All Entries in the "Marketing" Category

The One Thing About Healthcare Marketing Is …

Today I started my weekly healthcare marketing column with the phrase “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” It’s a bit of a cliche, I know. But it’s also appropriate. The column is a collection of some of the responses I’ve gotten over the years to my typical interview-closing question: “If you could tell the CEO one thing about this story’s topic (be it marketing your hospital’s quality rankings, competing against big brand-name organizations, or investing time and money in social media), what would it be?” So many of the quotes in answer to that question still resonate today.

But it’s also appropriate to mention change because this week’s column is my last as senior editor for marketing. Starting next week, my colleague Marianne Aiello will be covering marketing in the magazine and online and I’m moving to the technology beat. Marianne has already been covering marketing, contributing to the MarketShare blog, writing the weekly Campaign Spotlight feature, creating the multimedia healthcare marketing newsletter, Healthcare Marketing Advisor, writing marketing stories for our magazine and online, and much more. I know that the marketing audience is in good hands. I will continue to contribute occasionally to the MarketShare blog and I’ll continue to tweet about marketing and technology at www.twitter.com/gienna, so I hope to stay in touch with all the wonderful people I’ve met over the past few years.

Check out this week’s column and please share with us your words of wisdom by leaving a comment below: If You Could Tell the CEO One Thing About Marketing, What Would it Be?

An Open Letter to the Millennial-Wary

The way several presenters at this year’s SHSMD conference spoke about us so-called “millennials,” you’d think Converse-wearing, Red Bull-chugging, iPhone-wielding 20-somethings were making a run on hospital marketing departments everywhere. Words like “needy,” “entitled,” “distracted multi-taskers,” and, worst of all, “notoriously poor critical thinkers” were recklessly thrown around, forcing the few millennials in the room to put down our BlackBerrys, close our MacBooks, take out our earbuds, and hang our heads in shame.

After I packed up my electronics and allowed my embarrassment to subside, I realized the audacity of trying to stereotype such a diverse generation of Americans in a few slides. I mean really, it’s not you’re the Greatest Generation and we’re the hippies, reluctantly joining the workforce with flower-smattered tresses and a lingering herbal aroma.

(If you want a Gen X-er’s take on the best millennial bits from SHSMD, check out Gienna Shaw’s column, The Care and Feeding of the (Sometimes Annoying) Millennials. A speaker at a session Gienna attended said that one characteristics of Gen X is that they are annoyed by the younger generation, so if you’re looking for snarky millennial observations, her column is the place for you.)

Anyway, I want to take this time to tell everyone to, well, chillax. Millennials, Generation Y, or whatever you want to call us aren’t really that hard to communicate with, either as employees or potential patients. Let’s clear up a few misconceptions. [more]

Guest Post: Probing Viral Marketing Tactics

Exclusive:

Disposable toilet seat covers offer new form of social media marketing for hospitals

Hospital marketers now have a new form of social media to explore to get their message out—disposable toilet seat covers. At least, that’s the pitch from Tom Teynor, president of Slip-U-Not, the leading manufacturer of disposable toilet seat covers in North America.

“The options for custom designing your TSCs are really endless, and it’s a perfect medium for hospitals given their large toilet volumes,” says Teynor. “We consider this a form of social media given the open format and networking aspect of the medium.”

Teynor, whose company offers a special adhesive solution to prevent slippage, notes that the TSC industry is over $3 billion in annual sales, with the majority coming from healthcare. While no hospital is currently using the customized TSC for branding purposes, GI Centers have been fast adopters, according to Teynor.

I’m sorry, what?

OK, so if you haven’t caught on by now, this isn’t a real story about healthcare marketing. But it’s the kind of story you’ll find at The Weekly Probe, a Web site our firm created in April. [more]

Campaign Spotlight: Newsworthy Campaign Achieves Results

A teenage boy and his mother were sitting at the breakfast table in their Minnesota home when the boy noticed a hospital-sponsored article in the newspaper about people who suffer from eating disorders. “I’m one of them,” he told his mother. The young man soon checked himself in to Park Nicollet Health Services—one of the organizations that sponsored the article—for treatment.

The Minneapolis health system partnered with a local television station and newspaper to sponsor the Stay Healthy Minnesota campaign, which features educational print ads, TV spots, and Web content about several health issues. The campaign began in 2007 when the Milwaukee-based Zizzo Group Advertising + PR agency suggested the health system create an educational campaign similar to ones Zizzo had done for hospitals in other markets.

Read more about Park Nicollet’s integrated awareness campaign here.

Guest Post: Time, Money, Mindset: If Marketing Had a Theme Song

If asked, many of you could hum the tunes or sing the lyrics to popular classic TV shows like The Brady Bunch, The Beverly Hillbillies, and The Addams Family. These signature songs, as some refer to them, set the stage for the entire show for which they’re written.

