Health B2B Marketing

Microsites are like plants in a garden. They can either be weeds or flowers, and it all depends on how deliberate you are with them.

It’s spring in Salt Lake City. The grass is starting to green up. The fruit trees are starting to bud and bloom. For the last month or so, I’ve been preparing my yard for summer; fertilizing, pruning, repairing sprinklers and planning my gardens.

At my business, client campaigns are in full swing, and it seems just about everyone wants a microsite: you know, those web sites that have a home page and a few supporting pages, but can do some heavy marketing lifting. If microsites are on your mind, it’s with good reason. In health care B2B, microsites can help you promote a new product, be the foundation for a new campaign, publicize a new area of expertise or just generally improve your search engine rankings.

Microsites are like plants in a garden. They can either be weeds or flowers, and it all depends on how deliberate you are with them.

Despite all their advantages, microsites can bring more clutter than clarity to your message. If you view microsites as weeds, I’m guessing that there is little cohesion and consistency, and, likely, not much oversight among your microsites. That’s no way to strengthen your brand.

Love them or hate them, microsites can be an important part of your marketing mix. Here are three keys to making sure your microsites are doing their jobs.

Have an overall strategy. Any good garden starts with a good plan. You plan for how everything will look when full grown: the color, the spacing, the design. Microsites need to have clear criteria on the “when,” the “why,” and the “how” of creating them. You may even want to plan for the “what” by determining which topics are on point for developing a microsite. When everything is “full grown,” you’ll want your microsites to complement each other and strengthen your overall brand.

Put someone in charge. Any garden—large or small—needs a gardener, someone to keep the weeds out and care for the plants. Your microsites need someone in charge of them: someone who can put their foot down when a “weed” starts to spring up, someone who pays attention to whether the microsites are meeting their objectives. Which leads me to my third suggestion…

Have clear objectives and make sure they are met. Microsites are at their best when they have a specific, focused purpose. That purpose should be clear before any creatives start working on them. You should also determine your success measures up-front, so that once the site is launched, your “gardener” knows what metrics to manage.

Are your microsites bringing a lack of consistency and cohesion to your web presence? Keep these three keys top of mind and your marketing garden will be the envy of the neighborhood.

Health care marketers are likely to say yes when we're asked to help or take on more. We're "can-doers." But often, we just can't keep up.

I met a marketing director at HIMSS10 who ran, literally, everything related to marketing at her company. She had no staff—a true army of one. I felt for her; if her role was anything like corporate positions I’ve held, she had a lot of balls in the air. She was likely in charge of all the collateral development, all the booth design, all the logistics, all the messaging, all the scheduling, all the pre-show marketing, all the post-show marketing, all the planning meetings, everything. And I daresay that HIMSS wasn’t the only part of her job, which means she probably had to plan multiple trade shows and run multiple campaigns and plan budgets and write proposals and reports and, well, you get the point.

Before I launched the Health B2B Marketing blog, time management was one of the topics I thought was essential. Why? Because of people like this marketing director I met at HIMSS. Health care B2B marketers, like all knowledge workers, have intense demands placed upon us. And in my experience, we’re also more likely to say yes when we’re asked to roll up our sleeves and help on a project. We’re “can-doers.” But often, we just can’t keep up.

I know what it’s like to be the only person responsible for a project. I’ve been the only marketer to promote a product line. I’ve been put in charge of budgets with little guidance or supervision and expected to make it work. I’ve had to manage all my work responsibilities in addition to all my family responsibilities, not to mention all my community responsibilities. Here’s the key to how I do it:

I keep track of my time.

For the last eight years, I’ve kept track of every moment I’ve worked, in 15 minute increments. It started when I worked at an interactive agency. Makes sense, right? I needed to track billable hours, but I tracked all the non-billable stuff I did, as well, and it kept me focused. I found it so helpful that I kept tracking the hours I worked at corporate jobs, where no one really cared exactly what I did by the quarter-hour. I found that if I was accountable to someone—in most cases, myself—I would accomplish more in a day than if there was no record of what I did.

I also found that if I categorized the work I did, I could set goals for being even more effective. For example, when I first started keeping track of my time, I found that time spent on what I’ll call “non-project work” was taking up about 25 percent of my time. Meetings, training, research and general administrative stuff—even chatting with co-workers—were all important, but not so important that I needed to spend two hours out of an eight-hour day doing them. So I set a goal to spend more time working on things to move the business forward and less time on non-project work. I started out with a difficult goal: decrease my non-project work by 40 percent— that is, bring the administrative stuff down to about 15 percent of my total time. It took some discipline, but after about a year, I could consistently keep non-project work to around 15 percent. Once I reached that goal, I set the mark even higher (lower?): bring my non-project work down to 10 percent of my time. And you know what? It wasn’t that hard. After just two few months, I was able to consistently keep my non-project time below 10 percent.

