Tag Archive for: hospital marketing strategy

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

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This week in our Healthcare Branding Series, let’s concentrate on the importance of listening and engaging with your social media audience.DHG-blog-ProTips-v3

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:

Healthcare Marketers: Develop a Digital Content Strategy to Enhance Your Online Presence

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ProTips-#2This week in our Healthcare Branding Series, let’s focus on the importance of digital content strategies.

The meteoric rise of the internet, social networks and mobile browsing has changed how healthcare consumers seek out information. For healthcare marketers to reach audiences with meaningful, helpful information when and where people are looking for it, it’s critical to have a content strategy. Besides providing information consumers want and need, your online content should aim to boost search engine optimization (SEO) and enhance the user experience by providing answers to questions people are asking.

The good news: online health information is in high demand. According to the Pew Research Internet Project, 72 percent of internet users say they’ve searched for medical information online. Among them, 77 percent started with a search engine as opposed to a specific website. To boost your search rankings, make sure your website provides helpful, patient-centric information, and integrate your online content across multiple channels. While practice details and information about your services are valuable, content that answers patient questions will attract higher search engine traffic. To further enhance your online presence, create pay-per-click and other digital ad campaigns that link to topic-specific (and keyword-driven) web pages, or to campaign landing pages with clear calls to action like schedule an appointment, sign up for a class or newsletter, take a tour, or attend an event.

Online videos are also very popular in the healthcare space, so they’ve become a must-have for many successful web and social content strategies. Videos are so popular and highly regarded among consumers seeking information that YouTube is the second largest online search engine. In fact, according to Google, YouTube traffic to hospital websites increases 119 percent year over year. Simply put, videos offer a great opportunity to improve SEO and expand your reach.

In short, your content should fulfill your customers’ needs. If you’re not sure what information your customers want, check back next week when we discuss how to learn about your audience by listening and engaging with them on social media.

We encourage you to check out our other topics in this series:

To discuss how we can we deliver content marketing excellence across all channels, contact us today.

 

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

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Healthcare Marketing: Connecting the Dots Between Planning, Execution & ResultsOn 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.

Hospital Marketing & the CEO Insights Behind Success

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Hospital Marketing: CEO Insights & Success FactorsIn a previous blog post, I discussed responsibilities associated with the evolving role of hospital marketers. Recently, after reviewing Thomson Reuters research involving 100 Top Hospitals® CEO Insights, it struck me how closely the top three hospital success factors align with the three primary marketing responsibilities I mentioned in my blog post. Let’s take a closer look.

According to “strong patterns in guiding philosophies” that emerged from CEO insights in the study, the top three hospital success factors are listed below, each accompanied by my own assessment of its application in marketing:

  • Unwavering Commitment to Quality. As top CEOs demonstrate a strong and clear commitment to quality, marketing staff must respond by becoming champions of transparency who communicate results and drive healthy patient experiences.
  • Making Great Relationships with Physicians. Top CEOs recognize that keeping physicians engaged, motivated and aligned is a key success factor. Unfortunately, many of today’s hospitals do not have a dedicated physician relations program. Instead that role is shared by the CEO and other hospital leaders. The future requires a data-inspired, fully committed approach to physician relations that offers support and direction to physicians. The hospital’s marketing officer should be integral to these efforts.
  • Ability to Overcome Today’s Greatest Challenges: Reform and Reimbursement Cuts. As hospital CEOs face unprecedented pressures to operationalize under health reform, marketing officers need to lead the charge with new business strategies that position the organization to compete more effectively. We see marketing leaders becoming much more focused on shorter-term scenario planning and research and development of new care management programs (e.g. CHF clinics, access strategies, medical home models, etc.) to help the organization excel in a value-based purchasing environment.

If you’re in hospital marketing, ask yourself: do your current responsibilities align with the top three hospital success factors, and therefore, your CEO’s expectations? If not, it’s time to rewrite your job description. Start by thinking practically about how you can drive your organization to greater success using the points above as your guide.

Hospital Community Relations Directors Evolve to Chief Marketing Officers

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With so many patient-facing changes in healthcare these days, it’s no surprise the role of the hospital community relations director is also changing. Once focused primarily on communications, advertising and outreach, today’s community relations directors now drive patient experience, hospital strategy and business development.

