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As you craft a strategic plan for your healthcare marketing, asking the right questions and modifying any trouble areas can strengthen your approach. Have you asked yourself or your team these twelve questions about your strategic plan, targeting and use of data to improve your campaigns?
Strategic plan
1. Has your strategic plan clearly and specifically identified your target audiences?
2. Does your plan set reasonable goals that can be translated into actionable tactics?
3. Does your strategic plan address how marketing contributes to the overall needs of the organization (such as patient growth or brand recognition)?
4. Is your plan based on extensive market research and data, so that you’ve got all information necessary to drive informed tactics?
Targeting and reach
5. What sources are trusted by your audience, and how can you reach and engage audience members through those points of contact?
6. Have you used buyer personas to segment your audience into the specific groups that will be receptive to your message?
7. Have you evaluated the best ways to spend your budget to maximize your reach while effectively targeting your ideal audience?
8. Who is the final decision-maker, and who influences their decisions to buy? Are you planning to reach everyone involved in your marketing?
Data
9. Are you accurately tracking which marketing materials lead to conversions?
10. If your data collection includes protected medical data of any type, is it being collected and used in line with state and federal regulations?
11. What are you doing to ensure that your data is clean?
12. Have you built regular data evaluation and related campaign modification into your plan?
If you’re looking for more advice on how strong marketing can benefit your organization, read our white paper, Ten simple truths about strong brands.
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As we continue to look at the elements of successful healthcare marketing campaigns, it’s time to examine a few real-world examples. Each of these campaigns has something to teach about the best ways to reach and move your audience as you craft your next healthcare campaign. Take a look:
Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center: You Have Us
In 2013, Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center launched the “You Have Us” campaign to highlight its personalized, emotional approach to cancer treatment. Designed to show how Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center provides customized care based on an individual’s needs (in terms of their health, age and lifestyle) this campaign was named one of the winners of the 2014 Healthcare Marketing IMPACT Awards. The campaign included television and radio commercials as well print and online advertisements. These materials assured people, “Right now, you have cancer. But what your cancer doesn’t know is, you have us.”
What can your marketing learn from them? Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center recognized that people have a hunger for expert knowledge when it comes to healthcare as well as a sensitivity to their individual needs. They based their campaign on market research showing that individuals with cancer worry that they won’t get the individualized treatment they need. By featuring the center’s oncologists and directly addressing patients’ fears, this campaign put the focus exactly where it should be: on the top-notch care those doctors provide.
Merck: Univadis
Pharmaceutical company Merck (which operates as Merck Sharpe & Dohme outside of the U.S.), has an audience of medical professionals spanning the globe. Language and cultural barriers made it difficult to engage this audience as a whole, but Merck identified one thing they had in common: a desire for easy, centralized access to the best medical research and news. To fill this need, Merck created Univadis.
Univadis was created as a central source for medical resources and news from respected journals including The Lancet and The JAMA Network. Merck used email marketing to engage a substantial portion of their audience, offering an invaluable service while also creating close ties with medical professionals around the globe. If you are marketing to healthcare professionals, take this from Univadis: valuable educational materials that fit your audience members’ needs are one of the best options you can offer your audience to increase your thought leadership and garner trust from medical professionals. In return, you’ll see increased engagement and reach.
Trinity Health: Mercy Health
When Trinity Health decided to bring together seven hospital systems to form one new brand, Mercy Health, they needed a way to establish and differentiate the new brand. Movéo worked with Mercy Health to develop the new brand and create a variety of brand collateral, including print and digital advertising. Equally important were internal branding efforts, which helped employees from across the seven hospital systems to engage with the organization’s new brand.
These efforts were highly successful, and Mercy Health is today a strong presence in Michigan healthcare. What should you take from Mercy Health’s example? No matter the size or scope of your healthcare organization, cohesive branding is possible. Craft a strategy that looks both outward and inward to shape perception of the brand, and leverage the strength of your organization’s areas of expertise to build it up.
For more on how Movéo worked with Mercy Health to create 77 percent brand awareness within a year of the brand’s introduction, and how these efforts led to top ranking in the cardiac specialty, read our blog, “How brand-building made Mercy Health a preferred healthcare provider.”
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As we covered on Tuesday, there are a number of things to consider when determining the audience for your healthcare marketing. In that post, we focused specifically on healthcare marketing aimed at organizations. Today, we’re taking a deeper dive into what that looks like in healthcare marketing to individuals.
Who are you trying to reach?
