While the proliferation of the Internet has exponentially multiplied your marketing options, you must still remember the basics. Here are four tips I’m reminding my clients of to help them make the most of their 2012 hospital marketing budgets.

Tip 1: Targeted messaging
In today’s market, it’s essential that you spend time up front defining your audience and your message to make effective use of your marketing budget. Make it the goal of your marketing material to identify a specific decision-making audience and begin a direct dialogue with him or her.

Often, your best customers may not share the same age, gender, race, geography or income level. Your best customers may very well be linked together by their concern for health, education or finance. It is important to research your own data to determine who your targets should be and then engage directly with them.

This highly focused type of marketing will deliver a better ROI—even with a smaller budget.

Tip 2: Direct response
A direct response component can have a significant impact on the effectiveness of your marketing budget.

In its simplest definition, direct response marketing has four key components:

• An offer,
• A way for the audience to respond,
• Enough information for the audience to make a decision about whether they want to respond to your message,
• And a specific call-to-action that urges response in a very specific way.

Certain mediums are known for direct response effectiveness, right? We’ve all seen the amazing success of the Ronco commercials and the recent success of the Snuggie!

Direct response marketing is actually media-neutral. It’s a simple mechanism that can help you make the most of your marketing dollars, and an advertising formula that we’ve seen work well in hospital marketing, healthcare marketing and business-to-consumer marketing. Because it provides a way to engage with customers. And that’s what you’re really looking for!

Tip 3: Get specific with online marketing
If your marketing budget doesn’t contain an online component, it’s time to add one. Getting your business in the digital marketplace should be a high priority for any 2012 marketing budget.

Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, pay-per-click advertising programs—online marketing offers a relatively inexpensive means of sending a targeted message to a specific audience. You can target your audience by interest, demographic and location.

Once you commit, it’s important to get specific and focus your efforts. As I stated earlier, interactive options are virtually endless and new ways to engage target audiences online develop by the minute. You’ve got to focus.

Learn through content strategy where your customers are spending their time. Plus, what I really like about almost all online advertising components is that you can track, measure and test—important factors for knowing which campaign works and which campaign doesn’t work. Which brings me to my fourth tip.

Tip 4: Track it
Want to increase ROI on your marketing dollars? Track it. Nothing will do more, as quickly and as accurately to paint a picture of how effective your marketing dollars are than by tracking them.

Put a program into place that allows you to track responses to each campaign and medium to see exactly what your ROI is per initiative. With trackable data, you can effectively cut out dollars that are not working well for you and shift them into areas of higher ROI. Your boss will be pleased with that!

The key to stretching your marketing budget for 2012 is to spend wisely. Make the most of every opportunity you get in front of your customer.

Some companies cut back on marketing expenses when times get tough. Others reduce product offerings. But these are mistakes. Now is the time to keep those dollars steady.

Consider what might happen if you stopped communicating with your customers…will they venture off to form a new relationship with your competitor? During tough times it’s especially important to keep your products fresh and your communications frequent. Use every opportunity to build and develop your relationship with that loyal customer.

I’d love to chat more about making the most of your advertising dollars, and increasing your ROI, so feel free to drop me a line at lrobertson (at) Finelight (dot) com. Until next time…here’s wishing you a healthy year of 2012 marketing initiatives. Cheers!

The popular idea is that technology can drive preference and utilization among prospective patients. However, patients choose doctors, not hospitals; and according to a 2011 McKesson research survey, funding technology systems ranked last in importance when driving physician involvement with the hospital employer (executive summary p. #7).

I see a lot of creative that’s focused on the hospital, essentially ignoring customers and their needs. That’s a danger of feature-based advertising—the “All we have to do is tell them how great we are” approach doesn’t address your customers’ problems.

Try this simple exercise, which we routinely do for our clients: Take all your marketing materials from the past year and lay them out so you can get the ‘big picture.’ If you’re promoting features, instead of speaking to your customers’ specific needs, you’ll probably see photos of technology, self-praise for awards you’ve won, vague phrases like “board-certified,” headlines that begin with “We…” and a general lack of consistency in your materials.

