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As the US healthcare industry continues to reel from unprecedented change, new business models are emerging from unexpected sources. PwC has identified four disrupter archetypes: vertical integrators (e.g., CVS Health and Aetna), employer activists (e.g., Haven), technology invaders (e.g., Apple) and health retailers (e.g., Walmart).
Yet, there is a San Francisco-based startup that combines several of these elements — Forward. Demolishing barriers that traditional healthcare systems still cling to, Forward does not work with insurance companies. Instead, they charge patients a $149-a-month fee that covers everything, even labs.
The company also differentiates itself by embedding artificial intelligence, sensors and mobile apps in ways that makes healthcare more closely mirror other high tech consumer experiences.
Movéo insight
While Forward somewhat immodestly sees itself as “the primary care of the future,” it’s easy to understand why even the most casual millennial and gen Z patients might agree. With its sleek environs, unlimited visits (scheduled to actually start on time!) and easy subscription billing, Forward has the potential to redefine the healthcare experience. Yet, its technology, upscale retail footprint and hospitality-influenced patient experience can all be replicated by traditional healthcare competitors — if they don’t wait too long.
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There’s no doubt that the need for enterprise-wide business intelligence is changing how organizations use their customer relationship management (CRM) systems. For healthcare systems with an accountable care model, the pressure is even greater to find a CRM vendor with the capabilities and sophistication to deliver significant ROI.
But that’s where things tend to go wrong — during selection. The vetting process and early implementation are key to setting the stage for success.
In fact, 50% of CRM purchases fail to meet management expectations. This is likely due, in part, to early critical steps such as requirements analysis, strategy, and internal cultural alignment – people, processes, goals, finances and technologies. Even after a robust CRM system is transitioned into an organization, those early decisions can impact its effectiveness. Stakeholders might not use the system’s full functionality or operate in silos. Marketing might not account for CRM limitations such as data duplication, nurture flow restrictions or disconnection from other marketing efforts. Old habits and a singular orientation to CRM can persist.
It makes sense to work through all requirements and challenges before your RFP process gets underway:
- Create a roadmap for a customer-centric strategy and segments
- Establish vision and usage requirements
- Determine future considerations
- Identify marketing automation needs
- Prioritize functional specs
- Determine operational readiness
- Develop vendor selection criteria and scoring
- Review vendor demos
- Negotiate with vendors
- Plan set up, integration and seamless data transition
Movéo has helped healthcare clients at every stage of the CRM process, from requirement workshops and coordination to vendor scoring and data transfers. Contact us to learn how we can help your organization maximize CRM investments to enhance patient experience, reduce costs and more.
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When it comes to increasing demand for services and driving up patient volume, healthcare marketing is typically concentrated on acquisition and branding — the top of the sales funnel.
But that means neglecting one of the industry’s unique advantages: a buyer highly receptive to bottom-funnel tactics and relationship building.
A buyer sensitive to experience
Unlike other consumers, healthcare buyers are more likely than others to have uncertainty or other emotions in play at every touchpoint. Marketers have a big opportunity to influence patients to increase their confidence and positivity. Consider that the maternity experience alone, all taking place after initial conversion, includes many touchpoints. If marketers aren’t using these moments, they’re leaving potential revenue on the table.
“Effective demand generation continues after the ‘close’ and considers an evolving decision state,” says Brian Davies, Movéo Managing Partner. “When you look at the bottom half of a more holistic demand generation funnel, what you really see is a collection of experiences.”
Your best source of leads
Even the deep anxieties inseparable from a serious diagnosis can be mitigated by positive patient experiences, from appointment setting to follow up — which ultimately leads to more usage, retention and advocacy. Your patients can become new sources of demand (they generate nearly 70% of appointments) and cross sell in ways far more efficient than top-funnel acquisition tactics. In fact, attracting new patients can cost seven times more than marketing to your current patients.
On top of service and operational initiatives, marketers can use video, email, texting and other proven content tactics to continue educating and influencing their patients. Currently, marketers apply only 3% of content marketing to later stages of the buyer’s journey.* A broad demand generation strategy and ongoing engagement can deliver results long after the patient’s first appointment.
* Source: Content Marketing Institute
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Marketing personas, semi-fictional representations of your existing or prospective consumers, put a face to your data and give you something meaningful and relevant to talk about with your top targets. They help your team answer critical questions such as “Who are these consumers?” “What’s important to them?” “How do they use healthcare?” “How can we increase use of our services?”
But personas are only as good as what goes into them.
Bringing reliable data into the development process is critical to creating actionable new personas that reflect real characteristics or behaviors. Data ensures that your tactics hit the right target – and it may show that your initial assumptions didn’t hold up.
Start with Data
The most effective personas are born not from spitballing or brainstorm sessions but from multiple sources of quantitative data such as media and consumer habits, segmentation data, income and education level and qualitative insights. This quantitative survey data should be put through regression analysis to find commonalities that start to take shape as rough segments or customer types. These segments are then refined and given life in qualitative workshop sessions or interviews with sales liaisons or other SMEs. Their input helps add detail and context for more accurate and believable personas.
