EPISODE SUMMARY
Ever wondered what seems to be missing from healthcare providers’ digital marketing efforts? In episode 480, Dave Mastovich talks about how healthcare marketing leaders can create easily understood marketing plans by gathering insights and competitive intel about the marketplace to increase the effectiveness of their digital marketing.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
It’s the No Bullshit Marketing Show. I’m Dave Mastovich, CEO and founder of MASSolutions, the world’s only no bullshit marketing consultants. What’s the missing factor in digital marketing for healthcare providers? What’s the missing link preventing healthcare providers, medical practices, healthcare systems, and, insurers, senior living from achieving digital marketing success? Is it related to the digital marketing spend? The online spend? Is it tied to the social media outlet or channel that was chosen? Or when you post? Is it about the video produced or the graphic design or the words? Is it about how many followers, connections, likes, or shares that you have? Those each might play a role and they are probably important. But the missing factor that hurts the impact and overall success of healthcare digital marketing comes down to two things.
Number one, the lack of a strategic marketing plan that’s easily understood by people outside of marketing. Number two, a lack of a system or systematic way to implement that plan around your digital marketing. 
When senior leaders don’t feel that there is a strategic marketing plan that they can easily understand and a systematic way to implement that plan, they aren’t going to be able to budget the amounts necessary to move the needle on the healthcare digital marketing side. The second thing that’s going to happen is they’re not going to have the patience with whatever amount they budgeted for you. They’re not going to have the patience to let that digital marketing work and evolve over time. That’s it. The other stuff is all tactical components that may or may not be the deciding factor. Overall, the factors are that marketing needs to be able to have their rationale, make their case, tell their story to senior leaders in a way that they understand it, people outside of marketing understand what the strategic marketing plan is all about, what it’s going to do, what it’s going to achieve, and that there’s a system or systematic way that you go about doing this so you can achieve the goals, follow the plan, track what worked and what didn’t, and adjust. That’s why senior leaders aren’t budgeting what they need to budget. And that’s why they aren’t giving the digital marketing plans the time that they need. They don’t have the patience for it. Those are more of the reasons why healthcare digital marketing isn’t achieving what it should be. Then the reasons of: Which particular social media outlet, how much pay per click, which keywords, what was the conversion rate? All of that is important. But it really comes down to those first two points that aren’t happening with your senior leaders.
So how can you change this with your senior leaders at your healthcare organization? Well, the first way is that your strategic marketing plan must understand your customer through three methods. First, systematically gather insights from customers, from patients, and referral sources. So you understand perceptions – how people think and feel. The second is through competitive intel. You want to look at what’s going on around you in the marketplace. What is the story being told against you, what’s being done marketing-wise, what’s the competitive advantage that someone else has? And the third point is target breakdowns. You want to have target market drill downs that use multiple variables, and take a look at your existing data so you can understand who your customers and target markets really are, target market segments really are today, and what they probably should be today. So when you do those three pieces with your strategic marketing plan, that’s step number one. Step number two is that strategic marketing plan must have strategic marketing KPIs, in addition to your tactical marketing metrics. These strategic 
marketing KPIs are easily understood by senior leaders outside of marketing. For instance, bounce rate may or may not be that significant to a senior leader. I had a CEO actually say to me, ‘I don’t care about this that much.’ The bounce rate was on one of the reports, because what senior leaders were looking for is they want to understand what is their customer acquisition cost, what is their patient acquisition cost, new patient acquisition cost? What are their new resident and senior living acquisition costs? But then they also understand what the value is when they get that new patient or new resident. So what’s the lifetime value that you can build and estimate? So now you have a customer acquisition cost, and you have the lifetime value. Those are two things any senior leader can understand. And the ratio of those two matters because it shows how much market share you might be leaving on the table. So those are things you need to think about, presenting your strategic marketing KPIs as ones that are gonna matter to senior leaders. They want to know about how many leads came in, and they want to know how many leads were turned into customers. What’s the value of those customers? What did each lead cost? What was our spending? That’s what they want to know. So you have to have the strategic marketing KPIs.
Third thing you have to have is you have to have a story to explain those first two that I just said and to explain digital marketing plan to senior leaders. And you have to have a story that can change behaviors and mindsets of current and prospective customers or patients, current and prospective referral sources, current and prospective employees. You have to be able to tell the story to those groups to change behaviors and mindsets. If you want to learn more about how you can achieve success and ROI with your healthcare digital marketing, go to MASSolutions.biz/healthcare today.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the No Bullshit Marketing Show recorded here in MASSolutions studio in bold, beautiful, downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Remember, ask yourself, what’s the big idea? And build your story around the answer. It’s all about bold solutions. No BS.
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