of achieving market share objectives while ensuring leadership approval of your expenditures, align your marketing budget with the organization’s business plan.

For example, if your organization has strategic pillars, allocate budget dollars to those pillars; if your organization has specific goals for growth, service line volume and other similar metrics, directly demonstrate how your budget supports those goals. Jump-start a more effective marketing budget with these two basic, but critical tips:

Set attainable goals for a stronger return on investment (ROI).
Only market services that are ready to be promoted. For hospitals, this means if an area of the hospital isn’t properly prepared to take on new patients due to manpower shortages, long wait times, faltering patient experience scores or quality disruptions, put your marketing money elsewhere. Similarly, distributors and manufacturers need to consider production and service indicators. Don’t waste your marketing dollars promoting products if back orders are present or customer service departments aren’t prepared to take on new volume. The recommendation sounds pretty basic, but how many times has the marketing dollar been spent based on the “squeaky wheel” factor – the physician who demands a billboard; the sales manager who needs to reach her quotas? Keep open channels of communication between production and sales so that you spend wisely and can attain ROI on your marketing dollars.

Communicate and collaborate.
Regularly let key stakeholders know how your marketing efforts are contributing to the organization’s overall business plan and financial health. When you keep your colleagues informed, you will a) find ways to extend your budget through other departments, b) help others gain a better understanding for proper use of the marketing dollar, and c) get better ideas and more internal support/adoption for your marketing strategies.

Coming up next: our final topic in this healthcare marketing and branding series covers the benefits of stepping outside your marketing comfort zone – unleashing new ideas to reach new audiences. Check back soon for that!

If you missed the last blog posts in our series, catch up now:

Healthcare Brand Authenticity & the Domino Effect

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Brand AuthenticityOver lunch today, we discussed how to play dominoes. Apparently, there are new games that are quite complex, but one thing hasn’t changed at all: after the leader sets the game in motion, the inevitable chain reaction follows. It struck us that – in dominoes and in organizations – every “move” by every “player” affects the final outcome and ultimately connects back to that first play of the game.

For healthcare organizations undergoing a rebranding effort, this “domino effect” is more than an analogy – it’s a certainty that impacts the ability to deliver an authentic brand. We believe most rebranding strategies falter not because they are poor ideas or ill-conceived, but because they fail to consider the characteristics and influence of organizational culture and leadership behavior.

Here’s what we mean:

We all know strong brands create value for healthcare organizations by building emotional bonds with customers. Emotional bonds build preference, which leads to utilization. At Dobies Health Marketing, we help our clients understand that a brand is defined and delivered by the culture of the organization – and the culture is guided by the organization’s strategic intention. Strategic intention is important because it tells everyone within the organization how to realize its brand promise.

An achievable brand platform is built on the foundation of the strategic intention. The brand platform becomes authentic when the organization’s brand promise (what is communicated) aligns with the brand experience (what is actually delivered via daily operations).

Organizations often fall prey to aspirational or unrealistic brand platforms, whereby goals are too far from customers’ current brand perceptions to be believable. This does not mean companies shouldn’t set goals for enhancing the brand over time. However, the entire organization must be mobilized and empowered to deliver emotional and functional customer experiences that together form an authentic brand platform.

For organizations to sustain change, they need leaders that pursue brand platforms and develop cultures in alignment. It is through this alignment that organizations, and their people, create emotional bonds with their customers. And win at dominoes.

California-based Health Plan Retains Dobies Health Marketing for Brand Audit

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KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Health Plan of San Joaquin has retained Dobies Health Marketing to conduct a healthcare brand audit. The California-based plan provides health coverage to individuals and third party administration services to employers in the Central Valley region. The brand audit involves multiple phases of in-depth market research with health plan members, consumers, employers, providers, community-based organizations and employees.

Associated Purchasing Retains Dobies to Lead Healthcare Brand Initiative

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KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Associated Purchasing Services (APS), a group purchasing organization jointly owned by Missouri Hospital Association and Kansas Hospital Association, has retained Dobies Health Marketing to facilitate planning related to its corporate identity and brand. Dobies will lead the initiative by working closely with APS leadership and staff to enhance corporate identity, establish core messages and create a communication action plan to support the roll-out of the organization’s new messaging and identity.

