Most industries try to keep their business practices and tactics under wraps, so the competition doesn’t pick up on their “game plan.” This is not necessarily the case in the healthcare industry—particularly when it comes to marketing and consumer- and physician-facing communications.
“In healthcare, we all have the same mission, same objective. We're all trying to serve the consumers in our markets and provide them with good quality care. If you're the leader of any team, any organization, you need to be able to measure what you're producing, and benchmarking is one way to do that in a comparative fashion,” states Pete Miller, Division Administrator of Marketing at the Cleveland Clinic.
For example, the Cleveland Clinic exists within a certain structure as a large academic medical center that owns a number of other facilities. Miller explains that it’s important to understand how other organizations like Mayo Clinic and Johns Hopkins Medicine are structured.
“Then, from a marketing and communications perspective, we look at what we’re spending our money on,” he shares. “Are we spending all our money on sports sponsorships or on social media advertising? What are the components that we are focused on?”
Drilling Into the Data
As a marketing leader in healthcare, there are two primary ways of measuring effectiveness in your outreach initiatives. One is to look at what is being produced, such as a podcast, and how many people are engaged—as well as how much it costs to produce any one initiative.
The other is to look at what other organizations are doing and their return on investment. While marketing leaders may not be able to get as specific as each individual institution (e.g. what Mayo Clinic is doing with their social media efforts), they are able to use aggregate data to establish a benchmark.
Miller illustrates the process with the initial insights Cleveland Clinic had four years ago surrounding print media. “We were doing a lot of direct mail, especially to physicians. We were able to see that we had cut that down substantially as a percentage of our spend, relative to our benchmark group. So, we're very happy with that. On the other hand, we were very unhappy with how much we were spending on sports sponsorships, for example, as a percentage of our budget relative to others.”
Collaboration with SHSMD Expands Access
Using a benchmark tool developed in 2015, organizations have been able to gain unique insights thanks to the collaborative sharing of data. For example, they were able to look at marketing spend relative to net patient revenue.
“We find that among the big academic medical centers, that number is about 0.7% of net patient revenue. That's a helpful marker for us to understand what we should be spending on marketing. Whereas you look outside the industry, there's some published data that shows it's more like 10 to 15% of an organization’s revenue that goes into marketing,” notes Miller.
Now, partnering with the Society for Health Care Strategy & Market Development (SHSMD), the benchmark tool is expanding access to its membership base. “We already have a hundred people who entered their data. We hope all of the membership will take advantage of this great opportunity. Once you see the dashboards, you'll see how valuable it is,” adds Miller. “For those who don’t think it’s valuable, they’ll find out very soon when they're asked by their CFO to justify what they're spending their money on.”
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Peter Miller
Division Administrator of Marketing at the Cleveland Clinic |
Learning More
- If you are interested in participating and receiving a Marcom benchmarking dashboard, complete this interest form to receive a link to submit your data to the survey before November 1 (and you will be entered to win one of three $100 gift cards).
- To listen to an in-depth conversation on this topic with Peter Miller, Division Administrator of Marketing at the Cleveland Clinic, click here and listen to the SHSMD Rapid Insights podcast episode.
- To access a recording from Peter Miller and John McKeever’s in person presentation from 2021 SHSMD Connections, register and tune in to the virtual conference, October 19-21, where all in person recordings will be housed for 90 days.