Now ask yourself: Do we speak with one voice? Can our target audience see themselves in any of our pieces? Would they want to? And what is the next logical step they can take after engaging with the marketing? If the answer to any of these questions is unclear, your marketing probably isn’t attracting many new patients.

A feature war can be deadly for your brand strategy.
When a hospital chooses to fight a feature war, it’s often the brand that suffers. Marketing becomes reactive when it positions against the competition…instead of with the audience.

Messaging begins to deviate from the brand position and consistency of voice and personality is lost. To the public, it might appear that your gaze has turned inward, instead of being focused on the community. They might even begin to question your mission. Public service? Or self-promotion?

Recently, while creating a marketing case study for a client, we learned that consumers reacted negatively to what they saw as ‘chest thumping’ by the two largest health systems in the area. By its very nature, feature-based advertising is hospital-centric, not consumer-centric, and potential patients were turned off by all the “Hey, look what we’ve got!” messaging. Few healthcare brands would ever want to be associated with terms like “self-absorbed” or “braggart.” Because of this we recommended a more consumer-focused direction for their advertising.

Features don’t motivate consumers…benefits do.
Let’s face it, seeing a piece of technology in an ad no matter how dramatically lit or artfully photographed isn’t going to compel anyone to choose your hospital. Neither is promising something vague like “high-level care.” People need context—what does it mean to them?

To successfully market a feature to a healthcare consumer, we have to help them understand the specific advantage it provides. This is known in the industry as turning features into benefits and has been a cornerstone of successful advertising for 80 years. It’s the art of answering the question, “What’s in it for me?”

For example, a feature might be a non-invasive robotic radiosurgery system, while the benefit (the “what’s in it for me?”) is that “Recovery” will be quick and painless so you can get back to spoiling your grandchildren.

By highlighting the benefit, we connect the dots between the feature and our audience, and demonstrate specifically how we can improve their life, in a way that’s compelling and relevant. Benefits, not features, create an emotional bond between customers and a brand, and move them to action.

Feature-based advertising doesn’t inspire profitable growth.
Touting features in advertising is like a shotgun blast of messaging—it might be loud, but it doesn’t carry very far. It puts the burden on your customers to make the connection between your capabilities and their needs. We have to make it easy for them. A surgically precise, targeted message is far more effective and much more likely to compel an action…and will provide better ROI.

To find new customers through marketing (and justify our salaries), we have to know whom we’re talking to. That means we have to dig deep into the data to discover our most profitable patients. What motivates them? What values do we have in common? What media do they consume before taking action? What solutions do we have for their problems?

Once we have a portrait of our audience, we’ll have the insight that allows us to create messages that say something on a personal level (and hopefully something amazing) that answer the question, “What’s in it for me?”

It also means we’ll fight a war we can win: for the hearts and minds of our most profitable customers.

To learn more about hospital advertising that inspires profitable growth, get in touch with sthielen (at) Finelight (dot) com, leave a comment below or read our other posts on the topic.

That’s the situation St. Vincent could soon find itself in. Peyton Manning, namesake of St. Vincent children’s hospital, is widely believed to be leaving the Colts (no confirmation from Colts owner Jim Irsay or Peyton Manning, himself).

So the question is, “If Indianapolis’ beloved Peyton Manning packs up and leaves the Colts for a new team (or retirement destination), what impact will his move have on the brand name, Peyton Manning Children’s Hospital at St. Vincent?”

Finelight has no horse in this race (pardon the pun). We do not market for St. Vincent, IU Health (the Colts’ official sponsor) or the Colts. We are simply intrigued by the brand ramifications of a Manning departure.

Where Peyton Manning’s endorsement began
After Peyton Manning and his wife, Ashley, made an undisclosed monetary donation to St. Vincent children’s hospital in 2007, the hospital changed its name to reflect the Peyton Manning brand.

Since then, St. Vincent has been successfully building the Peyton Manning Children’s Hospital brand throughout Indiana. It’s a strong brand. I live 78 miles away and would not hesitate to take my child there. The patient experience more than lives up to what Manning stands for—making it a partnership in which the endorser’s brand and the patient experience are in total alignment.

This should come as no surprise, since at the beginning of the relationship, Manning indicated that he believed his endorsement meant as much as the name on the back of his jersey.