Prepare for Surprises
A persona development process that uses data can also help confirm—or correct—initial your assumptions. For example, Movéo worked with a large regional healthcare network to target consumers in one of their local communities. Despite having a large hospital presence in the neighborhood, they weren’t attracting enough local healthcare consumers. Our client assumed that a persona for this popular, gentrifying urban neighborhood would match a classic “hipster” type — younger, single and employed in part-time or creative endeavors. Drawing from four third-party sources of rich demographic data tied to the zip code, Moveo developed six distinct personas with widely varying ages, ethnicities, interests and attitudes regarding their healthcare choices.
This surprisingly diverse and nuanced picture of the area helped our client avoid investing in poorly aligned marketing tactics and messages. With precise, data-driven personas in hand, our client is able to filter ideas and target their efforts with precision and messages that resonate with the breadth of prospects in the area.
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What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear “Voice of the Customer research”? If you’re like many healthcare marketers, the answer is simple: surveys. Lots of surveys. The trouble is, that one-word answer could limit the value your Voice of the Customer (VoC) research actually provides.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean that surveys aren’t a valuable VoC research tool. They are. But if you want to learn how a customer really thinks, feels, and speaks about your healthcare brand, a survey can only tell you so much. In a formal survey setting, people don’t speak the same way they do in everyday life. For written surveys, the self-editing impulse is even stronger, which compounds the issue.
Overcoming this hurdle requires a different research approach. “To do VoC research right,” says Brian Davies, managing partner at Movéo, “you have to think about not just what people tell you, but also what they might actually do.”
This sounds intuitive enough. But how can you do it?
Think Outside the Survey
Your audience is already out there, speaking freely about your services and your brand, on multiple channels. If you can tap into them, you’ll bring added depth and authenticity to your VoC research.
Search engines are one channel that healthcare marketers shouldn’t ignore. “Search is an extension of your customers’ voice,” says Lee Vida, digital marketing manager at Movéo. “It’s them telling a search engine what they’re looking for, in their own words.”
When you dive into consumer search patterns around your brand, you can determine what’s most important to patients in your target area. This can obviously help you improve your SEO rankings, but the benefits go beyond that. By identifying the specific language patients use, you can talk to them on their own terms. It’s a great way to attract attention, spark engagement and encourage conversions.
Social media is another gold mine of insight into customer wants and needs. You’d be surprised how much social chatter is already out there about your brand or your services. By amalgamating and analyzing it, you’ll get a useful composite view of how patients speak about you.
Use this data to identify patterns, commonly used terms or phrases, and major customer needs — both the ones you’re already meeting and the ones going unfilled.
Broaden Your Net
The most successful VoC research doesn’t limit itself to a single approach. It takes a multi-channel deep dive into what patients are really thinking, saying and doing. True, this might seem like a more complicated process than conducting a few phone surveys and hoping for the best. But the extra effort is more than worth the deeper, more valuable data you’ll get in return.
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Online reviews are a powerful way for physicians and healthcare providers to put their best foot forward. And few people would dispute their importance. Between 60 and 77 percent of patients use online review sites to help them select a physician.
What’s more, patients take the content of those reviews seriously. Eighty-five percent of people don’t feel comfortable making an appointment with a physician if more than 10 percent of their reviews are one star — no matter how good the other 90 percent are.
Obviously, the incentive to keep reviews positive is strong. However, great care doesn’t always translate directly into great reviews. To make online reviews deliver results for you, it’s important to fully understand how they operate.
What’s in a Review?
Online reviews are used in many ways and shaped by many factors, some of which have nothing at all to do with the quality of the physician.
For one thing, most patients don’t just visit one online review site. They visit about three on average, and their interactions with those sites change as they move closer to selecting a physician. Early in the journey, a quick glance at a star rating might be enough to exclude certain physicians from consideration. Later on, patients might rely on in-depth reviews written by actual patients — which can be both more nuanced and more subjective.
To complicate things further, many patients review physicians based on their medical appointments as a whole. If a patient has an unpleasant experience with the billing department or can’t schedule an appointment at their preferred time, this can lead them to give even an outstanding physician a less-than-stellar review.
Even starred reviews themselves can be more complex than they appear. While most ratings operate on an absolute scale, some are determined in comparison to other specialists in the same field. And while a doctor might be in the bottom 25 percent of specialists for a certain metric, that doesn’t mean they’re doing a bad job. Those same doctors might receive outstanding results if ranked on an absolute scale.
Earn Your Stars
Providing high-quality, compassionate care is absolutely necessary for physicians to earn strong online reviews, but it isn’t the only thing that’s needed. It takes a holistic approach to turn review sites into real opportunities for patient acquisition.
Monitoring your online reviews is an important place to start. Some reviews might be unwarranted or incorrect, which merits your immediate attention. If negative reviews have a basis in fact, you can use them to demonstrate your responsiveness and willingness to improve.
Review sites are just one aspect of a complete reputation-building campaign, but they’re too important to ignore. With a strong strategy and help from a knowledgeable partner, you can make online reviews a source of new patients, not a source of stress.
