Business Intelligence is Key for Hospitals

Posted on February 28, 2012

More and more marketing and public relations departments at hospitals and healthcare systems are under increasing pressure to show the value of their return. Budgets are tight.  The first places that get scrutiny are the marketing & PR budgets.  As the experts, Strategic Intellavance, sees this trend playing out in both very large and very small markets.

Here’s an example of the advertising spending by key hospitals and healthcare systems in the Nashville, TN market.

Healthcare Marketing Research Benchmarks

Posted on February 23, 2012

How effective are your marketing efforts?  Do you have measurable healthcare marketing research benchmarks? Can you tie your marketing campaigns to results?  Do you  have a healthcare marketing scorecard that measures your marketing ROI?

Healthcare marketing research benchmarks will help you make sure your marketing efforts are paying off.  So that you are repeating what works, and fixing what does not.  The majority of hospitals and healthcare systems typically conduct annual community surveys.  At Strategic Intellavance, we specialize in healthcare intelligence. Therefore we are experts in developing and launching community and physician research across the country.  As a result, we have found that the majority of hospitals have a set of standard, measurable healthcare marketing benchmarks.

What you benchmark needs to be tied to your key objectives or strategies.  For example is your goal to achieve a better community image, introduce new services, or measuring the success of a new advertising campaign. Typical healthcare marketing research benchmarks include awareness, preference, ad recall, service line preference and utilization. And within each of these benchmarks, wording on questions and subquestions are critical to the benchmarks and quality of data you will get back.

Once you have set your healthcare marketing research benchmarks the experts at StrategicIV can help you establish your market research methodology.  We will help you determine whether online, mail or phone surveys will produce the best results for your specific business question.  We can help you determine how best to field your survey panel, when to send your survey, and how often you can conduct your research without burning out your survey respondents.

Once you’ve identified your key objectives, created your unique healthcare marketing benchmarks you should tie these benchmarks to a marketing scorecard that measures your marketing ROI.  This will showcase the value that you are bringing to your organization through your marketing expertise!

Public Relations Measurement Trends

Posted on January 10, 2012

You go to the seminars, read the white papers, and some key trends in public relations measurement emerge.  Social media measurement is becoming increasingly more important, advertising value equivalencies are becoming increasingly less important, and multipliers are going away…

However, is this really happening with hospitals & healthcare systems when it comes to public relations measurement?   After a decade of working with hospitals across the country on their public relations measurement – here’s our guide to most utilized public relations measurement practices from Healthcare Intellavance:

Trend #1: Social Media Monitoring & Measurement are becoming increasingly more important

Of course, it is… and that is why it is critical than you pick a provider that can monitor all social media – including Twitter, non-protected areas of Facebook, blog, forums, websites.  Some hospitals are now using their PR monitoring services to reply back to Tweets or respond to postings that might or might not impact their reputation, or even track posts that employees are making about the hospital itself. That being said, we find that although most hospital and healthcare public relations monitor social media and websites, and even measure the web PR activity, most are more comfortable with traditional media and are just beginning to tap the full potential of social media.

Trend #2: Ad Value Equivalencies are becoming increasingly less important

Well… that’s the buzz…. Supposedly measuring your advertising value equivalency (AVE) is a thing of the past… you hear it in seminars, when you talk to your colleagues.  In reality, AVE’s are still a very common form of measurement amongst hospitals and healthcare systems.  In fact, many of our hospital clients, tie their quarterly PR scorecard measures of success to the key PR measures we provide for them – hits, impressions and AVE’s – for their hospital and (if they want), their key competitors.  Don’t worry, if your hospital doesn’t believe in AVE’s, we even modified our All-in-1 portal & PR analytics to support non-AVE believers!  But, don’t believe the rumors, AVE’s are still alive and kicking!

Trend #3: Multipliers are Going Away

Yes… its’ true… whereas, in the past, most hospitals and healthcare systems would use the standard multiplier of “3”, now very few do use a multiplier for all media being monitored.   There are some unique approaches to multipliers – multipliers for just TV –with the rationale being that TV stories count more because they are harder to get, or multipliers for only the major dailies but not the weeklies or local papers as they are harder placements to get for smaller hospitals.  So, when choosing your public relations measurement service, it is essential that they have a customizable system to support your unique approach to multipliers and monitor all media even deep print – like we do!  As there are a lot of different approaches to multipliers and how they should be applied to different media!

I hope this helped.  What trends are you seeing in public relations measurement?  Also, let me know if you would like a free demo of the Healthcare Intellavance system.

Competitive Advertising Intelligence

Posted on January 10, 2012

Smart marketers use competitive advertising intelligence to get what they want.  Want bigger marketing budgets? Need to measure your marketing return?  Want to be the first to know about your competitor’s service lines, offers, ads, new facility openings?  Then welcome to wealth of knowledge you will gain from competitive advertising intelligence.

