Health B2B Marketing

"I like you:" One of the five consumer behaviors that should inform attraction marketing

A great post on the Healthy Conversations blog got me thinking about attraction marketing. Here’s how Eric Brody defines the term:

“The future of healthcare marketing is not about saying things to caregivers, communities and patients. It is about saying and doing things with them. It is about ATTRACTION MARKETING , compelling them to become more deeply engaged with your brand, while letting you (the healthcare marketer) actually spread your commercial message more effectively.”

Makes sense. We’re marketing in the age of the empowered consumer. Media is ubiquitous and fragmented. More marketing and advertising is competing for consumers’ attention, a scarce resource. Online communities put consumers in the driver’s seat, giving them the power to choose not only who they interact with but also, in some cases, what ads they’re seeing. If you’re a healthcare marketer targeting the C-suite, your audience understands their empowerment in spades.

To reach and persuade this evolved breed of consumer, we must do so on their terms, having a laser focus on meeting their needs in a way that delights them and attracts them to us. That’s the essence of attraction marketing.

For me, attraction marketing is informed by a succession of five consumer behaviors:

“I know you,” which can lead to

“I like you,” which can lead to

“I want to interact with you,” which can lead to

“I want to do business with you,” which can lead to

“I want to help you succeed.”

This isn’t rocket science; it’s how people behave, and they’ve behaved this way as long there has been commerce. Truthfully, great marketing has always met people on their terms. But too often, marketers have focused less on how consumers are benefited and more on how their product or service is bigger, better and more beautiful. These days, that approach won’t work.

When you build a marketing campaign, think of how you can attract your audience to know and like your brand, how you can encourage deep brand interactions and how you can make it easy for them to do business with you.

What are your thoughts on marketing to an empowered health care consumer?

To influence the CFO, stay on target.

In the previous “Interview with a CFO” post, I wrote about principles for pitching CFOs. In this final post, I’ll summarize some of the insights my CFO friend gave me on influencing him.

First of all, this CFO claims that he doesn’t pay attention to marketing. That’s an easy thing to say, and I’d guess that most CFOs would say the same thing. Does that mean that all the money you spend on advertising, direct mail, email and trade shows is wasted? Not hardly. I’ve learned from experience—and I’m sure many of you have, too—that branding, awareness and lead generation all provide a lift to the bottom line.

CFOs might not consume all your marketing with rapt attention, but they do notice. How do you get them to notice you more?

Message to the mark. The CFO told me many things about him: that he focuses on cash flow and efficiency, that he looks for new revenue streams, that he cares about value, that his financial position determines everything. Tell him how you’re solving his problems, and you’ll have his attention. It isn’t all about the message; it’s also about reach and frequency. But while bombarding him with the wrong message may get his attention, it also may make him draw the wrong conclusions.

Influence through influencers. Remember a quote from the post on pitching to a CFO: “Finance doesn’t drive anything.” Develop and leverage relationships with people who do. Directors of health information management, patient financial services, nutrition services—these people typically report to the CFO. Just because they’re not decision makers doesn’t mean you should ignore them. We don’t call them influencers for nothing. Help them see how you’ll solve their problems, and they’ll become your advocate.

His influencers aren’t just his direct reports. The CFO also told me that his CEO and members of his hospital’s Board of Directors hold a lot of sway. And don’t forget about physicians.

Be likable. The entire reason I was able to sit down with the CFO, despite not having spoken with him in years, is because he liked me. In general, as a company and as a brand, being likable means being personal, authentic, respectful and honest. It also means leveraging your company’s brand attributes that are attractive to CFOs. You know what they are.

Share your experience. What have you done to get the attention of CFOs?

Got a nice surprise over the weekend: Alex van Klaveren of MedicExchange.com emailed me to let me know that he would be featuring yours truly in Medic Exchange TV’s inaugural Industry News brief. I know, I know: slow news week.

Can’t embed the video on this blog, so click here to view. My bit is around the 2:40 mark. Thanks, Alex!

No, this is not me. And this post is not about the "hard sell." It's about not wasting a CFO's time.

In my last post, I wrote about how hospital marketing agencies need to pitch the CFO. This post will discuss some CFO pitching principles for health care b-to-b sales and marketing leaders.

An appointment with a hospital CFO is an essential opportunity to move your prospects toward closing. When a salesperson reaches this level, sales leaders can’t go it alone: they need marketing support. From my interview with my CFO friend, here are three principles that sales and marketing should keep in mind:

1. Do your homework. “Before you show up on a CFO’s doorstep, know enough about the business,” says the CFO. “Cash, revenue, income statements—all decisions depend on this.” A nice source for this type of information is the American Hospital Directory. It’s a free source of public data that includes high-level revenue numbers: gross patient revenue, non-patient revenue and net income (or loss). AHD.com also shows the hospital’s service lines, utilization statistics and total patient days.

