Evidence-Based Marketing: The Key to Volume Building
There is much talk in clinical healthcare about Evidence-Based Decision Making- but the key to marketing success and job security in the marketing department is Evidenced-Based Marketing.
What’s hot for clinicians should be even hotter for marketing departments.
How do you make evidenced-based decisions in marketing?
- clearly define the objectives before you design a campaign
- engage finance, decision support, or whomever is the keeper of admissions data and financial data. This collaboration is key to getting great metric information
- everyone in finance and marketing must clearly agree on what data will be gathered and how it will be evaluated (you must know what you are shooting at to hit the target)
- set expectations that all information will be used to Review & Revise marketing plans- not that you are expecting everything you do to be perfect. This information is used for Continuous Process Improvement
Get started working to build a collaborative marketing evidence gathering system and you will reap the rewards of continually improving marketing. This is good for the financial sustainability of the health system and the job security of hospital marketers.
 
Online Reputation Management Protects Patient Volume
Right now people are talking about your doctors, your hospital and maybe even you. You have to join the online conversation or reputations will be severely damaged.
A book you must read: The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet by Daniel J. Solove. This book explores the legal and practical ramifications of information dissemination on the internet.
Professor Solove is the preeminent scholar on how the information age has impacted the line between written and spoken gossip. His examples in the book are fascinating and sobering for anyone… especially marketers.
A Pediatrician at a mid-western Academic Medical Center accosted me after a meeting. “A mother of a new patient said to me after an appointment, ‘You are exactly like the comments and ratings for you online. Thanks for your help.’ ”
He asked for clarification; she said she recently moved from California and her young son has asthma so she wanted a great doctor. She searched online and found him.
The doc then went online and told me he was stunned at the volume of information patients were sharing about him and other doctors.
“They described my waiting area, staff friendliness, the wait times, the lag time for appointments and dozens of other quote-unquote facts” he said in angry disbelief.
Your next steps:
- Read the book… or at least scan it
- Engage a decent spider analytics program to monitor where your doctors and hospitals are being discussed. These programs scan the web for key words, names and phrases that may relate to you
- Construct a plan to get into the conversation both offensively and defensively
- Consider hiring a company that has a specialty in online reputation for consulting (novices can possibly do more harm than good) and maybe management if the job is bigger than your staff
This may be the most important new capability your team must develop this year. The reputation of your doctors and health system depends on it.
Build Patient Volume With A "Welcome Interruption"
The key to driving new measurable business: talk to the people who want to hear from you. Great segmentation leads to “welcome interruptions“.
Database management, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools, research and product usage information is getting sooooooooo scary accurate that there is really no need to interrupt people who do not want to hear about whatever product or service you are selling.
Becoming More Like E-Harmony And Less Like An Advertiser
You know what E-Harmony is: it is not a hook-up website for daters. It is a place that matches people with common goals, common values, common expectations who are ready to make a commitment in a relationship.
Marketers can learn from E-Harmony. We should not be selling to everyone with money like some common ho. We should save tons of money, time and resources by doing careful segmenting to find those that are likely to have a real interest in what we are offering.
An Example From An Orthopedics Campaign
A CRM list was generated to send mail for a shoulder pain seminar. Only about 10 people showed up and the surgeon was disappointed. It was discovered that the list they used was generated for a knee pain seminar.
So what?!?
Segmentation is getting so good that those with likely knee pain are not exactly like those with likely shoulder pain. The list was rerun for shoulders… 50+ people attended this time with all other things being equal…but the segmented list.
Taking time to segment by specific procedure is critical to spending less per campaign for better results. Now when a patient sees your communications, it becomes a “Welcome Interruption” that will probably lead to a new patient.
