Faced with a cacophony
of payment models from fee-for-service to value and risked based, with everything
else in between, the evolving healthcare consumer, millions of people in the
coming months gaining access to healthcare via the HIX insurance purchase, healthcare
marketing becomes an even greater challenge than before. One size does not fit
all. And growth is good.
Change and Survive
The above organizational marketing success factors are at a minimum what is needed to move healthcare providers from a cottage-industry approach to marketing, to a comprehensive multimillion or billion dollar corporation approach to marketing.
Michael
J. Krivich, MHA, FACHE, PCM, is an internationally followed healthcare
marketing blogger with over 5,000 monthly pages views read in over 52 countries
worldwide on Healthcare Marketing Matters. These views are my own. He is
founder of the michael J group, a Fellow, American College of Healthcare Executives and a Professional Certified Marketer, American Marketing Association. Like
us on facebook at the
michael J group, and connect with me
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Sustainability...Presence...Perception...Experience...
These are the
four dynamics that direct-care healthcare providers need to understand and
incorporate for success in their marketing operations and campaign efforts in a
consumer-driven market. No longer nice to have, these four basic marketing concepts are
now business requirements.
Sustainability- The
resources to effectively and continuously communicate brand and differentiate you’re
offering across multiple channels.
Presence - By
maintaining a continuous presence across multiple channels as in so many other
consumer-directed industries you build 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 minds.
Experience- Defining, measuring and changing the healthcare consumers experience including price and outcomes to match the brand image, perceptions and opinions of
the market place. And is communicated in an
integrated multi-channel sustained effort that includes social media engagement.
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
Chief Marketing Officer that reports to the CEO
and is involved in all decision making.
·
Marketing
resources- human and capital to support a sustainable and continuous
strategically based, fully integrated multi-channel effort externally and internally.
·
Basing
marketing plans and strategies on data rather than thought or here say. Marketing
via data analysis from consumer market
research to detailed service area analysis. Not just demographic or lifestyle,
but utilization patterns, prevalence and incidence of disease, insurance status,
healthcare brand preference, location preference, message testing etc.
·
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.
The above organizational marketing success factors are at a minimum what is needed to move healthcare providers from a cottage-industry approach to marketing, to a comprehensive multimillion or billion dollar corporation approach to marketing.
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 in a consumer dominated and directed healthcare
marketplace.
And that requires a far
different innovative sustainable marketing presence that changes perceptions than
the old way of doing things.