You know you've been successful at measuring the ROI of your marketing efforts when you tell a roomful of your peers about it and the audience responds with oohs, ahs, and wows. And I wasn't surprised to hear those murmurs of appreciation during the roundtable I moderated at the HealthLeaders Media Marketing Awards event in Chicago last week. The results truly were impressive and inspiring.
Our contest is about more than just pretty campaigns, by the way. Our judges give weighted points to those campaigns that set clear goals, had a strategy to measure hard results, and met their objectives.
The panel consisted of marketing executives from four award-winning healthcare organizations that were chosen by our judges because they represented the best of the best in ROI measurement.
A healthy ROI
Sara Bakken Lee, a public affairs consultant at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, spoke on behalf of the marketing team that won the Best in Show award in the large hospital category.
The campaign for The Dan Abraham Healthy Living Center, a 115,000-square-foot health and wellness facility for employees, aimed to keep employees informed during construction, generate excitement about the project, and inspire them to commit to healthier lifestyles.
The campaign achieved a 40% increase in new enrollments. In five months, 4,645 members signed up. Other measures of success include 25,000 hits on the video tour of the new facility in the week before the grand opening. Attendance at the grand opening was 12,000. That's 8,000 more than anticipated. Three hundred people signed up on the spot that night.
"There were streams of people—it was like a rock concert," Bakken Lee said.
By the end of 2007, membership (which includes employees, retirees and family members) stood at more than 14,000. About 42% of Mayo's work force enrolled.
A grand grand opening
Gayle Sweitzer, director of marketing for Community Health Network's acute care hospitals and service lines in Indianapolis, talked about the organization's branding campaign, which took the platinum award in its category.
The goal was two-fold: To draw at least 2,000 people to the opening events and to increase hospital usage. Attendance? More than 7,000. Consumer preference, measured quarterly, remains better than the competition. At the campaign's one-year mark, births were up dramatically and average patient days had grown by 29%.
High marks for technical difficulty
Jane Fielding Ellis, vice president of marketing, public relations, and community health at Holy Name Hospital in Teaneck, NJ, talked about her organization's campaign, which won platinum in the best quality campaign category. The marketing team faced a big challenge—making a campaign featuring technology audience-friendly. By all accounts, the campaign did just that, and although it is fairly new, inquiries are up and callers are specifically mentioning the ads.
"Our conversion rates were very easily measured; we worked with [our] ad agency to make sure the calls-to-action went through the call center," Fielding Ellis said.
The organization tracked 86 oncology referrals, 286 MRI appointments, and 200 visits to women's health.
An auspicious beginning
Alicia Argiz-Lyons, corporate director of public relations for Shriners International Headquarters in Tampa, FL, talked about her organization's branding campaign—its first in 87 years. Not a bad beginning: The campaign, which focused on the New England region, won the platinum award in the children's category.
In the first 11 weeks of air time, the campaign generated $8,000 in donations, with an average donation of $65. In the first five weeks that the 60-second TV spot ran, 1,768 calls were generated.
Additionally, inquiries are up, physician referrals are up, and the ads created awareness that led to media exposure and public relations opportunities.
"The increases in awareness were substantial," she said. Locally, awareness and advertising recall increased 17% in Boston and 21% in Springfield, MA.
The moral of this story
Listening to these four speakers, what impressed me most was the diversity of the goals they set for their organizations and the variety of ways they quantified their successes.
Our awards mimic what marketers face in the real world: If you want to get accolades for a marketing campaign, it had better be more than just pretty—it must also be effective. Whether your goal is to get a couple of thousand attendees at an event, increase call volumes, generate more physician referrals, or raise money, you don't get credit for what you don't measure.
Gienna Shaw is an editor with HealthLeaders magazine. She can be reached at gshaw@healthleadersmedia.com.
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