Marketing

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The Marketing Department plays a critical role in helping the hospital generate revenue to fund it's strategic initiative. Effective marketing goes a long way toward helping a hospital fulfill it's mission of providing healthcare services to the community.

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The System Approach

Marketing leaders should capitalize on economies of scale by taking a more globalized approach to building the newly merged system's brand. Promoting the integrated system instead of targeting distinct markets is one cost-effective way of spreading the benefits of utilizing the healthcare services of a hospital system. For example, distribute a community newsletter that promotes the system, not the individual hospitals.

While a system should approach their marketing program globally, it's critical for leadership to remember that when consumers think of healthcare, they think locally. Therefore, as leadership works to develop the system's marketing plan, it's important to build the brand around the idea that patients can seamlessly come in one hospital's door and go out the another's hospitals door.

A system's marketing resources should be as centralized as it's marketing message.

Marketing Resources

Regardless of whether your hospital belongs to system, as today's marketplace moves toward incorporating people and integrating communications, it's becoming increasingly important for the marketing team to work in tandem with the all other functions of the business. Seek out marketing leaders who have a financial background and who are adept at working across functions to bridge the boundaries between the organization's various operations.

The marketing team needs be composed of professional communicators who understand and value an integrated approach to corporate marketing initiatives. Today's consumer is inundated with information about the healthcare choices they have available to them. In order to maintain a competitive advantage, the most effective marketing teams have to develop a cost-effective way to reach their target audience. One strategy for achieving efficacy is to align operational goals with marketing strategies.

Linking Strategic Initiatives to Marketing initiatives

Clinical priorities need to drive marketing Initiatives. Given limited budgets, since every marketing dollar spent should be used toward generating business for the hospital, it's important to focus marketing campaigns on the service lines that hold the most potential for hospital profitability. Since revenue-building capacity will vary by service line and DRG, consider the effects of payor mix as you focus your efforts on developing a marketing plan. Select key product lines based on pre-determined criteria, including profitability and capacity for care, and allocate marketing dollars correspondingly.

Since requests for marketing campaigns will always come from individual departments and everyone will always want a billboard, there needs to be a process in place for handling individualized requests. Being able to point to a clinical priority as the standard for a marketing campaign is an effective way of managing expectations and marketing requests from individual departments. Remind individual departments that the marketing team will always help circulate the service's name in the media but that full-blown marketing campaigns are limited to pre-determined clinical priorities.