“In the NFL, the name on the back of the jersey is emblematic of a player’s commitment to contribute in any way he can to the success of that team,” Manning said in an Associated Press article. “For me, having my name on the front of this building carries with it much the same—a weighty responsibility to contribute to the many victories ahead here at St. Vincent.”

St. Vincent has enjoyed a notable increase in its pediatric hospital preference ratings and market share in the state¹ in the years since the name change. If Manning leaves Indiana, will the Peyton Manning Children’s Hospital at St. Vincent brand carry the same value with families throughout the state as it has during his star performance years as an Indianapolis Colt?

The Peyton Manning brand will live on
We think the St. Vincent children’s hospital will continue to see long-term benefits from branding the facility with Manning’s name.

Why? Because Peyton Manning’s national reputation with NFL fans transcends his status as a local player. Just listen to the Dan Dakich Show or The Ride for 10 minutes on 1070 The Fan AM radio and you’ll understand how much the city’s allegiance to Peyton Manning surpasses their loyalty to the Colts (a 2-14 record solidified it).

Perhaps the best case for St. Vincent is if Peyton plays for another team. Doing so may elevate deeper interest in anything associated with his personal brand. It will be interesting to study referral numbers, preference ratings and market share trends over the next few years.

First and foremost, let’s hope that Manning gets to end his career on his own terms. That said, it is our opinion that St. Vincent has picked a winner they can continue to enjoy for years to come—no matter where he goes. Now, like everyone else, we will wait and see.

What’s your prediction?
Let us know your thoughts on the possible long-term impact to St. Vincent if Manning leaves the city or the pitfalls of celebrity endorsed healthcare brands. Comment below or email msheley (at) Finelight (dot) com or lsmith (at) Finelight (dot) com.

¹ NRC Research and IHHA state discharge data.

The change in enrollment dates was just one obstacle. Another issue that became apparent as we reviewed the competition was that Medicare Advantage plans were all offering a $0 premium plan. With everyone showcasing the same benefits, prospects could not find a reason to switch. Under these circumstances, sales reps said prospects could not be convinced they needed to make a change.

In the last couple of years, CMS has pushed their Star Ratings to help eligibles find the best plans. But Star Ratings are fairly new, and prospects don’t understand the value of this new rating system. (Watch for my next blog on Star Ratings, as they continue to change.)

What about the target?

So how can plans differentiate themselves for the consumer? For at least the last two years, it’s been all about $0 plan premiums, which is no longer working. It’s time to reconsider the target audiences for this product.

Plans should go after people with Original Medicare. There are still millions who haven’t bought into a Medicare Advantage plan, and if there is no premium cost, that’s an easier sale. This is a great time to get Original Medicare fans to see the benefit of joining Medicare Advantage plans.

What else can plans do to differentiate?

National plans tend to create generic advertising messages. They need to find points of differentiation for their advertising. One local plan, Peoples Health in New Orleans, has been very strategic in their marketing messages. Because they are local, they can position against the national plans. And it’s effective. They are truly neighbors and friends with Medicare eligibles in their markets. Also, their customer service supports this strategy.

Plans must find new ways to stand apart in a confusing, complex Medicare world. Are you the plan that really helps those turning 65 understand their options? Are you going after people with Original Medicare who can join a MAPD plan for little or no monthly costs? Are you the local plan? Are you going to offer benefits that no other plan is offering?

If you’re looking for ways to differentiate your plan or increase your Medicare Advantage enrollments, I’d love to help. Just leave a comment here or email me at jeannene_manning (at) Finelight (dot) com.

Its registered user base grew from just 40,000 in late 2010 to more than 4 million by the end of 2011—all while maintaining its private, by-invitation-only status.

Why? Well, because it’s something entirely new. As a self-described “virtual pinboard,” Pinterest allows users to pin images of things they find and like from anywhere on the Internet onto categorized “boards.”

It’s eye candy, plain and simple.

Now, of course, the site is catching the attention of marketers everywhere. Brands like Real Simple, Lands’ End and Whole Foods Market have already set up shop, using the site to boost traffic and drive conversions.

So what does a glossy, image-driven site full of pretty things have to do with healthcare marketing? More than you might think.