Smart marketers know the value of competitive intelligence, and, more importantly, how to use it.  After over a decade of working with hospitals across the country on their competitive advertising intelligence –  monitoring and measuring all Direct Marketing Areas (from the biggest DMA’s, to even the smallest  that no one else monitors!) – here’s our guide to smart marketing practices from  Strategic Intellavance:

Smart Marketing Practice #1: Increase Your Marketing Budget

• Use Competitive Advertising Intelligence to Get More Marketing Money: You know better than anyone, the more marketing money you have in your budget, the greater the impact you can make in your marketplace.  What better way to show your CEO that you need more money than with an objective analysis of your hospital marketing budget compared to your key competitors?  A lot of hospitals have used our data this way – to increase their marketing budgets.
• Delve deep by Service Line: Even if you are the biggest player with the biggest overall budget, you might not have the most funds at the service line level. With our data, you can even drill down by service line and make a service line case for more money.  Hard to argue with measureable benchmarks showing you are being outspent!

Smart Marketing Practice #2:  Track Key Measures for Marketing ROI

• Track Marketing Benchmarks:  More and more, providing measurable benchmarks for marketing is becoming critical. Competitive advertising intelligence can provide your hospital or healthcare system with key measurable benchmarks so you can create a marketing scorecard.  Some key measures include:
• Advertising Share of Voice: What is your share of the advertising dollars relative to the total advertising dollars being spent in your marketplace by your competitors.  You need to make sure the tracking is customized to all your competitors, your media, your market – like we do at Strategic Intellavance. The higher your share of ad voice relative to your key competitors, theoretically speaking, the greater the impact you should be having on community awareness and utilization for your hospital.
• ROI Index: Another key measure is to track the return on your marketing dollars.   At Strategic Intellavance the way we calculate this to take the ratio of your share of ad voice relative to your share of patient utilization.  The goal is to have a higher share of patient utilization and a lower share of ad voice – spend less in marketing and have higher patient utilization. We have a custom grid analysis that shows where your hospital is positioned relative to your competitors – and who has a higher rate of return on their marketing.

Smart Marketing Practice #3:  Know about NEW competitor service lines, ads, offers, activities

• Be the first to know about your competitors activity: Whether your competitors have a new service line that infringes on your core competency, a new advertising campaign that you want to know what media channels it is being placed in, or a stealth campaign on just the Web, competitive advertising intelligence tracking can provide actionable insights.
• Monitor & Measure All Media including Deep Print: despite the fact that the web is capturing more and more advertising activity, the core of most hospitals and healthcare systems ad budgets are still being spent in traditional media – TV, print, radio, billboards.  And within print, for most hospitals, ad activity needs to be monitored in not only the major dailies, but also the weeklies, monthlies and trade pubs.  It is important that all media be monitored and measured – like we do at Strategic Intellavance – and accessible in an All-in-1 portal that can allow you to share, view, email, create reports & graphs.
• Service Line Intell for TV, Web, Print Creatives – and since service line advertising and new offers are so critical, it is key to be able to view ads, ad spending and placement  by service line,  as well as, by hospital competitor – so you know how to formulate your strategy!

Healthcare Intellavance Recommendation:

The more you know about your competitors, the better you will be able to formulate strategies and execute marketing plans to keep you on the forefront.  Smart marketers know competitive advertising intelligence can help them formulate measurable benchmarks, evaluate their marketing ROI, get the latest intell on new competitive activity, and in some cases, even add money to their own marketing budgets!

Healthcare Marketing Research Best Practices

Posted on January 10, 2012

More and more hospitals and healthcare systems are turning to online surveys for their healthcare marketing research.  Just like other businesses, marketing dollars are tight and everyone is looking for ways to get more out of their marketing budgets. So, all avenues are being investigated – including research.  Online surveys traditionally give you a bigger bang for your dollar… but are they the best way to conduct healthcare marketing research?

After working with hospitals across the country on their healthcare marketing research efforts, fielding online, phone and mail surveys; community, physician, and service lines surveys, here’s our point of view at Strategic Intellavance:

 The Advantages of Online Surveys:

1. Lower Cost.  Traditionally, you can field a longer or bigger survey for considerably less than either a mail or phone survey.
2. Quicker Turnaround. Online panelists are incentived to turn the surveys around quickly so you should get your results back quicker than with a phone or mail survey.

The Disadvantages of Online Surveys:

1. Incented Respondents: Typically most online surveys involve a paid or reward panel of respondents who opt in to participate in surveys for some kind of reward.  Not necessarily typical of the average person who would be utilizing hospital services.
2. Zip Code Quotas:  If your hospital has a primary or secondary service area that involves smaller zip codes or you have zip code quotas, online surveys might not be best way to field.  Panel companies tend to have lots of sample in bigger zips, and much less in smaller zips. So, you might need to do a backfill with phone if you don’t meet zip quotas through online.
3. Representativeness of Respondents:  Since the majority of hospital utilization comes from those 50+ in age, and online usage is higher amongst those younger than 50,  those who participant in online panels might not necessarily be representative of the typical hospital utilizer.   An online sample might be more enthusiastic online users than the typical profile of a person who is utilizing a hospital.
4. Low Incidence for Specialized Subsets:  Some hospitals want to conduct specialized service line research amongst respondents with cancer, cardiovascular disease, etc.  Online panelists tend to be much more limited if you have a finite population.

Healthcare Intellavance Recommendation:

For healthcare marketing research if cost and turnaround are your major concerns, and your hospital has its service area in a heavily populated area with a general acute care population, then online surveys are great way to research.  If your hospital is more rural in nature, or you want to reach subsets of the population, then other healthcare marketing research survey methods will most likely yield better results.