Health B2B Marketing

Some hospitals are struggling right now, and marketing can help them. But what won't work is pumping more marketing dollars into a fatally flawed institution in hopes of reviving it.

I saw two tweets during the past week that triggered the same red flag: they proffered marketing as the savior for ailing hospitals. This marketer is skeptical. Here are the tweets:

@KarenEllis1: St Vincent in Manhattan Shutters – What I Wish They Knew About Increasing Patient Volume #hcmktg http://dld.bz/chsr

@mspier: Excellent piece on how aggressive #hcmktg may save Grady Memorial in Atlanta. Is it a smart move? http://shar.es/mjDZe

The first tweet links to the “Turn Up Your Volume” blog and a post by John Luginbill, who has some impressive credentials. But I take issue with his statement that St. Vincent’s hospital in Manhattan “could have been saved by marketing.”

The second tweet links to an article by Marianne Aiello, marketing editor for HealthLeaders Media, who writes a nice defense of Grady Memorial’s marketing budget. But I disagree with the sub-headline: “Why Marketing May Revive the Struggling Hospital.”

Before I go further, apologies to Luginbill and Aiello. I don’t know either of them, and I don’t want to make them enemies of mine. In Aiello’s defense, she probably didn’t write the headline. In the copy editor’s defense—the one who probably did write the headline—she’s trying to get people to read the article. Same goes for Luginbill: he’s drawing attention to his specialty: increasing patient volume at hospitals. Can’t blame a guy for that, can I?

I talked this week with some friends who work for some very successful Utah hospitals, but those hospitals are struggling right now because of the overall economy. Less disposable income has meant fewer elective (read: “money making”) procedures being performed in these facilities.

Now, these hospitals aren’t in danger of closing like St. Vincent’s did or selling out like Detroit Medical Center did. The Utah hospitals serve populations that are relatively healthy and relatively well-insured. They can rely on commercially insured patients to make up the difference for the uninsured and for those insured by government payers like Medicaid and Medicare. Grady, St. Vincent’s and DMC all serve different patient populations: more unhealthy with a high percentage of uninsured or government-insured patients. They can’t rely as much on commercially insured patients.

The answer that Luginbill and Aiello offer is for public, urban hospitals to use marketing to go out and get more commercially insured patients. I see a few problems with that:

• There’s a finite pool of commercially insured Americans, and they’ve probably already chosen a hospital close to them
• You can bet that if urban hospitals use marketing to attract the commercially insured, suburban hospitals will do the same thing, too
• Health reform won’t kick in more insured people until 2014; even then, many of the newly insured will be on poor paying government plans

But let’s say that more marketing does bring more commercially-insured patients to urban hospitals. Will that fact alone save the hospitals from the brink of ruin? Not necessarily. Tight spending and prudent decision-making are key to running a hospital—any hospital—and just because there’s an influx of cash doesn’t mean that the root of the problem is resolved.

We all know the old saying, “put lipstick on a pig.” It refers to dressing up some unattractive product or service in hopes of making it more attractive. That can sometimes work, honestly. But what won’t work is pumping more marketing dollars into a fatally flawed product in hopes of reviving it. Marketing alone can’t save a failing hospital.

To see how I use time tracking to stay productive, read on. Then get back to work.

I’ve dedicated two posts about a key for staying productive at work: keeping track of your time. The first post introduced the concept that time tracking can improve productivity, while the second discussed the type of things you need to track. Today’s post will discuss how you can make all that time tracking effort bear fruit.

I mentioned in post two that I figured out that time tracking can be more than a way to make me work harder; it could also make me work smarter—that is, be more productive. The following are five ways you can make time tracking work for you:

Compare and contrast projects. When you use your spreadsheet’s formula functions, you can determine the percentage of time certain activities take for specific projects. When you’ve completed enough projects, you can compare and contrast them. For example, you could contrast how you spent your time planning a successful event versus the time you spent on an unsuccessful event. See if you can find replicable patterns of success.

Accurately plan future projects. How often do you get a question that starts out, “How long will it take you to…?” When you’re tracking your time, you don’t have to pull an estimate out of your ear. Just open up your trusty ProjectTracker, add up the time it took to complete a similar project, and you’ve got a real-world estimate that you can have confidence sharing.

Justify staff requests. Who among us doesn’t need more staff? But justifying that we need the help can often be the most difficult part of hiring a new person. Business leaders want data, and data from your ProjectTracker can show your VP not only how much time you’re spending on essential projects but also how that keeps you from other important priorities.

Set goals and follow how well you’re accomplishing them. In post one, I discussed how tracking “non-project time” helped me to set a goal for increasing the time I spent on important projects. That one action helped me to decrease my unproductive time by 40%. I believe that tracking this one metric can help everyone be more productive, but you could also extend this type of goal setting into specific areas of your job.

For example, think about the most important aspect of your job. How much time do you spend on that job category? How could it improve your results if you spent more time on that high priority function? What could you cut out that would allow you to spend more time on this important category? What amount of time should you reasonably be spending on the more important category? The answers to all these questions will help you set goals to change the way you’re spending time at work. Then follow-up‐monthly, weekly, or even daily—to see how you’re doing.