Making healthcare pinteresting

At its core, Pinterest is about inspiration. It’s designed to shine a spotlight on the things that move us. And few things are of greater interest to us than our health.

That makes it a pretty natural fit for healthcare marketers.

So do its demographics. While numbers are fuzzy, Pinterest’s user base seems to be overwhelmingly female. Even better, the women of Pinterest are early-adopting, social media-savvy technophiles used to making key decisions based on information gleaned from the Internet.

In other words, they’re most likely to be swayed by your online marketing messages—and take the desired action.

Here are just a couple of ways you could work Pinterest into a healthcare marketing strategy for a hospital or insurance company:

1. Create a “Healthy Eating” board linking back to recipes from your newsletters or patient programs.
2. Curate disease-specific boards (i.e., heart disease, diabetes, cancer) with resources and tips for patients coping with chronic conditions.

With a little brainstorming, you could find ways to work this social network into almost any healthcare marketing campaign targeting women under the age of 54.

Since this is a relatively new platform, gauging how many members of your specific target audience are currently using Pinterest is difficult. To protect your budget, test your Pinterest marketing efforts with a low- or no-cost campaign before jumping in with both feet.

Elements of Pinterest success

Pinterest is not like Twitter, or Facebook, or LinkedIn. It relies on visuals, not text. In other words, it’s all about the pictures.

Finding the right photographs and graphics to highlight is key.

However, it’s just as important to use proper SEO on Pinterest as it is on your other web properties. Make it easy for people to find your boards with the right titles and image tags.

Lastly, make sure the content you’re linking back to sings. You can hook someone with a pretty picture, but to get a like or repin, you’re going to have to make it worth their while.

Claim your spot on Pinterest

As of this writing, there are only a handful of healthcare organizations, like this cancer institute, on Pinterest. But that won’t be the case for long.

If you’re interested in maximizing your ROI, the time to move (and pin) is now, while interest is high and competition is low.

Need more proof that social media is a worthwhile investment? Check out some of our other posts on content marketing, social media and SEO.

If you’re interested in learning more about Pinterest and how getting involved with this new social network could benefit your organization, I’d love to help. Just leave a comment here or email me at apage (at) Finelight (dot) com.

1. The emergency room wait time billboard. You know, with the digital readout that gives the real-time wait? Played. Out.
2. da Vinci®. Enough said.
3. Ortho campaigns that “get you back in the game,” “get you back in the swing of things,” “get you back in motion,” etc.
4. State-of-the-art. Leading edge. “Our surgery department is cutting edge.” Aren’t they all?
5. Show the big donut! Whether it’s an MRI, a PET, or a CAT, it’s still a scary machine with a hole in the middle.
6. The newborn baby. Actually, even though this is cliché, it’s still human nature to love a cute baby. Use it judiciously.
7. Doctors in masks.
8. Nurses in masks.
9. Doctors and nurses in masks.
10. Doctors in plastic face shields that look like hazmat suits.

Latest content on the laser-guided procedural gadget? Check! Dr. Whozit’s disease-specific brochures that looked outdated in the 80s? Check! Every service line department head’s wish list entered? Check! This is only the tip of the stethoscope. Let’s add more. And why not? The web is infinite, right? The more we post and tag, the more traffic we’ll get. And more traffic means more consumers. More consumers means more revenue, which will allow us to add that uber-health management widget that will make our website the ultimate power in the universe. Or will it?

Most websites need to get rid of 90% of their content. (Credit Gerry McGovern, Keynote for Together London, 2011 http://vimeo.com/29306877)

Healthcare websites are no different. Like it or not, your users have a predetermined task in mind before they visit your site. Whether they have a positive or negative experience starts the second your first page loads and they attempt to complete their desired task…as quickly as possible. Fail and they may never come back, or worse yet, tell someone else about their poor experience. Succeed and become a valuable resource worthy of a repeat visit. This is how you earn trust and the ability to start a meaningful conversation online.

Addressing the diverse needs of healthcare website users is extremely difficult, so break it down into the top five things users want to accomplish on your site. You’ll need to talk to them. Then compare what you learn from your users with your site analytics. You’ll likely be surprised by what you find. If you can quickly help the users who fall into the most common categories, you stand to gain credibility and the opportunity for a repeat visit to further the conversation.