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Patients are giving healthcare reviews fewer stars. A recent survey on the health care decision-making process showed that reviews have become less important to the patient — in 2016 more than 50% of respondents said that reviews were either “important” or “very important” and in 2018 this number went down to 32%. Additionally, only 17% of patients selected doctor after reading a review.
This finding is surprising in light of other sources that have reported up to 92% of potential patients read online reviews of their health care provider before making an appointment.
Movéo insight
Movéo suggests several possible reasons for this decline:
With increasing deductibles and rising health care costs, consumers are becoming more savvy health care shoppers, viewing reviews as just one input in a complex decision.
Reviews are still important but other factors have increased proportionally. For example, 62% of patients now indicate that insurance accepted is very important.
Reviews are becoming less trusted. Reviews are becoming more positive in general, and 95% of consumers suspect censorship or faked reviews when they don’t see bad scores.
Do you think perceptions of reviews are evolving? Let us know how.
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There’s a lot a good information in the 2019 demand generation benchmark study released by Demand Generation Report.
The headline is that larger chunks of marketing budgets are now being allocated to demand generation to support the continued goal of revenue growth:
- 71% of those surveyed said their demand generation budget will increase in 2019, and almost half of those said it will increase by 20% or more
- 97% are projecting their total revenue growth will increase this year, and more than one-fifth of those said it would increase by more than 30%
Movéo insight
Companies are employing the usual suspects to generate top-of-funnel demand, including in-person events (76%), lead nurturing campaigns (58%) and webinars (58%). One tactic that was up 24% over the previous year and considered a successful tactic by 30% of respondents — content syndication. This makes sense because, when well executed, syndication is a cost-effective way to create more opportunities for demand from new places.
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Our team is looking to the new year with fresh eyes and ample creativity as the holidays wrap up. As we look back on the year in terms of productivity, there are a few items that caught our eye to keep us sharp — whether creatively, analytically, or strategically. Take a look at our year-in-review top items below.
What the Team’s Saying
Allison, Copywriter: Sharpie pens. Mountains of Sharpie pens. They write smooth as a felt tip but don’t bleed through, and I’ll go through a pack a month easy. (Anyone know how I can get sponsored by Sharpie?) Also, if someone were to buy me a lifetime subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary, that would be a Christmas miracle.
Lee, Digital Marketing Manager: Definitely classes. I’ve been gifted a clay sculpting class, a bread making class, and an aerial aerobics class over the last few years and all were tons of fun! They give you a chance to still be creative while getting you off the computer. Win win!
Alex, Design Specialist: This marker set! These are the best paint markers EVER, so good for illustration, sketching layouts or doodling. Other ideas include a nice framed print of a cool poster for my favorite band, art print/books from any artist I like/ follow on IG, or one of those fancy design-y wall calendars.
Peter, Senior Copywriter: Bose Noise-Masking Sleepbuds aren’t just for getting a great night’s sleep! These are perfect for writers who really need to concentrate on their work, but find music just as distracting as the background noise they are trying to block out.
Ommwriter is software designed to block out the distractions that come with computer writing and helps us keep focused on our work. When Ommwriter is opened, the program automatically takes up the entire screen, helping to eliminate the urge to abandon writing in favor of all the other shiny things you can do online. Both are great options!
Lauren, Assistant Consulting & Engagement Manager: There’s nothing I love more than knowing what my week, month, and year will look like, so I can best be prepared for the curveballs. I love 12-month weekly planners because they help me keep track of what’s coming, so I can stay present and focused on the moment. I also like looking forward to fun things, and knowing I have a break coming up keeps me motivated!
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Big things come in small packages, and soon something very big will be coming to small screens everywhere.
In July, creative technology giant Adobe Systems Inc. announced that it is releasing the full version of its Photoshop program for Apple iPads in 2019 — much to the delight of creatives everywhere.
Currently, Adobe offers a scaled-down version of the program, Adobe Photoshop Express, which gives users basic image editing functions. With the new program, users can access the full potential of these programs, and are able to pick up where they left off across devices.
For designers and marketers, this is big news. No longer shackled to their laptops, they can have more freedom to work on the go.
“This is great news and has the potential to change the digital design industry in a big way,” says Matt Laman, Associate Creative Director at Movéo. “I am already a huge fan and advocate of my iPad pro and apple pencil. The combination instantly rendered my Ituos tablet irrelevant”
While this update is long anticipated, some worry that that key functionalities may not translate well on an iPad. Take, for example, the use of keyboard shortcuts. These can be a massive time saver for design work. Without them, some feel that the transition may not be worth it. Others, like Laman, recognize and accept that additional software may be needed for optimal performance.
“It still requires third-party applications to interface with the creative suite, which adds yet another level of complexity and issues to overcome,” Laman says. “I cannot wait to give this a test drive and see how this impacts my workflow.”
Adobe is planning on releasing full versions of other programs, like Illustrator, though the timeline for that is unknown at this time. However, if the company can successfully replicate the full versions, iPads may well be creatives’ new must-have tool.
