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Healthcare Providers Lag on Customer Loyalty Metrics
A lot has been written about how the healthcare industry is woefully behind
most others in their strategic marketing competence, technology adoption,
customer focus, etc. This is not news.
Actually hospitals have been conducting patent and stakeholder satisfaction
surveys for a long time. But how have they been applying the results? Toward
building patient brand loyalty? Improving the care offering or service? The
reality is that very few provider marketers or hospital employees know if or
how the survey information is applied.
Much of the impetus for patient satisfaction surveying is driven by the
federal government’s quality mandate and establishment (HCAPS). Moreover,
enterprising satisfaction survey research companies have taken full
advantage of the need for hospital compliance to successfully sell ongoing
survey products (not consulting) to providers, in effect creating client
loyalty to the patient satisfaction survey process. But few really know how
the complex survey reports, tables and data symbols are used (if at all) or
who within the hospital owns the program. Does the hospital CEO regularly
keep tabs on ratings? Are strategic marketing and customer service plans
created based on the feedback? Doubtful.
So if hospitals are behind in their understanding and use of customer
satisfaction data, where are they with the latest in loyalty metrics, the
Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey. You guessed it…not very far. And
satisfaction survey companies are naturally challenging the NPS methodology
since it is ridiculously simple and actionable…and threatens their
livelihood.
Leaders at Cancer Treatment Centers of America and Ascension Health however
do read their NPS results regularly and act on them…but these are among the
enlightened few NPS practitioners in the healthcare provider field.
So a hospital that can figure out how to develop and implement NPS will have
a strong chance of standing out in the market, driving needed organizational
change and building powerful consumer, physician and staff loyalty… and
hence brand value.
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European regulations on privacy, collecting and retaining data are already much more stringent than those here in the US. A recent report published by the European Commission’s Article 29 Data Protection Working Party is recommending six months.
Google has been quoted as saying that they were the first company to make search logs anonymous and shortening the life span of cookies placed on users computers. “Protecting users’ privacy is at the heart of all our products,” said Google’s global privacy council Peter Fleisher.
The real power of information collected through search logs, however, is not limited to the first six months. The step that this regulation is taking seems to be pulling the eyes over consumers, as if their search data is not accessible to anyone after that six-month period. Most search industry researchers use historic databases of keywords that have been compiled from multiple search engines, with records that often reach back several years. The best data for search marketing research comes from a balance of current trends in the past month to three months and historical data from the last several years at the same time of the year as the search marketing efforts are going to be deployed.
These recommendations, and other European regulations such as the Data Protection Directive, serve the purpose of limiting the scope of data collected by search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Every third party search log collection service should be jumping for joy, assuming they can work quickly in collecting the data from the engines.
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It is a common question in advertising, how much spend is the right amount of spend? As any marketer can attest, answering this question is not easy — especially when it’s asked by your CFO. A straightforward (but overly simplified) response to the question is, “you should spend as much money as it takes to maximize your profits.” But, how can you project profits accurately?
The first thing to remember is that, when calculated as a percentage, maximizing return on investment (ROI) is NOT the same thing as maximizing profits.
ROI as a %…
Revenue Generated [minus] Investment [divided by] Investment [multiplied by] 100
So, if you spend $1,000.00 on a campaign, and you attribute $2,000.00 in revenue to the business generated from that campaign, your ROI is 100%. Or, the campaign returned a profit equal to the amount of the initial investment.
Now, back to the original question, how can you predict the profits you’re likely to achieve from a given marketing investment? It becomes a little easier if you can focus on a single marketing activity, and if you have the ability to attribute revenue to that activity in isolation. So, for the sake of simplicity, let’s consider an e-commerce company that generates customers only through its online banner (display) advertising.
Assuming the company had enough historical data (from testing), it could begin to predict customer conversion rates at different banner impression levels. Simply put serving X number of banner impressions will likely result in a customer conversion rate of Y. But remember, similar to the Law of Diminishing Returns found in economics, there will be a point at which each additional advertising impression will become less effective than the one that preceded it. Consider the three different points along the curve on the graph below.
Maximizing ROI (the first point) is based on finding the highest point in the distribution curve. Maximizing profits (the second point) is based on finding the point JUST BEFORE you begin overspending (the third point). [note: assumes the cost of each impression is the same, and the value of each new customer is the same at each point, at an $8.00 CPM and a customer value of $465.00]
In this (admittedly simple) example, if you were managing against an ROI metric (%), you’d choose to serve 70 million impressions. But, if you were managing against a profit metric, you’d choose to serve 140 million impressions.
Managing against profits represents a higher risk, because it increases your likelihood of overspending. But as you can see, if you’re focusing too much on ROI, you could be limiting the profits your campaigns generate for the company.