Healthcare Marketing Has Real Life Impact

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It’s easy to get wrapped up in ROI and profit-building strategies. After all, as healthcare marketers, that’s what we’re hired to do. We drive growth. We build brands. And when we do, we often save lives.

Every day I wake up thinking about the consequences of our work. If you’re the chief executive at a healthcare organization, you and I have that in common. In healthcare, we know far more is at stake than the bottom line. Real people are affected by what we do and say about your brand.

Just one short post may have been the most important thing I did the other day. I read a forum chat between two men who had testicular cancer—one a survivor and the other a young man searching for information about the best doctors, treatments and cancer centers. Armed with knowledge and confidence in the medical care at Indiana University, I inserted myself into the conversation and posted a recommendation. I connected the young man to an oncologist and researcher I was fortunate to meet in 2006 – the same physician who saved Lance Armstrong’s life a decade earlier.

Just a personal story?  Not really. In many ways, this is what we do for our clients every day. We convince patients, patients-to-be, physicians, suppliers, manufacturers and healthcare organizations of all kinds to make better, more informed choices. We convince people to choose our clients’ brands. We encourage people to make connections that save lives. These are the consequences of healthcare marketing.

Here’s what I mean:

When we promote cardiac care, we say the heart center can reliably and consistently open blocked arteries in notably less than the 90-minute national standard.  As our clients know, we won’t execute a single ad until we absolutely, positively know the promise can be delivered. When we produce white papers, webinars and campaigns to convince pathology labs and blood banks to adopt new patient safety technologies, we know that patients can benefit. We also know failure to do so can have devastating consequences.

I could go on and on with examples like these, but the real bottom line is this: everyone deserves to make informed decisions about healthcare. That’s why Dobies Health Marketing exists, and it’s why we are so passionate about everything we do for our clients. As a healthcare CEO, you deserve a marketing partner like us – experts who know how to drive new patient volume, sales, and market share, and who wake up every morning thinking about the consequences of what we do for your brand.

Brand Promises in Healthcare: How to Deliver through Patient Touch Points

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Healthcare consumers are more empowered than ever to choose according to their perceptions, and they know it. As health plans get more flexible in letting people pick providers – and online platforms enable word-of-mouth to cover more ground at faster speeds – the competition to be anyone’s provider of choice is fierce.

Which brings me to the importance of patient touch points—those many opportunities for healthcare providers to ‘live their brand’ by enhancing patient experiences. Every interaction counts, whether direct or indirect, clinical or non-clinical.

In a sea of how-to’s and must-do’s surrounding social media and health information technology, it’s important to keep more conventional methods in our strategies as well. With today’s patients empowered to think and act like retail consumers, providers are wise to take pages from consumer-oriented business models to elevate service levels and deliver fully satisfying experiences at the point of care. Think Disney, Zappos and Nordstrom.

Here are three great places to start:

  • Personalize Care. People love it when they feel camaraderie with their care team, and they respond with loyalty when they believe you know them as individuals. Introduce yourself, call patients by name and look them in the eye. Also, be mindful that your presence in the community is making impressions on people even before they become your patients, so find ways to customize every encounter.
  • Be Responsive. It goes without saying that patients are happier when healthcare providers eliminate wait times. Go beyond the obvious. Ask patients about their expectations and respond to their personal needs. Unanticipated opportunities to show extraordinary service go a long way toward improving the patient experience.
  • Keep Patients Informed. Whether it’s about medications or when the doctors are likely to make their rounds, keep patients informed. Explain tests, treatments and procedures; describe the technology you use. Include patients (and if appropriate, their families) in decision-making.

At Dobies Health Marketing, we encourage healthcare marketers to champion the notion that brand is what you do. It is not a logo or tagline—a brand is something that lives in people’s hearts and minds. It’s defined by expectations developed over time through your communications and more importantly, your actions.

In other words, when you make a brand promise related to patient experience, you need to know you can keep it. You also need to continually strengthen the promise by identifying and translating consumer expectations into touch points that matter most to patients.

SHSMD Word Cloud Finds the Focus of Today’s Hospital Strategists and Marketers

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In our last post, we talked about word clouds and their practical uses beyond the blog. This week, we’ll continue that discussion in lieu of our recent discoveries at SHSMD Connections 2011, an annual conference hosted by the Society for Healthcare Strategy & Market Development. The event was a meeting of the minds from all levels of hospital communications, and the word cloud was our way of learning more about what’s on their minds.