But what about that one user who may actually want to read the disease-specific brochure copy from the mid ‘80s?

Don’t get me wrong, there are users who want deeper, more-detailed information from your site, but you’ll need to identify these groups separately and after the more common site tasks are in order. Naturally you want to be everything to everyone, but in doing so you run the very serious risk of frustrating a majority of users who do not fall into this smaller category.

Focusing on an extremely specific task before common tasks is often what derails entire web projects. The hospital marketing environment is especially susceptible to this type of behavior as the marketing manager is often the gatekeeper to the hospital website. They are bombarded with content requests from every department, and without a web strategy to refer back to, extraneous content begins to seep into the site and before long you have content getting in the way.

Cutting content is difficult, even more so if you have written it yourself. A writer friend of mine would always say, “You have to kill your darlings,” as she slashed away unnecessary content. It sounds harsh, but it is necessary to best serve your users and your online business objectives. The hard part is determining which of your “darlings” must now go.

In a recent website redesign case study in England, the total number of site pages was reduced from 5,000 to 700 (86% reduction) and they saw a 400% increase in web reporting, with four user complaints. Here’s the kicker: There were hundreds of internal complaints from content writers demanding to know where their content was. Users were delighted and internal folks hated the new site.

The user is always right and a good content strategy is your best friend.

To learn more about content strategy and how it pertains to hospital websites or websites in general, I invite you to look at some of our other posts on the topic. If you feel like your site is at a critical mass of content, I would love to take a look at your site and talk about what improvements could be made. Please contact me at eshalley (at) finelight (dot) com or leave a comment and I’ll get back to you.

Usually it ends up lying around on our conference room table for a week or so before somebody tosses it out.

Last week, right on cue, our annual confectionery antiquity showed up. But this year, something was a little different. Check out the video and see for yourself.

Happy holidays from all your friends at Finelight.

We’re taking a break for the holidays, but we’ll be back in 2012. See you then!

Or perhaps the largest health system in your market announces that they have purchased an office building across the street from your hospital with the intent of placing a full complement of PCPs, specialty physicians and ancillary services in the building? How do you proactively respond with a Board-appropriate recommendation that will calm your CEO, Board and medical staff’s anxieties while preserving your hospital and physician group bottom line?

I have a solution for you, one that will redirect your CEO’s immediate urge to run a defensive advertising campaign. A solution that will enable you to uncover key market insights to steer your hospital’s reactions to looming competitive threats—strategically!

The solution is to establish an easy-to-access, current market-assessment platform that will allow you to uncover those “nuggets of gold” or key insights for each competitive situation you face. Take action today on the steps below—having this information organized and accessible ahead of time will save you a lot of stress later! You will be ready to strategically respond to your leadership team when the next “crisis of the week” occurs.

1. Pull together your current consumer-awareness data. If you don’t currently monitor awareness levels, begin to do so now. Your hospital’s consumer-awareness levels need to be strong enough that they provide you with the marketing platform needed to quickly grab your key audience’s attention when you need to do so.
2. Review your marketing-reconciliation data today—know which marketing tactics and call-to-action mechanisms generate the greatest volume of consumer responses, the fastest patient conversion and the strongest average contribution margin cases. This information is critical for directing future communications to your most important audiences, most cost-effectively. If you aren’t yet measuring the financial impact of your marketing campaigns, the time to begin doing so is now.
3. Assess your organization’s current consumer-preference levels to determine whether past marketing has moved people. Have your marketing messages driven consumers to engage with your physicians and hospital programs? Through meaningful engagements, consumers build loyalty and preference for your organization that is crucial in times of competitive turbulence.
4. Know your competitive landscape—have the working knowledge of your key service lines’ market positions. Know key competitive threats and opportunities existing within each. Develop firsthand recall of patient origin for your most profitable patients within each service line. Be aware of which market variables most influence competitive balance.
5. Lastly, determine how well your organization’s patient-satisfaction ratings compare with competitors’ ratings. Are your past patients’ word-of-mouth conversations about their experiences supporting your marketing messages about quality care and service? Have your patients’ experiences translated into favorable word-of-mouth recommendations for you and are they willing to stand by your organization in times of marketplace turbulence?