When you’re looking to reach individual consumers with your healthcare message, you’ll first have to consider who is most likely to need your services. But think broadly: healthcare decisions are often made by families together, not just individuals. Depending on the services you market, the parents, adult children, spouses and siblings of the people needing care may be as much or more involved in decision-making as those receiving care. You may also wish to impact doctors and other healthcare professionals who serve as trusted advisors to the individuals who need care.
Consider what the most impactful messaging for each group will be. This is where robust buyer personas come into play, and why they are a key component of your strategic plan. An experienced healthcare marketing firm will help you craft realistic personas that cover a range of audience segments and address how each will play a role in healthcare decisions.
When do you want to reach them?
Think about how you would choose a hospital or healthcare provider. Most consumer healthcare decisions have to do with location and convenience, as well as insurance coverage. But another major factor is reputation. Successful healthcare marketing is built on a foundation of reputation-building and thought leadership. For example, think of the hospital systems that are well-known far beyond their areas of service, like the Cleveland Clinic and Johns Hopkins. They have established themselves as leading research centers and hubs for cutting-edge-treatment, not only because of their expertise in these areas but because they have also excelled in spreading the message that they excel in those areas.
Your healthcare marketing needs to reach people long before they need your services. Your organization is building a base of potential customers, whether they are ready for your solution or not. With your marketing firm, discuss the messages that will most resonate with your audience in the awareness phase, because that’s what will matter when member of that audience finds themselves suddenly in need of your offerings in the future.
Once you’ve identified your audience members and crafted meaningful personas to shape your marketing, it’s time to put your marketing plan into action.
For more marketing thoughts from Movéo, browse our white paper library.
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Healthcare marketing is a wide-ranging industry, encompassing the activities of brands that want to reach consumers and attract them to a hospital system, as well as organizations that are looking to sell their wares to that same hospital system. In that sense, healthcare marketing audiences can be as different as B2B and B2C audiences.
But even within these categories, identifying and segmenting the audience is key to healthcare marketing success. As you begin devising a new healthcare marketing campaign, it’s essential to create buyer personas that address questions important to them, so that you’re better equipped to give them the information they need when they need it. Here are some questions you should ask yourself when devising buyer personas in order to identify and segment healthcare marketing targets for your next campaign.
What health benefits does your solution offer?
Healthcare organizations share many priorities with others, such as staying profitable and efficiently using resources. But unlike many B2B organizations, in healthcare, your stakeholders may be truly dealing with life and death. That added dimension creates another serious consideration that goes into purchasing decisions.
As you devise your audience targets and personas, consider how you can appeal to your audience on not just cost and efficiency, but the health benefits your product or service offers. When you’re marketing something in such a high-stakes environment, that message needs to be strong and clear: you need to ensure your marketing shows what the product is, how it works and why your product can potentially save lives.
Who is your point of entry?
For those marketing healthcare-related products or services to organizations, the first thing to determine is who to talk to. The people you wish to reach should of course include those at the organization with decision-making power, but also those who are most likely to use your product and those who understand how it would transform their day-to-day responsibilities. These individuals may be able to advocate for your offerings to their superiors.
As you segment your audience in this way, consider the priorities and roles of each of these categories of people and where they fall in your marketing funnel. What messaging and content can you create that will best reach a doctor? Where do they get their information from, and who do they most trust when considering making a purchase? How is that different from what intended for a hospital director who may sign off on a contract with your client? How are each of those different from content created for the patient, who may be your first point of contact? Ensure that any personas you create answer these questions, so that your personas reflect the reality of who you may come in contact with at different stages of the marketing funnel.
What tone and level of messaging does your audience respond to?
Often, your healthcare marketing audience will be highly educated in the medical field and will expect your messaging to show your organization’s expertise in their area. Are your marketing materials addressing the high-level concerns and questions that your targets will have, in language that demonstrates your understanding of their industry?
As you segment your audience, you may also find that you wish to reach people in a number of roles and specialties. How will your messaging differ between pharmacists and directors of pharmacy? What about between nurses, who work intensively with patients, and specialists, who may see each person only once or a few times?
As you can see, determining your audience targets and creating personas to shape your marketing is an important part of the strategic planning process. For more on strategic planning and working with a marketing partner, read our other posts on marketing partnerships.
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When Trinity Health, one of the nation’s largest healthcare networks, wanted to bring together seven hospital systems in Michigan to form a single brand, they partnered with Movéo. The two teams knew there would be challenges to the project both internally and externally. The new brand would need to be consistently conveyed to over 8,000 employees. It would be competing with a another major hospital system in the same region that already had an established brand presence.
