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Tell Execs About Social Media Outcomes, Not Process

 |  By jfellows@healthleadersmedia.com  
   October 02, 2013

Instead of trying to teach senior healthcare executives marketing lingo in order to get them to understand the complexities of social media's ROI, a marketing expert suggests communicating with executives about outcomes rather than process.

While attending the Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development conference these past few days, I saw and heard some great examples of hospital and health system marketing campaigns with strong ROI.

Organizations picked to speak seem to be working harder than ever to tie value to their marketing efforts. In fact, figuring out the best way to measure marketing efforts was in such high demand from SHSMD members that Diane Weber, RN, executive director of the organization, said it added a marketing analytics track for the conference for first time this year.

"Marketing analytics was added because of the awareness of [the need for] data to find out who patients are," she said. "The types of data and analysis available to us is becoming more advanced. Research and evaluation is going to be more important."

But along with all of that information came one piece of sobering advice for marketers who are trying to teach the C-suite marketing lingo in order to get more understanding from them about the complexity of social media ROI.

Stop.

Instead, learn their language.

It's a simple statement that hushed a crowded room on Monday morning during a session on analyzing social media efforts. Linda Pophal, owner and CEO of Strategic Communications, had a captive audience when she pointed to a slide that seemed to resonate with many in the room judging by the murmurs and nodding heads.

There were two sentences on the teal and white slide; the first one said, "The most common demand the C-suite has about social media is 'What's the ROI?'" Directly beneath that sentence was the answer, "The problem is that's the wrong question." We all chuckled knowingly as Pophal asked for a show of hands of who had been asked that question about their social media efforts.

Next, Pophal said something that seemed to stun, or at least sting a little, "That's not the wrong question." Silence. Crickets.

Pophal then went on to explain that in order to get buy-in from the C-suite on social media efforts, marketers have to understand that outcome is what is most important to executives, not process measures, which is what likes, re-tweets, and followers represent.

Those metrics, while important to a marketing team because it gauges how well (or not) a particular campaign message is resonating, do not give enough information about how that activity is contributing to the bottom line. And that, really, is what your CEO wants to know.

The shift in thinking is subtle, but can be a powerful tool that elevates the credibility of marketing activities. Suzanne Sawyer, chief medical officer for the Philadelphia-based Penn Medicine, put an even finer point on the topic saying, "It begs the question about the role of social media… unless it sits in a larger, strategic framework, we are at risk for being criticized by the C-suite."

Sawyer uses a robust CRM system to calculate Penn Medicine's digital/social/traditional media ROI for each campaign. She credits the system with giving her and her team a 360° view of all the audiences being touched by one of Penn Medicine's marketing campaigns. The CRM system took two years to build and is enterprise-wide.

It's a significant investment that allows Sawyer to integrate analyze marketing activity, online behavior, and engagement as well as pull patient data, billing, and insurance information together to show true ROI. It also pinpoints what doesn't work. For example, efforts to engage on Twitter were not as successful as Pinterest for a recent Penn Medicine bariatrics campaign.

But, knowing that not all systems have those robust resources at their fingertips, both Sawyer and Pophal gave practical tips to gaining credibility in in the C-suite with meaningful metrics for social media.

The first thing both suggested was knowing your organization's strategic plan in order to align marketing campaigns to those goals. It makes sense, but it is also easy to lose track of that big picture when you're constantly monitoring the number of likes a post gets on Facebook or the number of views a video gets on YouTube.

Get out of weeds and look at the landscape. It'll give you a different view – the same one your leadership most likely has.

Pophal broke down into three categories what the C-suite is looking for in terms of social media ROI:

  1. Increased revenue
  2. Reduced expenses
  3. Improved service

To show increased revenue from a campaign, potential patients have to be tracked somehow. Whether it is capturing email addresses at an event, such as a health fair, or tracking the number of new patients to a particular service line that was recently marketed on social media channels, patients must be tracked.

There are several ways to track volume increases, and it tends to be easier when executing a service line campaign, but the key is tying it to the strategic plan of your organization.

If your hospital wants to increase colonoscopies by 10% over six months, giving your CEO the percentage increase in Facebook fans doesn't address the ROI question. Instead, frame it by noting how Facebook contributed to engaging patients who came in for colonoscopies.

One opportunity social media is great at exposing is the bang for your buck. Traditional media spends are so high, comparatively, and simply figuring out what you didn't spend on another billboard because you reached more people with a pay-per-click, is an easy calculation that shows, in real dollars, the impact social media can have.

Improving service is a little trickier to measure, but keeping a physician happy, i.e. improving physician relations, is something hospital and health system CEOs are paying attention to. Contributing to an effort to help increase patient satisfaction, experience, and employee relations also fall under this category and those are also buzzwords that leadership is keen on improving in this transition from volume to value.

The tips for tying ROI to social media are not meant to be tricks you can pull out to impress the C-suite when need be. None of them are meaningful without knowing your organization's strategy.

For example, at Penn Medicine, Sawyer says the system's business strategy is aimed at growing its advanced medicine volume, the "super sub-specialties." Her job is to deliver profitable volume, and everything she reports back to the C-suite is tied to that.

Telling your organization's social media story through the lens of what its contribution is in terms of increasing revenue, service, or reducing cost, may require another set of tools and a different mindset, but it may be the best way to get you and your marketing department closer to being viewed as a valuable, strategic partner.

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Jacqueline Fellows is a contributing writer at HealthLeaders Media.

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