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Scientific Evidence that B2B Customers Want, Need Brands
We have been arguing for years that brands matter in the B2B world while showing data to support this assertion.
https://blog.marketo.com/blog/2007/03/b2b_branding_wh.html
https://www.synaxisworks.com/blog/business/b2b-branding-matters/
https://www.marketingmo.com/blog/template_permalink.asp?id=176
Of course we like the irony of using science and facts and dollars to say that art and emotion and brands are the things that drive business value. Intangible value, managed properly, creates tangible value.
Back to the lab
A little over a year ago, none other than the fact-based Wall Street Journal reported (“This is Your Brain on a Strong Brand: MRIs Show Even Insurers Can Excite”) that a German radiologist, Dr. Christine Born, demonstrated through MRI investigation on subjects’ brains that B2B brands cause the same quality and quantity of brain activity as B2C brands.
None of the brands measured in the study activated the rational, decision-making side of the brain. All brands stimulated brainwaves in the emotional parts of the brain. Large brands produced more activity than small ones and more positive responses than the latter. B2B insurance brands rated as strong as B2C car brands.
Another experiment tying emotion to brand attachment
In 2008, researchers from the University of Iowa and Stanford University reported that consumer subjects who had less information about the product they consumed were happier and liked it more than those with more information. The more satisfied consumers were engaging in ‘wishful thinking’ and wanting to rationalize their decision after the fact (“Blissful Ignorance Effect”).
While this experiment was conducted with users of basic consumer goods, these findings may suggest some brand-building wisdom for B2B marketers:
• Give customers an emotional reason to feel good about their decision
• Play up only the most positive aspects of the brand/offering in the post-purchase experience
• Don’t deluge existing customers with information (that can only serve to weaken the brand attachment)
We look forward to experiments with business insurance and microprocessor buyers.
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Imagine you’re driving from Chicago to St. Louis to meet an old friend for dinner. To effectively calculate whether you’re on target to meet your stated objective (arriving in St. Louis by 5:00pm), the only instruments you would need are your car’s clock, its speedometer and the gas gauge. By monitoring these devices, you could easily determine whether any adjustments would need to be made in your travel plans — leave a bit earlier, increase your speed (slightly), take shorter and/or fewer rest stops, etc.
Now, imagine that you sit down in the driver’s seat of your car, and the dashboard looks like the cockpit of a Boeing 747. With hundreds of dials, levers and gauges. It would be overwhelming. In fact, it would likely impede your ability to meet your objective.
This may seem like an extreme example, but this is the way many marketers choose to manage their online advertising campaigns. With a heightened desire to prove ROI, and accessibility to campaign-level data at a moment’s notice, online marketers are spending enormous amounts of time trying to make sense of all the data.
Many of today’s marketers are consumed with finding their answer to the question that plagued John Wanamaker at the turn of the last century. However, instead of finding the necessary insight (from the data) to eliminate advertising waste, they often find themselves too confused to make ANY decisions about campaign optimization at all.
The reason: they’re looking at too much stuff…Impressions, Clicks, Visits, CTRs, Pageviews, CPCs, CPAs, CPVs, Time-on-Site, Bounce Rates, Referring Source, Recency, Visitor Loyalty, and on, and on, and on. And worse, they don’t always know why they’re looking at all this stuff.
Obviously, information is good, but information is not the same as insight. Too much information can actually cause indecision. This is often known as "paralysis by analysis," a phrase applied when the opportunity cost of decision analysis exceeds its benefits.
Remember, campaign optimization is not a destination, it is a process. It requires clear establishment (up front) of the metrics you will leverage to assess the present state of performance, and to prescribe a course of action.
Any metric that is reported on should have a purpose that is understood by anyone involved in managing (or funding) the campaign. Simply put, any metric that is reported on should be actionable. Otherwise, ignore it.
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Data from ComScore released to Wall Street analysts indicates that Google’s paid clicks in February rose only 3% compared with the same month a year earlier. Paid Search is Google’s Primary revenue source, when search users click on a sponsored-search result, generating revenue from the company’s advertising customers.
So what does this mean for Paid Search advertisers?
Google’s 25% growth rate in the final quarter may have harkened Google’s growth from new to emerging media, but the slowing of the income growth rate is not a sign that Google advertisers are slowing down.
Google dominates the U.S. search market, delivering sponsored search results relevant enough for users to actually click on them. Search is the driving force behind Google’s success. The February paid-click figures from comScore could reinforce the perception that Google is feeling the effects of the recent troubles in the broader economy, but really it is a sign that Google realizes that while it matures into mainstream media, it still has some refining to do.
ComScore even made it a point to come back and clarify for Wall Street what those of us on the Google Highway already know…
…Google’s quality improvements, known as a “Google Dance,” account for the drop-off in paid click growth. Unlike the housing boom, Google is taking time to reflect, improve, and solidify it’s position as the top dog in the world of search.
