Don't Let Lack of Metrics Sink Your Hospital Marketing Department

The notion that it's too hard to determine the value of a marketing strategy is common. And it could be negatively affecting the way that marketing departments are viewed within the C-suite.

Spending money without knowing what you're getting in return is something most of us recognize as a bad idea, yet hospitals and health systems continue to approach their marketing this way.

For some organizations, tracking the value of a marketing dollar is qualitative and therefore generating ROI isn't easy. For example, the owner of a family practice in the Midwest told me last week, that it was "impossible" to determine the ROI of its marketing, which consists of its physicians being "very involved" in the community by way of attending chamber of commerce meetings, local community events, and the town's high school sports games.

As the owner of that practice put it, "How do you put a value on a physician being present at chamber of commerce meetings?"

As a writer and observer of healthcare marketing, I had no advice to give, but the implication that it's too hard to determine the value of a marketing strategy is something I hear a lot. And, it could be affecting the way that marketing departments are viewed.

With shrinking margins and price pressure mounting, C-suite executives are eager to see meaningful numbers from every department. Not measuring the ROI, even qualitatively, of an organization's marketing efforts, is one of the barriers to a marketing department's desire to be seen as strategic partner that supports the vision and mission of a hospital system.

One place organizations can start, is simply looking online using Google Analytics to get a baseline read of their website visitors. Yes, this is basic information, but (believe it or not) there are organizations that are either not doing this simple step or do not give much weight to the online statistics because they don't believe the information is meaningful.

Jim Connolly, CEO of Ellis Medicine in upstate New York, calls online stats "invaluable."

"It's easier to track marketing if your objective is to drive people to your website, because then I can track how many people have visited the website and how much time they're spending on it," he says. "That gives us a real indication of who was attracted to us and what they were looking for."

Connolly, however, also recognizes that there are obstacles to moving marketing closer to the boardroom. He says the expense can be a roadblock, as well as the time it may take. For example, getting approval for a $15,000 marketing campaign will always be easier than one costing more. If a marketing campaign requires a lot of engagement from leadership, however, it may be a hard sell.

The big hurdle to overcome may be just getting the C-suite to agree that the organization needs to be communicating with the service area.

"You've got to feel that there's something important about getting your message out," says Connolly, otherwise any campaign, even a small one, will be a hard sell.

If you are able to sell leadership on a marketing campaign and they come looking for metrics that assign value, be prepared, says Beth Wright, vice president of corporate communications and strategic marketing for Franklin, TN-based Capella Healthcare. Capella operates in six states, but isn't a giant system with access to all the bells and whistles of an academic medical center.

"Capella is a system, but healthcare and hospitals are local, so measurement is different," says Wright, who works to measure what she can.

Wright says sometimes her resourcefulness means getting creative with who is part of a marketing effort. For example, to increase a particular insurance-covered procedure, such as bone-density scans, the registrar can ask three questions at the point of screening. That is a simple step worked into an already established process netting information about prospective patients.

Perhaps the biggest roadblock to bumping up marketing's reputation in healthcare is educating leadership about the nuances of everything a marketing department does, or can do.

"One of the obstacles is not really understanding what is marketing, versus advertising, versus branding," says Connolly. "I was fortunate to have people to educate me really well, and I thought I knew a little bit about this, but people raised my consciousness about the difference between those and how they need to reinforce each other. "