Maybe the person who manages community relations at your hospital has a new title, maybe not. Regardless, the purview of the position has expanded. At Dobies Health Marketing, we see three core responsibilities for hospital marketing officers:

  • Drive the patient experience. Today’s hospital marketing officers own the patient experience. They take a lead role in creating loyalty and repositioning the patient at the center of the hospital’s delivery system.
  • Develop overall business strategy. In addition to increasing market share, hospital marketing officers are now responsible for new business and program development to enhance the hospital’s competitive advantage.
  • Nurture the system of care. Now more than ever, it’s important to be proactive rather than reactive in creating and nurturing an emerging system of care. Working with leadership on service line, physician engagement and system of care issues has become a routine function.

Even from this quick summary, it’s easy to see how the role of hospital community relations has evolved far beyond its more traditional PR/promotional functions. That’s why many hospital leaders turn to healthcare marketing specialists who can help them navigate these complexities and grow into the next generation of healthcare.

Lawrence Memorial Hospital Renews Commitment with Dobies as Healthcare Marketing Agency of Record

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KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Lawrence Memorial Hospital (LMH), a 173-bed, not-for-profit hospital in Lawrence, Kan., recently renewed its contract with Dobies Health Marketing as agency of record. Since 2008, Dobies Health Marketing has provided strategic marketing counsel to the hospital, along with the development and implementation of marketing campaigns that increase awareness of LMH services.

In-Depth Interviews (IDIs): Exploring the Hearts and Minds of Healthcare Consumers

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Recently, we heard some compelling stories about a client’s brand. We were conducting consumer in-depth interviews (IDIs) to better understand how people make personal healthcare decisions, as well as their perceptions of our client’s brand.

As we listened, we were impressed by the passion and honesty each participant shared—a benefit that’s relatively unique to IDIs. Focus groups, on the other hand, tend to be dominated by a handful of participants, which can skew results. By eliminating the drawbacks of “group think,” IDIs enabled us to garner consumer input that was not affected by the views of other participants.

Other advantages of IDIs include:

  • They allow us to investigate not only perceptions, but also individual thought processes. Because consumer feedback is solicited and given in a one-on-one dialogue, IDIs help shed light on differences that exist within each target segment.
  • By design, IDIs give the interviewee significantly more “floor” time, meaning the consumer will speak for approximately 80 percent of the interview. By contrast, focus groups require more speaking and facilitating by the moderator, which leaves less time overall for consumer responses.
  • IDIs can be adapted to other settings as well, including online and phone interviews.

We value IDIs for all these reasons and more. By taking group bias and external influence out of the equation, we can gather insightful information for our client that may not have surfaced as clearly in a focus group or survey. Probing the hearts and minds of healthcare consumers as individuals enabled us to draw several informed conclusions and build them into our client’s strategic plan. We are confident tomorrow’s consumers will like what they see from this client in the coming years because it will be, by and large, exactly what they said they want and need.

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.

Engaging Patients through Social Media

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Later this week, I will moderate an interactive panel for Kansas City Healthcare Communicators Society.The topic: How to Deploy Social Media to Improve Patient Engagement. With expert input spanning a wide range of social networking tools and best practices from our healthcare marketing panelists, the session promises to provide an eye-opening look at what it takes to continuously engage patients online.

Here are highlights from colleagues in the healthcare social media field:

Two-fifths of adult internet users in the U.S. have read someone else’s online commentary about health. Many thanks to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, who published a report earlier this year revealing that 80% of internet users search online for health information, and a growing number rely on the internet to connect peer-to-peer. Among the findings:

  • Symptoms and treatments dominate health searches (66% and 56% respectively).
  • 44% of internet users look online for information about doctors or other health professionals.
  • 25% of adult web users look online for people with a chronic illness.
  • 24% have consulted online rankings of doctors and hospitals.
  • 20% look online for people with similar health issues.

There are 140 uses for your 140 characters if your healthcare organization tweets. Phil Baumann, a social media strategist and advisory board member for Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, studied the challenges and opportunities available for providers via Twitter. In the end, he identified 140 different healthcare uses for Twitter – an oldie but goodie for those in need of ideas when it comes to tweeting for and about health.

More than 1,200 U.S. hospitals are now actively using social media sites. And that number is climbing every day. If so many healthcare providers are putting it out there on so many sites, it must be simple, right? Wrong. We all know representing an organization via social media is much more complex than managing personal accounts, so it’s important to know what you’re doing behind the scenes. Fortunately, help is out there, like this list of 20 Excellent Social Media Networking Resources for Health Professionals, compiled recently by HealthWorks Collective.

I’m looking forward to a thought-provoking discussion by our panelists this week. We will update you with the biggest takeaways and lessons learned next week.

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