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

April 28, 2015/in Healthcare Marketing Strategy/by Dobies Health Marketing

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 Marketers: Listen and Engage through Social Media to Learn About Your Audience

February 13, 2015/in Social Media/by Dobies Health Marketing

This week in our Healthcare Branding Series, let’s concentrate on the importance of listening and engaging with your social media audience.

To engage healthcare consumers who visit your website, you must know what types of content they want. If you’re unsure, try engaging them in various ways on social media, and listen to their feedback and input to gain insights that can help drive your digital content strategy. Here are some tips to get you started:

Create social posts that interest your followers. Do you have something relevant to say about a trending healthcare topic, such as the flu or a popular news story? Share tips and information on a wide range of issues – from health-related facts and warnings to health promotions and educational events. Pay attention to likes, comments or shares – people read click because they find something interesting; they share because they’re convinced others will find it interesting too. Likes and shares, then, are decent indicators of what types of content people want to see. Use that information to steer the direction of your future blog posts.

Ask questions. You don’t have to be hard-hitting. The questions can be light and fun. And since photos have an engagement rate of 87 percent (as opposed to four percent with links), why not share a photo with a question to get followers talking. The answers have the potential to offer great insight.

Generate engaging moments. Social networks are for sharing. Engage your followers by encouraging them to post something. After all, you must give to get. For example, during American Heart Month you could urge followers to share selfies of their favorite ways to exercise for heart health. You can ask for photos of their best all-pink outfits for Breast Cancer Awareness Month. It could even be a simple question, such as, “What are you most thankful for this Thanksgiving?” Take the responses as indications of where and how to invite and inspire people into a conversation, to take part in a community forum, so to speak. Low response rates mean people don’t find it a worthwhile topic to act on.

Observe patient connections. Patients sharing their experiences with one another can be a very powerful thing. Not only can they receive emotional support from others with their condition, but patients can also offer word-of-mouth recommendations for physicians or services. Watch and listen to the conversations they’re having. What questions are they asking other patients? What are their concerns? This insight may provide ways to improve on and offline patient experiences.

When you engage with followers, you may at times receive very honest opinions about your organization. If you receive praise, don’t forget to say thanks. If you get a complaint, recognize that it’s an opportunity for informed improvements driven by customer feedback. Always acknowledge patient or visitor concerns. If there are multiple similar complaints, review how your hospital or practice is living your healthcare brand.

For more information, visit our other topics in this series:

It’s a Strategic Plan, Not a Shelf Decoration: Why Healthcare Marketers Should Revisit Plans Regularly

June 14, 2012/in Healthcare Marketing Strategy/by Dobies Health Marketing

On our new website, we promise to help clients connect the dots through careful research and informed strategic planning. But then what? Even after a marketing plan is signed, sealed and delivered, the work is far from over, and execution is only part of what remains. Revisiting your marketing imperatives to monitor, measure and sometimes modify is a critical success factor.

In other words, as you execute your strategic plan over time, make it a priority to assess the current landscape against your long-term marketing goals. What’s at stake if you don’t? Shelving your strategic plan means missing out on regular opportunities to:

Conduct a historical review. Compare marketing imperatives against new data, and pay keen attention to key benchmarks that align with your plan. For example, hospital marketers should look at measurements like outmigration trends, physician referral patterns, clinical quality measures, patient satisfaction scores and so on.

Uncover new opportunities. Looking at fresh market data through the lens of your long-term strategic plan enables timelier decisions that help you meet market demand and gain competitive advantages.

Forecast what lies ahead. Being forward-thinking and adaptable to an evolving landscape is important for marketing plans to be both efficient and effective.

Identify emerging challenges or limitations early on. It’s important to pinpoint where operations are poorly aligned with strategic priorities and to respond swiftly when local, regional and national healthcare developments affect your organization. Regular strategic plan reviews help with that.

Inform key players of progress and lessons learned. Marketing departments lead marketing plans, but when patient-facing and decision-making personnel are not engaged and aware of the objectives, success will be out of reach.

At Dobies Health Marketing, we encourage and often lead quarterly strategic plan reviews with clients. There’s no better way to make sure actions continuously align with the objectives that inspired them in the first place. Give yourself the insight you need to make better decisions and revitalize your marketing strategy today.