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Heading into the New Year with 2020 Vision

By The SHSMD Team posted 01-02-2020 10:30 AM

  

New Year 2020

One of the greatest challenges health care marketing professionals face is meeting the expectations of leadership. Many times, the requests that flow into the marketing department require marketers to stray from already-formed – and already-budgeted – strategies.

One way to get back to basics, according to Jennifer Horton, vice president of strategy at Ten Adams, is to return to the four core purposes of marketing, which they abbreviate as BERG:

  • Brand awareness.
  • Engagement.
  • Reputation management.
  • Growth.

“As health care marketers, I think one of our big challenges is we get reactionary and spend all of our time fighting fires, taking care of urgent requests that really aren't strategic in nature. The whole approach should be about the core purpose for marketing, these four things,” stated Horton.

Working from the Inside Out
For this type of framework to succeed, it must encompass all aspects of the health care organization – not just marketing collateral or community outreach, but employee outreach and engagement as well. Lisa Winters, director of marketing at Peterson Health in Kerville, Texas, witnessed this firsthand when the organization embarked upon its rebranding journey.

“We decided we needed to work from the inside out. We made it theirs. We assigned brand champions. We included them in every look or color or thought or tagline and it became theirs,” explained Winters.

Since Peterson Health implemented its version of the BERG framework, employee engagement and physician involvement grew. Winters referred to this as a domino effect – physicians feeding off employee excitement and community members feeding off physician excitement. “It was key to everything. Things could not be better for Peterson Health in the 70 years they've been there, and we're excited,” she added.

Why Marketers Must Learn to Say No
In order to combat the distractions each marketing department encounters and avoid drifting away from core marketing strategies, Horton advised one key technique: learning to say no.

“Health care marketers are people pleasers, making people happy and solving problems. It naturally draws us into saying yes to everything. We need to change the language to focus on the fact that marketers don't print money or make time,” urged Horton. “Just like every other department in a health care organization, we have a set budget. We have a set amount of staff time available to us and it's finite. There are trade-offs that have to happen.”

As teams head into 2020, Horton also encouraged marketing strategists to set aside three hours of non-office time to really reflect on the organization’s goals.

“Go to a coffee shop. Don't go home. Don't stay in the office. Put three hours on your schedule that you're actually going to sit down and think about 2020 and at least start framing what you need to accomplish,” she advised. “We are the strategy department of our organizations, but what we [have found with] marketing departments large and small is no one is spending more than about five percent of their total time on strategy when that's our core function.”

To access more helpful information from SHSMD on hospital and health system marketing and strategy to guide you into the new decade and new year, please check out the SHSMD podcast episodes and virtual conference.

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