Eight Ways Healthcare Marketers Can Support Growth

Community hospitals oftentimes deal with an unfair stigma when delivering care in a small town or rural area. Many times there is a perception from patients that ‘bigger is better’, and that the care in a larger city, or even a larger hospital in a particular area, is superior to that of the community hospital. While it may be the case some patients with certain illnesses, conditions and injuries may need to visit your tertiary and quaternary care partners, as the community hospital marketer, you want to help your community understand that your acute-care hospital/ health system can care for most of their needs. You know that many patients don’t want the added stress of arranging and paying for travel to a hospital/ health center further from their home and their families if it’s not medically necessary. You also know that your role as healthcare marketer has changed.

No longer can we rely on passively advertising our services to the captive audience that is our service area. Healthcare marketers are now responsible for actually supporting volume and revenue growth, and that takes a more sophisticated approach. We need patients and referral sources to choose us over our competitors. Many hospital marketing departments don’t have large teams or large budgets. There will always be a heavy volume of work. So what can you do?

Below Are Eight Ways Hospital Marketers Can Support Growth:

First: Have a plan.

I didn’t give this one a number, because it should be considered your number one step.

Ask Yourself:

• Do you make a list of priorities for each fiscal year? The list should be based on the business priorities of your healthcare system. If you don’t have access to the business plan(s), ask. The rationale for this ask is that you can better support the hospital/ system’s growth if you know what the organization wishes to accomplish for the year. Having clear priorities for your department will help you understand whether a project or even a task should be completed/ continued in the current fiscal year, or whether it can be put in the ‘parking lot’ of ideas for future consideration. It will help you to become a more efficient department, because you will have something by which to measure the importance of all the current activities on your plate. Sometimes, hospital marketing departments get caught up in the order-delivery mode of working. This passive operational mode can have consequences, which I will cover in a later post.
• Do you have a strategic marketing communications plan that identifies the metric-based organizational goals you are supposed to be supporting, strategies that will get you there, and the tactics we will use to implement those strategies? It cannot be overstated that a strategic marketing plan is the foundation of success for your department. Without a plan, you are navigating without a map.
• Does your marketing planning process involve stakeholders outside of your department? It is crucial to get the voice of your service line leaders, physicians and front line staff when determining how you will support the growth of their service line.
• Does your marketing planning process utilize methods or principles such as design thinking, to develop a collaborative and creative process? I am a huge fan of bringing design thinking into the healthcare marketing department. The more you can help your planning participants utilize a flexible mindset, the more meaningful, and successful your plan will be.
• Does your marketing planning process utilize personas and journey maps? Do you have a content strategy? These are all important tools to help you ensure an actionable and measurable plan. They’re super fun, too!

As part of the awesome plan that you have now collaboratively developed, consider these seven components:

1. Have an Effective Digital Presence.

Ask Yourself:

• Is your health system’s website content relevant and updated? A good content strategy can help you ensure that your site’s content is integrated with your other channels and that you are organized when determining what to do and when.
• Is your website optimized for a great mobile experience? Are you ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements such as ADA and GDPR? Is it secure? Is there a privacy policy? If you don’t know the answers to these questions (and there are more), it’s probably time to engage with a quality web development agency. These questions may seem rudimentary to most readers, so if you already have an awesome website, then skip this step.
• Are you appropriately using social media? There are many channels out there, and not all of them will be right for your brand or your market. Sometimes it’s best to limit yourself to two or three for manageability.
• What is your plan for managing your online reputation? This is an area where a good digital marketing agency can help you, because there are now so many avenues for your patients to talk about you online. You’ll want to know where they are talking about you, what the general sentiment is, how to effectively respond, and when not to respond.
• Are you optimized for online search? What is your plan for ensuring you show up when people are looking for you online (or for healthcare services in your area)? It’s a multi-part process because you want to show strongly in all areas, including locations, advertising and organic content. Since algorithms change frequently and managing online marketing can involve many moving parts, this is another area where a talented digital marketing agency can help. If you lack the budget to hire an agency, you can manage it on your own, it’s simply a more manual process. There are many tools freely available to help you understand and increase the effectiveness of your online marketing strategy.