2. Remember who you’re talking to. “Finance doesn’t drive anything,” my friend says. That doesn’t mean that he doesn’t make decisions, just that he typically isn’t the person who needs to be sold on need. However, he definitely needs to be sold on value. Price is part of that equation, as is features, reputation, product stability and cost savings. Sales and marketing should work together on a message that incorporates all of these elements. Which leads me to my final point.

3. Have client success stories, preferably with ROI. “When I talk to a sales rep, I’ll always ask for references, and I’ll always look for a return on investment that can be quantified,” the CFO says. Marketing and sales need to work together to develop these stories through branded case studies, ROI calculators, customer testimonials.

Next post: Do CFOs pay attention to marketing and advertising?

A bit of unorthodox hospital marketing, but it illustrates a point: hospital ad agencies need to be clear how they're solving business problems.

In the previous “Interview with a CFO” post, I discussed how finding new revenue streams is a big part of his job. This time, I’ll discuss how the chief financial officer and the hospital marketing department intersect. I’m breaking away from the theme with this post, since it’s not precisely relevant to health care B2B marketers, but it will be relevant to marketing professionals who sell their services to hospital marketing and communications teams.

My CFO friend isn’t a marketer, but he is a business man. He understands that bringing in revenue isn’t just about offering services; he needs to generate demand within his community for those services. That’s where his marketing department comes in.

Most hospitals are dependent on physician referrals, and that’s true of physician-owned hospitals like the one my friend helps to lead. Most of his marketing time and money are spent reaching out to local physicians, educating them on his services lines and just generally developing relationships. His marketing department supports this effort by developing sales support materials: brochures, sell sheets, presentations, etc.

That’s not to say that sales support is all his marketing department does. Community and public relations are a big part of their budget; they place strategic sponsorships and host events that help them stay in the good graces of the public and their opinion leaders. They have also found that advertising does make a difference in some specific service lines; due to competitive issues, I won’t divulge which ones.

Why is all this important? If you’re an ad agency wanting to do business with a hospital, especially a smaller hospital, you need to understand who’s writing the checks. Not every hospital has the same business issues as my friend’s, but they all have challenges. You’re more likely to be successful if you understand their business issues and how your services can help solve them.

Next post: Tips for approaching a CFO.

Staying with the topic of “what’s on the CFO’s mind?”, I came across this article this morning from September of 2009. In it, a 3M HIS executive shares this nugget:

“When I sit down with hospital CFOs and CIOs these days, the recurring theme is value,” says Ray Terrill, senior vice president at 3M Health Information Systems. “My background includes the hospital environment, so I can appreciate that budgets are simply not what they used to be. Hospitals need to see ROI and cost savings from software products and proven results that can be sustained over time.”

It's the CFO's job to "go for the gold."

In my last post, I summarized a conversation I had with a friend of mine—a chief financial officer for a physician-owned hospital—about the issues he worried about everyday. This time, I’ll share how he really creates value for his organization.

The man has incredible responsibility: keeping a hospital in the black, making sure his facility can pay its employees, its creditors and its investors. That takes more than just pencil pushing and cost cutting. As CFO, it’s also his responsibility to find more ways to make money. He’s an entrepreneur on salary.

Physician-owned hospitals like his often focus on certain specialties. But putting all their proverbial eggs in one basket is risky. “I’m always looking for ways to diversify our product mix,” said the CFO, “so if there’s a downturn in one area, the whole hospital isn’t affected at once.”

His focus is not unique to smaller hospitals. CFOs at large hospitals with a full complement of service lines might not be looking to add new ones. But they are always looking for ways to bring in more revenue. And for hospitals, making more money almost always requires a capital purchase.

Maybe they’ll consider upgrading to a 64-slice MRI, adding another hyperbaric therapy chamber or possibly installing a daVinci robot. Whatever they decide on, moving from concept to completion will take months, oftentimes years. My friend told me that the research, planning, approvals, program design and process design for adding a new service line takes anywhere from 18-24 months from concept to completion.

The next time you approach a CFO, ask yourself, “How can I help his organization find new revenue streams?”

Next post: The CFO and the marketing department.

No surprise: CFOs think about cash flow

If you’re a marketing or sales professional in health care B2B, you are likely to think a lot about chief financial officers (CFOs). I know I do. Rather than just thinking about them, I decided to interview one.