The success of the project despite these odds shows the power of brand-building in the healthcare space. Here’s how Movéo and Trinity Health worked together to form the Mercy Health brand.
The process
As in all marketing efforts, healthcare marketing must be grounded in robust qualitative and quantitative research. In Movéo’s work with Mercy Health, that included competitive and category audits of the brand’s industry environment and an ethnographic study. This research was used to inform the branding work that came next.
To differentiate Mercy Health from its closest competitor, Movéo worked with the team to develop a brand that positioned individual facilities’ clinical expertise and advanced service offerings as the natural outgrowth of a focus on personalized, relationship-based and inclusive healthcare. This work led to the development of a brand strategy, architecture, voice and visual identity as well as audience personas. These values were conveyed through print advertising, newspaper inserts and more, which were aimed to engage the identified audiences directly. Internal branding efforts engaged employees throughout the system, allowing the new brand to be more thoroughly expressed.
These brand-building efforts were fruitful. A year after the new brand’s unveiling, brand awareness reached 77 percent. At the same time, Mercy Health was rated the preferred provider of cardiac services and a close second to their main competitor in oncology services.
Lessons from Mercy Health’s success
What can other healthcare marketers and brands draw from Mercy Health’s success? We believe these are key takeaways:
- that healthcare messaging must be built on a foundation of strong and thorough research
- that in this competitive marketplace, addressing people who have enormous emotional and physical stakes in the services they seek, crafting a differentiated, compelling brand is key
- that a healthcare brand needs to be conveyed through top-notch, targeted creative
- that you must track results to analyze the outcomes of your work
To see examples of some of the collateral Movéo produced for Mercy Health, view our case study.
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When you are looking for a marketing partner to help craft or carry out your healthcare marketing strategic plan, what’s the first thing you take into account? Hint: it should be marketing experience within the industry.
While every industry has unique aspects that are best navigated with experience, healthcare is particularly sensitive. Marketers in this sphere must handle all of the usual aspects of marketing challenges, including audience research and targeting; data collection and analysis; and the creation and distribution of marketing collateral. But on top of that, healthcare marketing touches on issues of policy, privacy and sensitivity that marketers need to be aware of before embarking on a new project.
Policy
Government policies greatly impact healthcare marketing, and not just in areas of privacy, which we’ll explore in a moment. The shifting landscape of health insurance, for example, changes who has access to what types of care and where they are looking for it. Decisions by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) impact the availability and cost of treatments, including whether they are available over-the-counter or require a doctor’s prescription—important things for any marketer to keep in mind when considering how to nurture a lead down the marketing funnel. In some cases, laws regarding health procedures and the availability of medication vary by state, and this is another area an experienced healthcare marketing partner can help you navigate smoothly.
Privacy
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) limits how certain protected health information can be used for marketing purposes. A marketer without experience in healthcare marketing may get by with learning how to comply with HIPAA in their content, but an experienced healthcare marketer can help optimize content, develop collateral and further your goals without coming near a HIPAA violation. What’s more, they know when and what authorizations may be necessary for particular marketing activities, and keep up-to-date on any changes in regulation.
Sensitivity in messaging
You certainly don’t want your audience to feel that you are taking advantage of their health concerns or are in any way talking down to people who live with certain health conditions. A marketing firm that specializes in healthcare is experienced in striking the fine balance of illustrating why people need your services while respecting these concerns.
Experienced healthcare marketers know the preferred and resonant terminology for various health needs, and know how to do the research to determine those things in specific areas where they don’t. Marketing firms who are well-versed in healthcare know the messages that resonate with consumers, from concerns about the cost of care to a focus on its outcomes.
Are you looking for a marketing firm that can bring healthcare expertise to your organization? Give Movéo a call today. Contact us today.
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In 2014 we introduced the new marketing value chain, a new framework for marketing that replaced the old “rules and tools” approach. In the old marketing value chain, marketers used best practices and conventional wisdom (the rules) and marketing approaches such as advertising, direct mail and trade shows (the tools) the drive sales, engagement and loyalty. In contrast. the new marketing value chain consists of three links: data-driven insight, quantifiable strategy and the application of creative and technology.
Over the past two years, the importance of data-directed marketing has become even clearer. That value chain is just as applicable today as it was in 2014. This month, we’ll be taking a deep dive into healthcare marketing, and looking closer at the role of strategic planning and the new marketing value chain in healthcare applications. With that in mind, let’s refresh our understanding of the new marketing value chain with a quick look back.