2. Assess your Community Involvement.

Ask Yourself:

• Are you making sure the events you sponsor are really strategic partnerships, and not simply a logo on the back of a t-shirt that most participants will never wear again?
• Are you involved in the community events that align with your mission? We in health care receive so many sponsorship requests and there aren’t financial resources to fulfill them all. Developing a set of criteria can help you know when to say yes, and how to say no.
• Are you involved in the community events that matter to your staff and medical staff?
• Is your department in charge of approving sponsorship requests? If so, I recommend that you develop a multi-disciplinary team to review instead. This method brings more voices into the fold and alleviates the pressure from your team to have to make all the decisions.
• Do you have a high level of engagement from your staff and medical staff in the community events that have a physical presence?
• Are you empowering staff to become leaders in your community involvement program? Starting a ‘club’ or committee internally can help engage your organization’s team members as well as assist with some of the event planning tasks.

3. Don’t Forget the Media.

Ask Yourself:

• Have you developed a media relations strategy that takes into account how you will grow your earned media presence locally, as well as at the state and national level where appropriate? Having a clear strategy will help you eventually banish “Everything deserves a press release” thinking from your organization.
• Are you effectively partnering with your media partners to tell the powerful stories of your brand?
• Are you pitching stories that are relevant to that reporter/ publication?
• Are you thinking of your media partners as another key audience, or are you acting in a passive capacity, waiting for inquiries about the press releases you send to the masses?
• Are you partnering with a clipping service, or better  yet, a partner who can help you gain a deeper understanding into your earned media opportunities? Most tools will allow you to run some great reports that will help you better hone your strategy. If your budget doesn’t allow for a tool, Google alerts can be your friend.
• Are you educating your internal stakeholders on your procedures as it relates to media relations? Consistent communication to this group on when and why you use each tool in your PR toolbox will go a long way in overall understanding and engagement. See bullet one on how an effective strategy from the get-go can help eliminate constant press release pressure.

4. Align Your Physician Relations/ Referral Development Strategy.

Ask Yourself:

• Is your physician referral development strategy aligned with the strategic priorities of your hospital/ healthcare system? If this functional area does not report up through you, you can make a case to have it moved to you. Otherwise, be sure you understand the strategy and that you develop a plan to support it.
• Do you have buy-in and support from your CEO and others in the C-suite on the importance and direction of your physician referral development strategy?
• Are you building relationships with your referral base to learn what the physician or provider needs, rather than focusing only on ‘promoting’ your health system’s services?
• Are you communicating referral obstacles back to the operational leads, then circling back with your referral base on resolution and timeline?
• Are you, or your Liaisons, setting up meetings between clinical leaders, executives or others when necessary to facilitate a referral?
• Do you have access to a PRM (Physician Relationship Manager) tool that allows you to organize and track your referral strategy?

5. ‘Own’ the Patient Experience.

Ask Yourself:

• Even if you are not the one leading this area, are you offering your support to your Customer Experience Leader? You should be working as a cohesive team. How can you collaborate with them to ensure their team has the tools necessary to properly represent the brand to patients? How can you help them interpret your health system’s online reputation?
• Are you working with your peers on best practices that you can share with your Customer Experience Leader?
• Are you and your team consistently modelling a great customer experience to all customers?

6. Audit your Brand.

Ask Yourself:

• Are you regularly assessing how your brand is being perceived in the market? There are tools out there to help you understand your level of brand awareness, how consumers perceive you, and whether or not they perceive your services over those of your competitors.
• Are you regularly assessing how consistently your brand is being delivered across all stakeholder touch points? For instance, do your employees, volunteers and board members understand your health system’s brand? Could they describe the experience? The difference between you and your competitors? If not, you have work to do. A simple plan can get you on the right path.
• If you haven’t answered ‘yes’ to a and b, find a tool to help you achieve these audits, or create one yourself. There are many out there, including one that is available for members of the American Marketing Association. I welcome my readers to share others.

7. Provide Face-Time.

Ask Yourself:

• When was the last time your community met your physicians and providers? Other clinical leaders? Your executives?
• When was the last time your community met your nurses, techs and other care givers?
• If it’s been a while, perhaps it’s time to schedule a lunch-and-learn, or health fair, presentation in collaboration with a targeted organization or group of community members. This will give you one more opportunity to ‘humanize’ your incredible care givers with your community, and it will give the community one more reason to make your hospital and health center the provider of choice.

So there you have it. You can be an effective driver of volume within your health system. None of the steps outlined above happen overnight. in fact, some of them can take a couple of years to fully implement. But by developing operational efficiencies within your healthcare marketing department, you can support all of the above functional areas and demonstrate solid results.