The results showed in my work. I was spending more than 90 percent of my time on important projects and getting a lot done. It made the bosses happy. It also made them expect more, but that’s another story.

When I started my own business, I wasn’t really sure how much time running the business would take. But after six months of doing this full-time, I’m averaging around 85% productivity, as I’m counting billable work, sales and marketing as “project time.” I think I may even be able to do better.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll share a few more of my keys to productivity. The next productivity post will get more into the details of what to keep track of and how to keep track of it. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your productivity secrets. Please share in the comments.

With some physicians unhappy about HITECH's meaningful use requirements (not sure how this one feels), it's time for health IT marketers to ease up on the stimulus message.

It’s been a year since ARRA and HITECH were passed into law. In many ways, HITECH has revitalized health IT. At the end of 2008, our industry was in a funk. But today, we’ve experienced a 180-degree turn. The excitement around the industry was palpable at HIMSS10.

But I’m also noticing some wariness among the very markets that health care IT is banking on: health care providers.

Physicians especially seem to be expressing reservations. Last month, 96 organizations representing hundreds of thousands of physicians complained that proposed “meaningful use” requirements that sprang from HITECH are onerous and should be scaled back. When the proposed requirements were released in January, some commenters objected vehemently:

Why would health care professionals be willing to deploy complex user unfriendly time consuming devices that disrupt medical care and cause new errors which put patients at risk while being paid less for their work? … My best advice: do not purchase or accept to be gifted this equipment. (Suzie, RN, from HIStalk blog comments)

The clinical practices will experience lower efficiency and more errors from these poorly designed devices. (Noah Praetor, MD, from HIStalk blog comments)

The latest journal of Health Affairs is mostly focused on health IT and meaningful use. One of the articles was headlined: The gold rush is on. That’s certainly the message we’ve been sending. And a year after ARRA, it’s the wrong message.

A recent analysis (PDF) performed by Ingenix Consulting suggests that providers aren’t likely to see the financial benefits of EMRs until five-to-seven years after they implement. Stimulus money may not be enough to get docs to buy.

But many health IT vendors are still mostly focused on monetary benefits to providers. They’re guaranteeing meaningful use and offering no-interest financing. Those are all good ideas, but they should no longer be our main message.

Our messages should be attacking the pain that physicians are feeling: uncertainties about EMR benefits, worries about down time, concerns about clinical disruption.

Their concerns are valid, and they can only be assuaged by one of their own. I recommend finding a satisfied client who can tell a story about your ease of use, about your smooth installation process, about your comprehensive training, or about another key satisfier.

Better yet, show that you truly understand providers’ concerns by partnering with insurance companies and large employers—organizations who stand to greatly benefit from ubiquitous EMRs—to offer doctors even more monetary incentives for using your EMR. That may be a pipe dream, I know, but the vendor that could pull it off would get the attention of every doctor and hospital in America.

Stimulus funding is still an important topic. The current rules use a carrot and a stick to encourage meaningful EMR use—physicians who aren’t using EMRs will eventually be penalized. But our messaging needs to position us more like partners and less like profiteers.

What are your thoughts about EMR messaging?

Photo credit: The Doctr

Dr. Wes Fisher, a blogging cardiologist, succinctly shared half of Twitter’s value equation:

I have grown to appreciate Twitter with time. Not as a panacea to all that ailes medicine, cardiology, or my social life, but as a means to transmit information publicly VERY fast and keep up with the constant stream of ideas emanating from others with similar interests to me.

The other part of Twitter’s value equation, for me, lies in how easy it is to connect and network with like-minded people.

Read HIStalk’s excellent interview with Gary Cohen, the CEO of iSoft, and found this nugget from Cohen:

In my opinion, whether it’s at the smallest end of the scale or the largest end of the scale, you need a partnership for delivery of healthcare solutions of a complex level. You’re not going to a shop and buying a piece of commodity and walking out and you don’t have see the shop keeper again. If that works, or doesn’t, you don’t really have a relationship with the vendor of that software. You just put it in your system. It either works or doesn’t work. You might be pissed off with the vendor, but that’s a reputational issue. You don’t really have a relationship.

Complex healthcare delivery solutions at the level we’re talking about require a very significant interaction and partnership between the providers and the integrators and the government, or the providers of the services — the users. If you don’t have that partnership, and because you dictate terms that become more and more unreasonable, if that partnership starts to get one sided by either side, then basically that relationship starts breaking down as the complexities of the solution, which often requires a lot of flexibility, and as time goes on, changes of understanding of the market and things.

The best vendor/client relationships are partnerships where the success of one leads to the success of the other, and those successes build on each other.

Cohen’s talking here about how partnerships are affected by contractual terms. Thinking about marketing as the beginning of a partnership, what can we marketers do to lay the foundation of a solid relationship?