Why does marketing require the new value chain?
Marketing’s goal has always been predictability, a clear understanding of what inputs drive what outputs, and how to most effectively use resources to achieve the desired result. For this reason, marketers have always worked to quantify and attribute results, but have never before had access to the type of data insights allowed by digital technology.
Because of this, the old marketing value chain emphasized the use of “rules” — the application of best practices and conventional wisdom — and “tools” — advertising, direct mail campaigns, trade shows — in the hopes of generating leads and sales. Some portion of this marketing spend was always wasted, but a lack of data and insight made it difficult to determine which portion was effective and which was waste. Moreover, the old value chain did not account for the dynamic aspects of both marketing conditions and the tools of marketing.
Thanks to digital technology, the game has changed. Reliable data can now inform the entire marketing process, from developing a strategic plan to applying the new era’s “rules and tools.”
What does the new value chain teach us?
The new marketing value chain is all about figuring out why marketing works (or does not work), and applying those data-based findings to consistently improve its performance. Collected data drive the application of insight, strategy and tactics that generate leads, sales, engagement and loyalty. The new value chain teaches marketers not to rely on our instincts but on clear evidence as we make decisions about how and where to message our offerings.
In the healthcare field, as for B2B and B2C companies, these data are invaluable for effective, efficient marketing. Follow our blog throughout the month as we look further at the roles data insights and strategic planning play in healthcare marketing, along with special considerations for those working in this field.
For more on the evolution of marketing from a rules and tools approach to a data-driven process, read our white paper, The New Marketing Value Chain.
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Now that you have a strategic marketing plan to work from, it’s time to ensure that it is feasible to carry out and will be effective in raising your organization’s profile and communicating your key messages. If you’re working with a marketing partner, talk through your strategic plan with them to understand how best to execute it over time and whether there are any concerns that still need to be addressed. Here are ten questions to help you start the conversation:
Carrying out the plan
- How does each tactic support the overall goals of the strategic plan?
- Which member of the team will be responsible for carrying out which aspects of the strategic plan?
- Are there tools we do not currently have in place that are needed to most effectively carry out the plan? If so, when do we need them by?
Adjusting the plan over time
- Are there any changes in our industry that may impact our strategic plan? If so, what are they, and what is their impact?
- What data do we need to assess our plan, so that we know what adjustments are necessary?
- If data shows that particular tactics are not effective, will they be replaced or adjusted? If replaced, by what?
- Does this plan provide guidance for how marketing should proceed in the case of unexpected events?
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- Is there a baseline level of investment in each of these tactics required to create an impact?
- Are there skill sets not currently present in our team that are needed to successfully carry out this plan?
- Are there marketing tools that could make our efforts more effective or efficient?
Do you have questions about marketing that you’d like a Movéo team member to answer? Contact us today.
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No matter what your marketing firm is doing or how effective they are, there are certain circumstances that can impact the success of your marketing campaigns. Today, we’re taking a look at some of the main roadblocks that keep marketing from achieving its full potential and what you can do about each, particularly if you have the help of a marketing firm.
Budget cuts
Like any department, marketing needs the appropriate resources to do effective work. These include the ability to invest in top employees with creative and analytical skills; marketing automation, analytics and design software; and digital and traditional media buys and collateral.
If your budget has been cut, you and your marketing partner will face significant challenges to perform at the same level as before. However, a marketing partner is a great resource in this situation. Your partner firm can help you make the case to your superiors for marketing’s resource needs and what can be achieved with an appropriate investment. Talk to your marketing partner about case studies, past data and other information that you can use to advocate for the importance of marketing.
Employee turnover
Whether it’s the loss of one or two high-level employees or constant low-level staffing churn, employee turnover can impact your ability to develop and deploy consistent messaging. Turnover at a low level can redirect time and resources to training new recruits. At a high level, it can cause major changes to marketing’s direction, forcing your team and your partner firm to go back and revise your strategic plan.
For your internal team or a partner firm to do work effectively, there needs to be a certain level of stability. A marketing campaign’s impact cannot be assessed if it isn’t given the time to run its course or the investment to succeed. If there have recently been staffing changes at your organization or you expect some in the near future, talk to your marketing partner about how to establish some stability. Identify the campaigns that are having the greatest impact and make a plan for how you will show their importance to a new team. You may wish to also create some training documents or tools that can systemize and streamline the onboarding of new marketing team members.