So how do you ensure you know all of this and more? Two words. Content strategy.

Content strategy helps you activate your business objectives to targeted audiences, deepen target audience understanding, develop useful measurement metrics, and it gives you a framework by which all content can be judged. It improves the effectiveness of hospital websites while providing clear direction for those managing the website, and it paves the way for focused user testing.

Think of it this way—content strategy is to the web as marketing strategy is to your brand. You wouldn’t put together haphazard marketing and media plans for print or TV—so why would you add just any old content to your hospital’s website?

Business Objectives and User Research

One of the first steps in the content strategy process is identifying a website’s business objectives and determining how they can be activated through content. For a hospital, business objectives could be anything from increased physician referrals to email list expansion.

Business objectives are activated through content and functionality. For example, if physician referral is the main objective, the majority of content must compel and guide people to find a physician and the physician search tool must be spot-on.

Once business objectives are established, audiences that match the objectives can be identified and researched.

User research is a key component to the content strategy process. To give your audience the content they want and activate your business objectives, you need to know what content they want. Do they want information about hospital services and features, or do they want detailed medical information? User research can answer these questions.

The level of detail that goes into audience research will vary, but the more you know, the better off you’ll be. It’s really helpful to look beyond psychographic profiles and talk directly to users about their wants, needs and habits. Talking to your users through surveys, in-person interviews or user testing gives you the chance to be specific in your information gathering, instead of relying on assumptions made from general data.

Measuring the ROI of a Hospital Website

To be effective, metrics should tie back to business objectives. If you aren’t measuring your website with relevant metrics, you’re wasting your time and money. While it’s nice to know how many page views or unique visitors a website has, that probably isn’t telling you if you’re meeting your business objectives.

Are people calling the unique phone numbers you’ve provided on the website?

Are physicians receiving referrals from the website?

Are visitors reading the pages you want them to and then taking the action you wanted?

If your hospital website doesn’t have specific metrics for each objective, you’ll never know what’s working and what’s not. Content strategy will help identify those metrics and show you how to read them.

Testing for Content Relevance

Does the audience find the website helpful? Does the content resonate with them? Do they comprehend it? You can infer some of this by reviewing analytics, but you can’t know the true effectiveness of your content without testing it.

This is especially important for hospital websites that provide detailed medical information about conditions and procedures. Medical information can be difficult to understand under the best circumstances, and downright indecipherable when in a heightened state of anxiety.

To know if the audience understands your content, you must watch them interact with it and test their comprehension. Who knows, you might be spending valuable time and energy on developing content that doesn’t help, or worse yet, hurts your audience. You won’t know until you test.

Purposeful Content

A website will never reach its full potential as a business tool if content is added willy-nilly. To be effective, each piece of content must relate back to the overall content strategy. If it doesn’t, it starts to work against your objectives instead of for them.

Purposeful content supports the needs of the audience and the business objectives. It keeps the size of the website under control and ensures you’re not spending precious resources developing content that doesn’t support the end objectives.

It’s hard to have purposeful content without a supporting strategy. Content strategy lays the foundation on which your content can be created. It gives your content purpose, direction and life.

A Real World Example

Over the past few months, we have been working with a hospital system to help improve the effectiveness of their monthly eNewsletter. We used a pared down content strategy process to outline business objectives and content goals, and develop a detailed tracking and measurement system. The content was SEO optimized based on previous user research. While the efforts have been very successful so far—a 214% increase in newsletter subscription rates, increased open rates and repeat visits, and enrollments—we hope to conduct in-person user interviews to further improve the effectiveness of the content.

But Wait, There’s More

As you can see, content strategy can help focus many aspects of a hospital website. But it can do much more than what has been covered here. It can provide guidance on everything from competitor differentiation to content development processes. But its beauty comes from being a customizable process aimed at providing clarity and results.

To learn more about content strategy and how it helps hospitals (or insurance companies, or any business for that matter), read some of our other posts on the topic. I’m also happy to talk about using content strategy to improve your hospital website. Drop me a line at krobinson (at) Finelight (dot) com or leave a comment and I’ll get back to you.