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The Road to Becoming a Digital Marketing Leader Starts with Your Team

By The SHSMD Team posted 11-30-2021 11:15 AM

  

One thing all healthcare organizations can agree on is that the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of the “digital” world. They were tasked with re-envisioning their digital strategies to meet the new demands.

A key part of this transformation? Getting buy-in from staff… everyone from administration, to physicians, to marketing team members.

“You need the bandwidth, the people, to get from here to there. Understanding where your staff is, understanding what they're going to need in order to be successful with this next stage of things, that’s become a huge gap in the way organizations are trying to assess operations right now,” states Ben Dillon, Chief Strategy Officer at Geonetric.

Assessing Team Skills

The first step in optimizing an organization’s digital marketing strategy starts with key team players. Oftentimes, there’s a difference in perception about how leadership views team members’ skills versus how they actually view their own skills.

“We sat down with the team, and we looked at a bunch of different digital marketing disciplines. First, we asked them how they're spending their time today. Just understanding what the burden on the team looks like right now. We asked the people on the team to self-evaluate their capabilities in each one of these areas. But, we also asked about their interest in developing more deeply in those areas,” notes Dillon.

Many organizations have been struggling to bring on additional staff. So, understanding where they can upskill staff—develop capabilities within the existing team—is just as important as understanding where they need to justify a new position.

Turn to the Data for Answers

In order to help healthcare organizations better serve their marketing teams—and in turn allow their teams to better serve those organizations—Geonetric has gathered robust data to assess how teams are “spending their time.”

“We put together a peer group. In this case, it was a bunch of academic medical centers, and we did some benchmarking,” shares Dillon. “This doesn't mean you have to match where you are [as an organization] to where they are, but it just gives you some context to say, ‘Okay, it feels like maybe we don't have enough in this one area, but we're actually pretty in line with where a lot of our peers are.’ It just gives you the context to start asking different kinds of questions about how the team is investing time today.”

The 2020 Geonetric survey is available now on the company’s website, and the 2021 results will soon be available. Some of the data can seem overwhelming, but Dillon assures organizations that it should be absorbed as a more long-term plan—even three-to-five years down the road.

Geonetric also has information on outsourcing and which areas are best fit for bringing on external help. “It's hard to justify positions. So, we identify areas where you can really go outside the organization easily and get the capacity you need to be more effective versus other areas where you need people with feet on the ground within the organization,” adds Dillon. “We want organizations to justify positions that are going to have the most impact.”

Ben Dillon headshot
Ben Dillon
Chief Strategy Officer at Geonetric


Learning More

  • To listen to an in-depth conversation on this topic with Ben Dillon, Chief Strategy Officer at Geonetric, click here to listen to the podcast.
  • To view the recording from this in person session at SHSMD Connections, register here ($200) to access on-demand content featuring recordings from the in-person and 30+ new content from the virtual conference.
  • To view the SHSMD Connections conference full agenda, click here.
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