Lack of communication
When you’re working with a marketing partner, open communication is critical to success. Ideally, you’ve established a regular meeting or phone call to go through priorities, progress and sticking points, and communicate regularly by phone or email between those meetings. However, none of this guarantees good communication if you aren’t working to clearly and transparently share the information your marketing partner needs.
If you feel there’s a weak spot in your communications, you need to find a way to fix it. Address your concerns with your marketing partner, and they will work with you to brainstorm ways to fix the problem. They may recommend a project management tool like Basecamp or more frequent check-ins regarding your project. You’ll also need to take a hard look at your internal communications processes, and examine whether there are areas that you can improve.
Lack of marketing-sales alignment
While marketing’s ultimate goal is to increase sales, that goal can only be achieved when sales and marketing work together. If your organization lacks an integrated CRM, if sales goals are not clearly communicated or if sales expectations of marketing are unrealistic, the marketing team is being set up for trouble. The good news? Improving communication between marketing and sales can bring these issues to light and create opportunities to make them better.
Your marketing partner can identify the specific areas in which marketing-sales alignment can be improved at your organization, and share possible solutions. For more on this issue and how you can deal with it, read a few of our past blogs:
For more marketing advice, browse all our past blogs.
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Recently, we brought you a recap of a CRAVE session about benchmarks and analytics by Movéo’s director of data and insights Jiani Zhang. In a followup session, she presented an in-depth look at the power of A/B testing. Here are some of the key takeaways:
Types of A/B testing
There are two forms of A/B testing, gradual and radical. Gradual A/B testing changes only one element at a time so that you can definitively attribute any differences between the two to the variable. If you are testing two differently shaped call-to-action buttons, you would only change the shape of the button, not the color, text, placement or anything else.
In radical A/B testing, many elements are changed at once, and the whole is treated as one variable. For example, two dramatically different versions of a landing page, with different images, copy and form design may be tested against each other.
While radical testing cannot identify the effect of each individual change, it is often a good choice for B2B marketers. It has the advantage of being able to test larger changes quickly. and especially when it is difficult to gather enough impressions for a statistically significant result. Before applying the results of a radical test to your entire project, consider repeating it in a few places to confirm the results. You may also wish to, if possible, run a few gradual tests on specific elements as well.
Why perform A/B testing?
A/B testing compares two variants of a given landing page, email or digital ad to determine which one performs better based on a specific metric or metrics. It’s an efficient method to optimize campaigns and to gain understanding of the elements that drive success.
Customer journeys are enormously complex in the digital sphere, and A/B testing can pinpoint aspects of a campaign as small as the text on one call-to-action button or the color choices in a banner ad that draw customers in or push them away. Ultimately, the increased understanding of customers’ values and behaviors offered by A/B testing can help you develop more relevant content, build better user experiences and improve ROI.
For the most effective A/B test, perform qualitative research first to determine which elements to test. Then, ensure that you are tracking results in a way that is clear and easy to measure. Make sure that you collect data in the same manner for each version you test to streamline analysis.
What can be tested?
All forms of A/B testing compare two versions of the same element on a certain channel. You can test calls-to-action, copy, forms, videos, content display, site navigation and more. Even within those categories, there are numerous things to test. Try these on for size:
- Calls-to-action: text, colors, sizes, shapes, locations of images
- Copy: headlines, paragraphs vs. bulletpoints, shorter vs. longer copy
- Forms: length of form, inclusion of special offer
- Videos: autoplay, must be clicked
- Site navigation: style of menu, order of menu options
For test results to be valid, they must have an appropriate sample size, which is considered in terms of number of impressions. The minimum and ideal sample sizes will vary based on the expected conversion rate, so take that into account when planning your test.
Case study: Movéo for Molex
While working on the Chinese version of Molex’s website, Movéo helped design and execute an A/B test on a landing page with a form submission for a gated report. In this radical A/B test, the original version of the landing page offered several calls-to-action for visitors to engage with, including one that led to a form to download the gated content. The variant landing page focused entirely on that single content offering, presenting the form and call-to-action.
The test focused on two metrics: bounce rate and lead conversion rate. In the test, the original landing page demonstrated a lower bounce rate but also a lower rate of form submissions than the variant. While it may at first seem that the test ended in a tie, further statistical analysis revealed that the difference in bounce rates was statistically significant while the difference in form completions was not. Since it kept more visitors engaged on the site, the original landing page was therefore considered to be the winner.
For more on Movéo’s work with Molex, read our case study.
