Tight marketing budget? These 7 hospital directors have advice
Hospitals operate on low margins, so marketing departments often have to design campaigns on tight budgets. Here, marketing managers from seven healthcare systems across the country share tips on how to launch a successful campaign on a tight budget.
Note: Answers have been edited slightly for clarity and style.
Jigar Shah. Marketing Director at Providence (Renton, Washington): Building effective campaigns requires a deep understanding of patient needs and the solutions we can offer. Efficient audience selection, personalization, messaging, and using the right channel can help keep campaign costs low. We regularly conduct in-depth campaign performance analysis to ensure that we are applying lessons learned from messaging and channel testing and optimizing them for future campaigns. To keep media costs low, channel selection is crucial, and we have found that using less expensive channels, such as email, can be compelling if done with respect for the needs and wants of communities. that we serve. We’re also leveraging organic channels, acquired media, and other low-cost methods to reach consumers.
Finally, it is essential to keep the message fresh and to ensure that the campaign promise is aligned with operational reality. Providing a frictionless call-to-action experience ensures high campaign efficiency. We believe the real campaign experience begins when consumers act on our message.
Alexandra Morehouse. Marketing Director at Banner Health (Phoenix): Banner has been able to deliver profitable growth campaigns by publishing highly relevant content marketing which in turn drives organic search results. We monitor trending health topics on social media as well as topics raised by our patients when they call us. We use natural language programming to track these phone call trends.
Once we know what our customers are concerned about, we develop blog posts, social media posts and emails that address these topics and use them to engage readers and generate engagement. This has dramatically increased traffic to our website, which we see as our digital storefront. We are currently one of the top 10 health websites for traffic out of approximately 9,800 nationwide.
Another profitable campaign tactic is to make sure we claim all of our Google listings for doctors and locations. Before we did it consistently, banner listings were only getting a million hits per year, but in 2021 we’ll have nearly 200 million hits on our doctor and location lists.
When traditional TV, radio, print or display is too expensive to invest in, digital campaigns like this are very effective in boosting business.
Suzanne Bharati Hendery. Head of Marketing and Customer Service at Renown Health (Reno, Nevada): Many creative and resourceful healthcare marketers produce highly effective campaigns by working across multiple disciplines. Public relations colleagues help capture media attention with editorial panel discussions, organizing events and distributing press releases, and creating an experience for journalists and media where patients tell / reinforce your story / brand . Social media / podcasts give CEOs and other representatives the opportunity to listen, engage and respond to patients, donors, employees and partners in wonderful and new ways and on new platforms. Social partners, donors and business partners help share your stories with influential and targeted audiences.
The American Hospital Association, Ad Council, CDC, and advertising agencies produce excellent graphics, photos, videos, and creative elements on public health topics that are free upon request. As non-profit health organizations, there are many national media and billboard companies that will provide you with leftover media free of charge.
Sheila Champlin. Director of Communications and Marketing at the University of Medicine of South Carolina (Charleston): MUSC Health’s marketing team deliver effective marketing campaigns using limited budgets through a digital-centric approach that leverages advance planning, collaboration, data-driven decision making and integration into our healthcare system and our business.
The healthcare system marketing team regularly connects with related teams, including public affairs, media relations, corporate campaigns and academic communications, and branding and development and strategy. business, to determine how to maximize storytelling and integrate messaging across all audiences and channels. Our teams identify and take advantage of every opportunity to extend and amplify marketing campaigns through transparent strategic orchestration. Together, our marketing team and our communicators across the company are constantly forming loyal brand ambassadors who enthusiastically share MUSC Health’s compelling story.
Susan Milford. Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications at OSF HealthCare (Peoria, Ill.): Effective campaigns with smaller budgets are easier than ever in marketing. The reason is that there are so many more channels and ways to target very specific audiences, ensuring that your budget is used effectively. When I started out in healthcare marketing, there were mostly only traditional advertising and earned media options, so the most targeted spots you could get would be local radio spots and commercials. in the newspapers in your city.
Today’s data-driven marketing enables precise targeting of consumers and therefore less waste for people who are unlikely to convert to patients. In addition, the free and low cost options via social media, smartphone videos, email campaigns, search engine optimization content marketing, geotarget advertising, search engine marketing. Search and targeted digital advertising can get solid results for less money. We often use our customer relationship management system to target patients with specific illnesses such as diabetes, multiple sclerosis, etc. to reach those who have a direct need for our services to help their chronic illnesses.
Finally, the growth of artificial intelligence on digital properties such as your website now allows for greater personalization based on your users’ interactions with your site. Retargeting and offering the services that consumers seek is the way to become their brand of trust, which encourages reuse of your healthcare system at no additional acquisition cost to the patient.
Matthieu Pinzur. Jackson Health System Marketing Director (Miami): Sometimes the best campaigns come from limited budgets as the team is forced to stray from the usual tactics. When we create low budget, high impact campaigns, we spend a lot of time talking about the target consumer: who are they? Where do they meet? What catches their attention?
We find community partners to create unique activations, influencers who share our mission, and content creators to co-brand or white label material that is outside of our wheelhouse. For example, we have partnered with a local video comedy group to produce and distribute a hilarious childbirth video in our hospital. our first web-series in several episodes.
John Englehart. Senior Vice President and Director of Communications and Marketing at The Hospital for Special Surgery (New York): Start with a fresh take on organic sources of influence. All brands have latent or underutilized assets, which are generally less obvious and more valuable than normal marketing tools. Often they are revealed by learning from current high affinity consumers: in an instant, the opportunity that had been hidden becomes blinding.
An example of RSS is the opportunity and value of harnessing, harvesting, and channeling patient affinity. The epiphany came when a recovered patient was observed visiting the HSS leadership offices to ask the right person to share about her very positive experience. This has led us to observe that many patients feel compelled to share their story, and as we all know, this information can be particularly useful, accessible and trustworthy for others who are considering and where to seek treatment. to be treated.
So we asked and answered the question of how to innovate in a simpler and more rewarding way for patients to share their stories, and for interested consumers to find the ones that are most relevant to them. The result is a forum from already over 3,000 patient stories that have been used by millions of people who walk by common interest (from walking to weight lifting) and by hometown (from Akron to Amsterdam) down to their condition and their doctor. The forum was created for the cost of one full page insert in a large newspaper.