So what would marketing’s theme song be if it had one? I think I found it.

I’ll go ahead and openly admit it–I’m not a big fan of The Beatles. Barring possibly the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album (which I don’t even own), I just never got into their music. With exceptions of a few songs I’d have to dig to find, I don’t even like the solo projects that each of the Fab Four produced after they broke up.

However, I do think that if marketing had a theme song it would be George Harrison’s cover of Rudy Clark’s song “Got My Mind Set On You.”

Here’s a sample of the lyrics:

I got my mind set on you
I got my mind set on you
I got my mind set on you
I got my mind set on you

But its gonna take money
A whole lotta spending money
Its gonne take plenty of money
To do it right child

Its gonna take time
A whole lot of precious time
Its gonna take patience and time, ummm
To do it, to do it, to do it, to do it, to do it,
To do it right child

So there you go. It’s the perfect theme song for marketing because it captures the essence of what marketing is all about and what it takes “To do it, to do it, to do it, to do it, to do it, To do it right child.”

I Got My Mind Set On You

If there is a better key statement than that of the title of this song that defines the core of marketing I’m unaware of it. The crux of marketing is having your mind set on your target. It’s all about getting your ideas, products, and services ingrained into the minds of those you think it matters to the most. Additionally, you have to keep your mind set on what your target is saying about you. You need to focus your efforts on listening just as much as you do on speaking to your target. They will be able to tell you what your business is doing wrong and what it’s doing right. If you put your mind to it then you really will do it–”it” meaning growth in brand awareness and profitability for your organization. Marketing is about setting your mind on your target.

It’s Gonna Take Time

Marketing isn’t and never will be a snap-of-the-fingers event. You can’t go to your marketing firm or in-house department and ask for effective marketing events in a matter of days and expect quality. Rather, you need to be looking for timeliness with quality and thought out strategy. Time is needed to assess the situation, understand the target, and develop the proper approach to hit that target with effectiveness.

Even after a strategy has been put into place there is a need for patience to let that plan take root and bear out fruit. For instance, if you’re employing social media into your marketing mix, you’ll need to allow for more time because that method is viral and requires patience to see any ROI. Marketing is gonna take a whole lot of precious time to do it right.

It’s Gonna Take Money

I know money is a sore subject given the current recession, however, marketing efforts are going to cost you. A good rule of thumb is that 25% of your budget should be devoted marketing efforts. Yet the return on that investment should more than pay for itself. Understand, I’m not suggesting that the more something costs the better it will be. There are plenty of horror stories of massive expenditures in a marketing effort that never amounted to anything. Oftentimes those efforts are the result of there not being enough focus, research, or time devoted to making sure the event was appropriate to the desired goal. Marketing is gonna take a whole lot of spending money to do it right.

For me, “Got My Mind Set On You” is the perfect theme song for your marketing efforts. Focus, time, and money are all core ingredients that lead to marketing success. The quality of all three ingredients determines whether you will be as huge as The Beatles were in the 1960s or just some obscure wannabe still playing in your parent’s garage.

Guest Post: Does Your Hospital Suffer From Hidden Gem Syndrome?

You probably hear it all the time, from physicians, executives, board members: “If people only knew what great services we offered, we would be set.”

We call it the Hidden Gem Syndrome, as in “Our hospital is a hidden gem.” The thinking is “If we just communicated the quality/scope of our offerings, we’d have all the patients we can handle.” Those of us in healthcare marketing have to help others in our organizations move past the Hidden Gem Syndrome so we can focus on the true challenges at hand.

The Hidden Gem Syndrome is caused by four main assumptions:

• That people aren’t aware of your offerings (which may or may not be true).
• That your market wants to know about your offerings (most don’t, at least not until they need care).
• That if consumers did care about your services, they could know, understand, and value all of them.
• Worst of all, it assumes that addressing this notion (being hidden) is enough to convince people to use your organization. It’s not enough, not by a long shot.

Those who are pinning the financial survival of a clinic, service line, or hospital on simply “telling their story” are in for a rude awakening. In today’s world, marketing starts with awareness, but it ends with compelling customers to choose you over your competitors. How can you help your organization move past the Hidden Gem affliction? [more]

Guest Post: Are Men the New Healthcare Decision-Makers?

Believe it or not, marketing to women is a relatively new phenomenon. When industry leaders first recognized women’s purchasing power and influence they wisely invested in product development and marketing efforts to woo this “new” customer.

GM rolled out the Saturn line of cars specifically to attract female buyers. Investment firms such as Charles Schwab and Fidelity created unique financial services products for women. Seemingly overnight a call to arms for marketers everywhere was sounded–engage women or be left out in the cold.

Well, the tide may be turning.

A recent New York Times article reports that over the past 12 months 82% of layoffs have affected men. Combine that with the fact that 58% of college graduates and an even higher percentage of post-graduates are women and you’ve got the makings of a potentially powerful trend.