SHSMD attendees participated by entering today’s hot topics into our word cloud app. But what do the results tell us about the directions and challenges hospital marketers face as we head into 2012?

The most commonly used phrase was “physician strategies,” with “social media” coming in close behind. Many hospital strategists are looking for effective ways to engage with physicians and patients. While social media continues to grow as a cost-effective way to expand reach and frequency, strategists are struggling with how to reconcile professional relationships with online social platforms—and even how to get people to “Like” or “Follow” their hospitals in the first place, let alone leverage that affinity. It’s a challenge many of today’s healthcare marketers must untangle, and clearly engagement is the name of the game.

Other issues taking center stage for healthcare marketers include:

• Direct marketing – promoting what works to grow market share.

• Brand building – on-target messaging in the midst of health reform and ACO debates.

• Market-driven plans (and plans that drives markets) – thinking strategically and delivering creatively.

• Better returns – demonstrating improved ROI and ROE as direct results of marketing efforts.

If your marketing initiatives don’t include solid strategic planning in the areas described above, you’re missing opportunities to enhance relationships, grow in volume, improve your brand and more.

What about you—what’s on your mind in healthcare marketing today? If you didn’t share with us at SHSMD, feel free to do so in the comments below. We’d love to hear from you.

Make Your Key Messages FAB-ulous

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Developing key messages is perhaps the most essential practice of a strategic communications department or company. But it’s not always easy. The process can take time and patience, but by identifying the features, advantages and benefits (FABs) of your offering, you can ensure consistent, targeted messaging across all communication platforms.

Although we are in the business of marketing healthcare,  we can learn a lot from auto manufacturers; they are expert FAB’ers. Watch carefully the next time you see a television commercial for a new car to see if you can follow the pattern. I’ll bet you’ll be able to identify the three components:

  • Feature:  A prominent part, characteristic or special attraction
    • “The new Cadillac CVS has pop-up navigation, a 40 gig hard drive, wood trim and a sunroof.”
  • Advantage:  A favorable impression or effect (of the feature)
    • “It’s a luxury vehicle…”
  • Benefit:  Something that promotes well-being (from the perspective of the recipient)
    •  “…that will turn you on.”

Granted, healthcare benefits may not be as stimulating, but they certainly fall into the “well-being” category. Auto manufacturers drive home the benefit by using sound and images. They create their brands on television and rely on the Internet and dealerships to sell them.

Brand Audits Reveal What Healthcare Brands Are Really Saying

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Brand is about what you do, who you are. It’s your DNA.

Why is it then that so many still consider brand to be about the look, the feel, or the words on a page? Ask yourself this: The clothes you wear create an impression, but do they fundamentally change who you are? No. The same is true with brands.

At Dobies Health Marketing, we are disappointed when we see companies invest tens of thousands of dollars, if not a hundred thousand or more, to create identity style guidelines without ever exploring the heart and soul of their brand.

Clearly, changing the brand is a lot harder than changing the message or the look and feel. That’s why we recommend starting the process by gathering evidence that will help convince executive leadership that change is necessary.

Brand audits do just that. They give the company a qualitative snapshot of how stakeholders perceive the company and its products and services. An audit is like peeling an onion one layer at a time to expose the core essence of the brand.

A brand audit systematically assesses the company’s brand from three vantage points:
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What Is Your Healthcare Brand Really Saying?

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At Dobies Health Marketing, we believe a brand is only as strong as the connection between the organization’s actions and its messages. After all, your brand is more than what you say – it’s what you do.

So how do you determine what your brand is really saying?  Two words: Brand audit.

A brand audit systematically assesses the company’s brand from three vantage points:

  1. Communications: How authentically the company appears in documents, proposals, advertising, Web sites and other venues
  2. Internal: What employees think
  3. External: What the customer believes

An audit is like peeling an onion one layer at a time to expose the core essence of the brand, and reviewing these three areas can help leadership understand how well the brand aligns with the organization’s strategic priorities and core values.  Plus, it creates a road map for both marketers and executives to use in improving the brand’s overall authenticity.

Learn more about the components of a brand audit  and take the first steps toward truly living your brand.

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