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If you start with the idea that brand loyalty means people feel a connection to a brand because they believe the brand understands and meets their needs – both expressed and latent needs – then it makes sense to incorporate market segmentation into your approach in developing the full brand strategy. In other words, market segmentation strategy and brand loyalty are intertwined.
A good market segmentation strategy lays the groundwork for brand loyalty by identifying:
• The most valuable market, channel, product and customer segments
• Key decision makers and influencers
• Critical needs and wants for each segment
• Future needs
• Measures of customer satisfaction and loyalty
• Brand and competitive equity benchmarking
• Value proposition alternatives for each segment
• A trade-off analysis for features vs. price
Your brand can’t deliver value unless you understand what your audiences consider valuable. And the more granular you get in your understanding of your audiences, the easier it is for your brand to meet diverse needs, move into new areas via brand extensions, and continue to be relevant and useful to your audiences in the future. In addition, a robust market segmentation strategy can help you align the enterprise and focus resources on the most profitable targets so that they can be served and cultivated in a way to drive loyalty and hence brand value.
By: Mark Shevitz, Senior Brand Strategist
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Universal search promises to bring exposure to content once relegated to limited audiences and savvy surfers. Universal search requires businesses to adjust their approach to search engine optimization.
Businesses looking to optimize for universal search need to broaden their content horizons and look beyond optimization of just their website content. Anyone who knows anything about search engine optimization knows that content is king. Having keyword rich, keyword relevant, spider accessible content is critical to successful search engine optimization and optimization for universal search success is no different, there’s just a lot more to optimize.
The content mix of universal search results is diverse. Businesses will not only compete for position with their competitors’ websites in the search engines results page (SERP), they will compete with videos, blogs, podcasts, news feeds and more. So the broader the spectrum of online content a business can produce the better their chances for success in gaining high placement in universal search results. That being said, simply producing video, audio or blog content does not ensure success. Just as with website search engine optimization, video, audio, RSS and blog content should be optimized too. Businesses should place keywords in their video, audio and news RSS feed’s title and meta description tags, submit local listings, leverage web applications like Googlebase and consider creating a widget that can make their content available to search portals like iGoogle and myYahoo.
The bottom line, integrated, optimized, online marketing communications equals universal search appeal.
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At Microsoft’s MIX conference Steve Ballmer, the Microsoft CEO, really let the questions fly, and handled himself the way one would expect the CEO of Microsoft, with audible playfulness, jokes, and a little dancing. However, the crowd wasn’t all drinking the cool-aid. Former Apple Evangelical turned info product salesman Guy Kawasaki, blogger Rafael Rivera were among those pushing Ballmer while he attempted to show off Microsoft’s latest web wares.
When interviewed by Guy, Ballmer broke the news as gently as he could, “We’re in the game, and we’re the little engine that could, just working away, working away, working away. In online, yeah, it’s Google, Google, Google. I’d say were the underdog.”
One year ago at last years MIX conference Steve and Microsoft were singing a different tune of calling Google “a one trick pony” and “cute.” That would explain the court documents that Guy dug up alleging that Ballmer once threw a chair across a room when an employee let him know he was leaving for Google.
Hopefully Microsoft’s CEO has more than just the one trick of being able to slip out of that question by Kawasaki up his sleeve, because…
Microsoft = Underdog
Seems like one heck of a trick to me.
Posted by: Randall Gniadecki
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Like most advertising professionals, I enjoy watching the Super Bowl as much for the commercials as for the game itself. The next day, I always enjoy scouring the internet for the various reviews of :30 spots that ran during the big game — to see which are being considered true examples of great advertising, and which are determined to be forgettable (at best).
For those who join me in this annual ritual, you’ll agree that most of the reviews turn out to be a popularity contest. Usually, the ads are considered solely on the basis of whether they made the (self-proclaimed) expert laugh — or not.
This year, I usurped my usual indulgence by instead downloading a review that I feel is a bit more informed. Since Super Bowl XXXIX (2005), Reprise Media has published a report that ranks Super Bowl advertisers based on the level of integration between their television commercials and presence in search and social media – essentially measuring how prepared each brand is to capture online interest and buzz.
You can check it out here…
https://www.reprisemedia.com/scorecard.aspx
What’s interesting about the Scorecard is that, rather than focusing on “laugh-ability”, it rewards advertisers who think about the brand impact of integrating their marketing efforts. The report recognizes those advertisers who’ve maximized their exposure by successfully linking their TV ads to their online presence.
In today’s day-and-age, especially given the high price of advertising during the Super Bowl, it surprises me that more of the reviews are not based on ROI and Brand measures — and less on entertainment value. Reprise Media’s Search Marketing Scorecard is certainly a step in the right direction.