With more men losing jobs, and more women better prepared for the workforce, couples have to make some big decisions that affect a whole range of issues from work to childcare to family budgeting. [more]

Healthcare Marketers: Make the Most of the Economic Downturn

In his poem A Rainy Day, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote that “into each life some rain must fall.” Another line in that poem is less frequently quoted: ”Behind the clouds is the sun still shining.” 

So here’s a little sunshine for physician recruiters and liaisons in the midst of a downpour: The economy can actually work in your favor when it comes to recruiting and building better relations with physicians.

In this week’s column, Down Economy Provides Opportunities to Improve Physician Relations, three healthcare marketing experts share their thoughts on how to see opportunity where others see wet hair and worms on the sidewalk. For example:

• Delayed retirement plans make employment more attractive to physicians, says Joel English, executive vice president of BVK. It’s also a buyer’s market.
• A slowdown in patient volume means physicians have more time to help increase patient volume, says Leslie Dean, director of planning and marketing at FirstHealth of the Carolinas. Consider inviting them to speak to potential patients or other physicians.
• And patients’ financial woes are an opportunity to help physicians by offering financial assistance to their patients, says  Roberta Clarke, associate professor at Boston University.

More good news (and great advice): Daniel Weinbach, executive vice president and chief operating officer of The Weinbach Group, says healthcare marketers can not only survive the challenges of the current economy but also thrive. Read more in A Healthcare Marketer’s Guide For Surviving In A Bad Economy.   

Reading Roundup: Marketing Blog Posts and Stories You Might Have Missed

Reading roundup: A random and sporadic list of our favorite marketing articles and blog posts from the past week or so.

Best practices for community relations: I love lists (who doesn’t?) and this post on Livingston Communications’ The Buzz Bin has two of them. Both are packed with tips, techniques, best practices, and plain old etiquette for organizations using online social media sites to reach customers. So you can act more human and be more effective.

Will small ad agencies get us out of this mess? (Good Twitter response to the question from Mindpower Inc., by the way) Small advertising agencies do things for their clients that big shops can’t, writes Alex Bogusky. “With fewer people and less overhead, they offer the nimble and fast approach to problems a lot of nascent brands need.” 

Global marketer says economy will spur medical travel: But, says Jason Yap, marketing director for Singapore’s Raffles Hospital, medical travel growth in the region has the potential to help, rather than hurt, the business of healthcare in the United States.

If your CEO doesn’t see the value of marketing, guess who’s out of a job? In interviews with Robbie Kellman Baxter, CEOs cited two reasons they fire marketing staff–and then turn right around and hire marketing consultants to replace them. First, they say, their marketing team wasn’t creating enough value. Second, they weren’t creating a focused, market-driven strategy that makes the most out of limited resources. 

Want to win friends and influence people? Chip Mahaney, director of digital content for The E.W. Scripps Company in Cincinnati, adapts Dale Carnegie’s  guidelines to social media. One tip–don’t try to join a conversation by screaming headlines at people when they’re trying to make lunch plans and complimenting each other’s shirts. (Trust me, read the post and you’ll get it.)

Guest Post: Quick, Call a Topless Meeting!

Do you suffer from fogeyism?

What?

Fogeyism–an adherence to old-fashioned ideas and intolerance of change. While it isn’t a disease that’s fatal to your health, it certainly has an impact on the marketing health of your organization.

If you didn’t know what fogeyism was, you might need to brush up on some other “new marketing” language.

As more and more consumers take control of their own healthcare decisions, it’s crucial to stay versed in these and other new marketology terms. You’re more likely to reach your customers if you know how to speak their language.

Marketing is changing. And keeping up is no small task. So how can you stay on top of these and other trends and terms?

Try reverse mentoring–the coaching of senior staff by younger people in the organization in areas like social networking, mobile communications, and information technology. Forward-thinking companies have found it’s a great way to share information upward and make sure upper management has a grasp of the “latest and greatest.”

Here are a few “new marketology” terms to get you started:

Recessionista: A marketer who manages to stay current while sticking to a tight budget.

Moofer: A mobile, out of office worker.

Stickiness: A Web site’s ability to retain visitors.

Mousetrapping: Using browser tricks, like disabling the “back” button to keep a visitor on a Website.

Greenwashing: The practice of making “green” claims when your products or actions are not.

Cyberchondria: Neurotic self-diagnosis via the Internet.

Wombagging: Strategies to protect your brand from negative or undesirable word of mouth.

Topless Meeting: A meeting in which participants are barred from using their laptops, cell phones, and other mobile devices.

Are you so far out of the loop you can’t even see the loop? Learn these “new marketology” terms and make sure everyone in your marketing department does the same.

Maybe you can schedule a topless meeting to discuss!