Shortly before I started Lumeno Marketing—my health care marketing and communications agency—I sat down with a friend of mine who also happens to be a hospital CFO. My objective was to try to understand how a CFO makes purchasing decisions. Over the next few posts, I’ll summarize what he told me and then share some thoughts about what I learned. This post will discuss the issues my CFO friend and others like him worry about.

But first, a little background. I didn’t get my friend’s permission to use his name, so I won’t. He works for a physician-owned facility that competes with a much larger hospital nearby. This isn’t his first hospital gig. He had been the CFO of another hospital before, and, as far as I know, he has about 15 years of c-level experience under his belt.

The first question I asked him was, “What’s the first thing you think about when you sit down at your desk?” His answer was thorough: not only did he tell me his first concern, he also shared the major concerns that he manages every day.

His first concern: “What’s our cash position?” He gets a daily report of the previous day’s cash status so he can know how he can pay the hospital’s bills.

His first concern leads to his second concern: “What’s our patient volume?” The cost of staffing a bed isn’t insignificant, so my friend needs to know if his staffed beds are being put to good use.

His third concern is something about which we in the health care IT and B2B business can help him: “How can I reduce expenses?” According to my friend, his biggest expenses are supplies and labor.

Are there any other concerns that a hospital CFO might need to address on a daily basis?

Next post: How does a CFO earn his keep?

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kukywa/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

My stack of health care magazines to read looks about like this one.

Your organization somehow fits into the giant health care ecosystem. What happens in this industry affects you—it affects everyone. When the proverbial butterfly flits its wings in one health care sector, it could cause a disaster in another.

As a health care marketer and communicator, you need to know how macro issues impact your organization for good or ill. If you do, you can prepare for problems or profit from a trend.

For example, I was talking strategy recently with a client. They wanted to reference in their marketing material Pres. Obama’s recent suggestion that eliminating health care waste would pay for health care reform. Because I had kept up on the reform debate, I knew that the President was largely referring to preventing unnecessary care. I knew that hospitals, health systems and physicians are concerned that Obama’s suggestion could result in less money in Medicare and Medicaid payments. I also knew that my client’s product wouldn’t help these health care providers. I counseled my client to focus on other industry problems it truly did solve.

Rather than giving you a list of the many news sources you could read to keep up on the industry at large, I’ll suggest one: Kaiser Health News. KHN is far and away the best source for general health care news for a busy health care marketer, because they summarize the most important health news of the day. They offer four daily newsletters, all of which are helpful. I subscribe to only one: the Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report.

How has staying on top of health industry news helped you?

Kathleen Sebelius's department of Health and Human Services just gave health care IT marketers a late Christmas gift

Any time there are new, complex regulations related to health care, it’s a marketing moment for health care vendors. Last week, just before the New Year’s holiday, a golden opportunity fell in to your laps when the Department of Health and Human Services proposed its long-awaited meaningful use and certification criteria. If you sell products that are affected by these rulings, you should be working right now to take attach your brand to meaningful use.

Share your perspective. Chances are, there are a few people in your organization who know every nuance of the HITECH bill, who have read every major news article on meaningful use, who have contributed to online discussions, and who have pored through every page of the meaningful use proposals. Take some time with these people to learn about the rulings and what they mean to your company, your clients, your prospects, and to the industry in general.

You probably already have talking points on meaningful use; adjust those talking points based on the new information. Then, share your updated perspective every way you can: pitch an interview to your media contacts, send an email to your user’s group, update your employees, etc.

Teach your audience what you know. All told, there are more than 700 pages to read, 556 proposed meaningful use regulations and 156 discussing the proposed certification standards. Most people are going to rely on outside sources to learn what it means to them. Be their source. Working with the experts you identified earlier, develop a webinar presentation that discusses the important points of the meaningful use rule. Share how the changes would affect your audience, and give them detailed instructions on how they should prepare. It’s also a good idea to schedule and promote a webinar to discuss the final rulings, since its contents are will likely be the last word on meaningful use.

Go public with your response. Your organization has a lot riding on meaningful use, so it will want to respond to the proposed rule as a corporate entity. Your response will become public information, so why not go public with it as soon as you can? Now’s your chance to influence the court of public opinion. Post your response on your company’s website or blog, but don’t stop there. Start and participate in discussions in appropriate LinkedIn groups and with your Twitter followers. Do your part to keep the discussion about meaningful use moving.

What are you doing right now to take advantage of meaningful use? Please share in the comments…