Should healthcare providers change marketing in an era of reform?

Faced with a cacophony of payment models from fee-for-service to value ad risked based with everything else in between, the evolving healthcare consumer and the newly insured, healthcare marketing becomes an even greater challenge than before. One size does not fit all. And growth is good.

The hospital or health system has five markets: Medicare; Medicaid; Commercial; Exchanges; and Uninsured. And in those five markets it’s about:  Sustainability; Presence; Perception; and Experience.

These are the four dynamics that healthcare providers need to understand and incorporate for successful marketing and campaign efforts in a consumer-driven market. In short the answer is yes. No longer nice to have, these four basic concepts are now business requirements:

 ·         Sustainability- The resources to effectively and continuously communicate brand and differentiate the offering across multiple channels

 ·         Presence - By maintaining a continuous presence across multiple channels as in so many other consumer-directed industries is how one builds brand preference

 ·         Perception- With a sustainable, continuous presence in the marketplace, sooner rather than latter, your key messages become the opinion of you by consumers and they become fact in their mind.

 ·         Experience-  The actual customer experience at all touch-points matches the brand image, perceptions and opinions of customers that you created in the marketplace, that have been communicated in an integrated multi-channel sustained effort that includes social media engagement

What to do?

A consumer-directed market is much different environment than a provider-directed market which requires skills and abilities that may or may not exist in an organization.   Key success factors for creating a high performance marketing operation that delivers revenue and market share in an era of reform in the new healthcare environment include:

·          A Vice President of Marketing senior management position that reports to the CEO and is involved in all decision making.

·         Marketing resources human, operational and capital budgets to support a multi-channel effort externally and internally.

·         Comprehensive strategic and measurably focused marketing plan that is integrated with the financial and operational plan of the organization.

·         Price, outcomes and experience transparency

·         Internal communication and training to educate the organization around marketing efforts, expectations and their role in the execution of the plan.

·         Creation of a comprehensive marketing dashboard which communicates activities and results on a monthly basis to all levels of the organization.

As the healthcare providers continue to consolidate across all segments, marketing will assume an increasingly important role in the survival and revenue generating activities for the organization. And that requires a far different innovative sustainable marketing presence that changes perceptions than the old way of doing things.

How can the hospital make the Facebook experience memorable?

Facebook represents one of the more enduring social media channels that hospitals and health systems can use to engage the healthcare consumer and build their brand. As the evolution of healthcare continues unabated, brand engagement and the healthcare consumer experience is everything.

Ask the healthcare consumer to define the brand of the hospital and health system. Ask them to define the experience.  Can they define the healthcare brand in the terms such as trustworthy, innovative, compassionate, or high quality?  Can they describe the typical experience one will have when they engage the hospital or health system?  Can the employees of the organization describe the brand positively or negatively?

That is the starting point. Understanding and defining the brand attributes you want the healthcare consumer to perceive and believe. Then use Facebook to build those attributes in the minds of consumer.  Perception; leads to opinion; becomes fact.  That is what the hospital or health system should be doing on Facebook.

So here are some concrete steps to take for building brand on Facebook:

1.       Define the brand attributes and test those attributes? Don’t guess. The time for guessing or thinking you know the answer without consumer input is over in hospital and health system brand development.

2.       Understand the experience that the healthcare consumer desires.

3.       Understand the level and type of engagement that the healthcare consumer wants.

4.       Based on the data for the three steps above, create the content plan along the brand attributes, experience and engagement to be built and strengthened on Facebook. Yes, one can have three plans- brand building, experience and engagement, but all three must be highly integrated.

5.       Create content that is memorable, engaging, supports the experience and builds the brand.

6.       Create a detailed tactical execution plan and timeline. This is an ongoing marketing activity. It is not once day, week or month. It is all the time.

7.       Integrate the Facebook activities into the life and fabric of the organization and employees.  Employees can be the biggest supporters of the brand or the most negative detractors.

8.       Assign this activity to one person. If it is passed around as a group effort as just an activity in the marketing department, at some point it won’t get done.

9.       Measure, evaluate, adapt and change as you go along.

10.   Be proactive with Facebook. Flexibility is the key here. Leverage healthcare news and events that people are talking about and how the hospital and health system band fits.

Facebook and social media overall for that matter is hard. It takes focus, time, commitment, effort and resources. But done correctly, the payoff is great.

Social media, hospitals and Facebook; a place to engage consumers?

Facebook I think represents an interesting challenge for hospitals to use, but it can be the social media channel of choice in attracting and engaging the healthcare consumer. Now that being said, Facebook is not a one and done activity.  

I see too many hospital Facebook pages that have weeks between posts.  Well, that is not engaging and probably doing more harm than good. The healthcare consumer and patients for that matter will stop looking at the hospital or health system page if it’s not engaging.  Simple really, no engaging content means no page views and lots of negative perceptions which carryover to the brand.  They will go elsewhere.

One needs to be able to post regularly and post often on Facebook.  Think of Facebook as an ecosystem that lives, breaths and changes as its users.  That means as a healthcare organization, one must keep up with the change, looking for those opportunities that can be leveraged to engage and build the healthcare consumer friendly brand.

That’s right, hospitals and health system as a business imperative have to build a consumer friendly brand.  If the healthcare brand is not perceived as friendly, engaging, meaningful, innovative and proactive, that organization is at a significant disadvantage in a semi-retail healthcare consumer-driven market.  

Where does a healthcare organization need to start? Follow the money. And it’s not as crass as it sounds.

1.) In this new age of healthcare one has five markets: Medicare; Medicaid; Commercial; Exchanges; and Uninsured. That’s it folks.  Submarkets and demographics abound but it still only comes down to five markets.  That is what I mean by follow the money. Look at your service areas in those terms and do the market research to understand how consumers are using social media.

2.)  From the data and not I think, develop the strategic social media content plan that is fully integrated into the organizational marketing plan. Social media is a channel, but as an active channel it has to be managed in a strategic, coherent, engagement, experience and brand building fashion.  

3.) Don’t boil the ocean. An organization cannot be everything to everyone.  It’s impossible and arrogant. This plan is built around the needs of the healthcare consumer, not the organization.

4.) This is the full time responsibility of someone in marketing. It’s not when we have time in this day and age.  It’s easy to say there is no FTE because we are “lean”.  I have learned that the great majority of hospitals and health systems marketing departments are really marcom shops not true marketing shops.   

That means you are probably doing a lot of stuff that has no value. 

It also  means that in becoming “lean” there was no process improvement to change what you were doing and removing inherent marketing organizational inefficiencies.  All it really means is that one is doing the same or more with less.

By the way hospitals and health systems aren’t as lean as they think they are. If you want to know about lean, talk to someone who works for private equity.

5.) Start collecting from patients, visitors, anybody really that comes in contact with the healthcare organization their social media preferences if they will share it. Collect those email addresses because this in many ways is about email marketing.

It will take marketing to build awareness of the Facebook page and it seems silly to spend money on ads, billboards and TV when one can place  a link to your Facebook page in an email.

I am stopping here for this post.  There is already a lot to consider and act upon in the first four steps.  Weeks if not months of work actually.  No spoiler alert either.  Check back next week for the next installment of as the hospital world turns around social media.

Until then, have a great week.