How to Make Small Hospital Marketing Budgets Count

Organizations that believe marketing campaigns must boil down to ROI may be missing important qualitative data that could help inform leaders. Hearing from real people is invaluable, and inexpensive.

For every academic center with a robust marketing department tracking the value of each patient that touches the system, there is a hospital cobbling together a marketing campaign with nearly non-existent resources.

For these hospitals and health systems, proving the value in marketing to the C-suite can be especially hard because a barely-there budget typically means enough money to execute, but not enough to track results. Marketers fighting to have a bigger voice in hospital strategy are doubly hamstringed: there's not enough money to truly compete and no way to prove if whatever they can execute on is effective.

At Franklin, TN-based Capella Healthcare, which operates hospitals in six states, the marketing department is small but resourceful when it comes to tracking its campaigns. Beth Wright, vice president of corporate communications and strategic marketing, emphasizes the importance of being prepared to give meaningful metrics to the CEO by "going beyond the standard tracking" of patients.

"Fiddle with consumer perception question surveys, with specific questions," says Wright. "Don't be afraid of asking questions that measure softer things."

To her point, organizations that believe boiling marketing campaigns down to ROI may be missing the important qualitative aspects that could help inform leaders. Hearing from real people, in their own words, how they perceive a hospital or health system is an invaluable piece of information that numbers miss.

Reach Out
For small hospitals or systems without large marketing budgets, qualitative data is relatively easy to get. It's not the only thing to rely on, but when combined with figures on whether patient volumes increased after a recent marketing push, it can become a meaningful data point.

For example, Dignity Health Hospitals of the Central Coast (DHHCC), a three-hospital system that is also part of San Francisco-based Dignity Health, recently recorded its highest turnout of walkers at this year's National Walking Day.

The annual event is part of DHHCC's community partnership with American Heart Association (AHA). But the bigger number doesn't give the complete picture of the system's relationship to the community it serves, says Lisa Dosch, AHA's executive director for the central coast division in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties who works closely with DHHCC.

"The Rotary Club of San Luis Obispo de Tolosa held their meeting at French Hospital that day (National Walking Day) and went for a walk with the entire community," says Dosch. "It's bringing people to their hospitals to enjoy the walk around the campus. They had so much fun. The president of the Rotary came to me and said, 'Hands down, we are doing this again next year.' "

Engage With the Community
The sentiment is a win for the AHA and for DHHCC, which is tying its community partnership to specific marketing strategies. It's a smart tactic that smaller hospitals can learn from because chances are that partnerships are an untapped source for marketing that isn't being leveraged strategically.

Megan Maloney, marketing director for DHHCC, knows marketing budget challenges, but is blazing a new trail at the small system by tying its AHA partnership to cardio service lines at two of DHHCC's hospitals: French Hospital Medical Center and Marian Regional Medical Center. Together, both hospitals have 60% of the market share; Maloney is aiming to grow that by 3% next year.

"We've always tracked the community engagement activities with our disproportionate population, but the marketing… we've never tracked because we're a small community hospital," says Maloney. "We lacked the funds, the focus. Now things are changing so much in healthcare. I need to make sure we're very strategic in what we're doing. I need to make sure we are putting efforts toward programs and spending marketing dollars that are going to help and effect the population."

Mine the Waiting Room for Patient Feedback
Wright believes that service lines offer a tailor-made route to track marketing activities. And she's right. The message is usually aimed at a specific audience, and counting appointments made for a specific period of time after the campaign begins is a standard, effective measure of volume growth.

There are more sophisticated metrics and systems that will dig deeper, but if the organization isn't giving the marketing department money to do that, it doesn't mean marketing can't do anything. This is just one place to start building marketing's value as a strategic business partner.

Kim Fox, vice president at Nashville-based Jarrard Phillips Cate & Hancock, says to get at the softer, qualitative information that will net information about patients' perception, head to the lobby or waiting room.

"Having a volunteer in lobby asking questions… some branding and image type [questions]… gives you a snapshot of what people are thinking, says Fox. "CFOs want numbers; CEOs like perception."

Finding the right balance of metrics to prove marketing's value to an organization and metrics that show marketing messages are resonating in the community is tricky. It's even trickier when budgets are tight, as they usually are. Smart hospitals already see marketing as a strategic partner. Smart marketing departments are resourcefully fighting their way up the ladder to stake that position.

Beth Wright, vice president of corporate communications and strategic marketing at Capella Healthcare, and Kim Fox, vice president at Jarrard Phillips & Cate will participate in a HealthLeaders Media webcast, Metrics and Marketing: Proving Value in Healthcare Marketing, September 25.