Find out where you’re strong. You typically spend more time on activities you enjoy than on activities you don’t enjoy. That’s true in your personal life as well as your life at work. By tracking your activities, you can see the activities on which you spend the most time, which are more likely to be enjoyable. Now, there’s bound to be a part of your job that you hate but that’s a necessity, so the data won’t tell you everything. But look at the activities where you are surprised you spend a lot of time. That activity is likely one of your strengths. If you know your strengths, you know can negotiate your job description so that more of your job involves those strengths, helping you to contribute more and be more productive.

Tracking my time has been the single-most important catalyst I’ve used to improve my productivity. If you’d like to discuss some of my ideas, including a more in-depth presentation on how to track your time, let me know in the comments.

Previously, I offered one simple rule for improving productivity: keep track of your time. Because simple rules aren't always easy to follow, here are some time-keeping tips.

A few weeks ago, I posted an article that offered one simple rule for improving your productivity: keep track of your time. As we all know, simple rules aren’t always easy to follow. So I offered to share a bit more about my time-keeping process. I’m a bit late in writing this—for reasons I described in my last post—but here’s the follow-up article I promised.

My time-tracking system has morphed over the past eight years. When I first decided to keep track of my own time, I simply wrote down the date, a brief description of what I was doing, and a measure of how long I did it. But I began to see that keeping track of my time could do more than just help me stay on task; it could help me be more productive. To measure my productivity, every line item on my “ProjectTracker” spreadsheet now includes the following: the day’s date, a job category code, an activity code, a project code, an activity description and an hour column. Let me explain what I mean by job category, activity and project:

Job category: Job categories are the various parts of a marketer’s job description. In one of my previous jobs, for example, I was mostly focused on managing marketing projects, so I kept track of creative management, project management, campaign management, event management and non-project work. For my health care B2B marketing business, I keep track of all billable work, sales efforts, marketing activities and staffing issues, plus I include an administrative category so I can keep track of things that are necessary to run the business but that don’t fall in to the above categories. You know your job better than anyone; break it up into categories that will give you a meaningful view of how you spend your time.

TIP: I use numerals as job category codes. For example:

  1 = Billable work
  2 = Sales
  3 = Marketing
  4 = Staffing
  5 = Administrative

Activity: Activities are the things you do to “get the job done.” For instance, if part of your job is creative direction, there are a number of activities you perform to do that part of your job well: you develop creative briefs, you conduct meetings, you edit, you review and approve. If you’re a public relations pro, you’ll do things like planning, writing, editing and pitching. As the leader of a B2B marketing agency, the activities I track are centered around planning and strategy, creative direction, production management, and project/campaign evaluation. Whatever you do, have enough activities so you can describe everything you do throughout the day.

TIP: I use alphabetical characters for activity codes. For example:

  A = Analysis
  B = Brainstorming
  C = Concepting
  D = Planning
  E = Outline
  F = Creative Direction
  G = Draft Copy
  H = Edit Copy
  I = Finalize Copy
  J = Draft Design
  K = Edit Design
  L = Finalize Design
  M = Production
  N = Launch
  O = Comparison
  P = Evaluation

Project: A project is something that you do to reach your business goals. To keep track of my agency’s projects, I’ve made up five-character alphanumeric codes for each billable deliverable and for all my sales and marketing activities. The type of code I use doesn’t matter—it could be a phrase rather than a code. What matters is that it’s unique. That way, I can keep track of how I spend my time on each project.

TIP: Here’s an example of how I develop project codes. The first character represents the client (I use an underscore for internal projects), and the final four characters describe the deliverable.

  DPPCC: Client PPC Campaign
  XSPKR: Client Speaker's Bureau
  NBRAU: Client Brand Audit
  GBCRD: Client Business Cards
  _BLOG: Agency Blog

Once you’ve figured out all the category, activity and project codes, use your spreadsheet’s built-in functions to tie everything together: calculate how much time you spend per job category, how much time you spend per activity, and how much time you spend on each project.

You can go even further and develop tables that track the activities that make up each job category, the activities take the most time per project, how much time you spend per activity per job category, etc.

How much time does this take? I typically spend no more than 15 minutes a day logging my time, and that’s only if I wait until the end of the day to track my time. If you’re going to make the commitment to track your time, I’d recommend making it part of your workflow. When you finish up an activity, take 20 seconds to log it, and it becomes part of what you need to do to complete that activity. The thing that takes the most time is developing your ProjectTracker spreadsheet. But I can make that easier for you.

If you’d like to start tracking your time, I can provide you with a template to get you started that has all the spreadsheet calculations built in. If you want the template, let me know by commenting on this article and I’ll send you the file.

If your organization can communicate a vision that inspires, you might have the same affect on your customers that the Boy Scouts have had on me.

Regular readers of the blog will note that it’s been a few weeks since I’ve posted an article. Here’s why: I’ve spent two long weekends—six days, in total—at a leadership training session at wilderness camp about an hour away from my home. The balance of my time in the past two weeks was spent keeping clients happy and making sure my business didn’t fall apart in my absence. (I’m happy to report that all is well.) No time to blog, and only a little time to tweet.

The leadership training was a great experience for me, and, while it wasn’t health care or B2B-related, there was a principle reinforced to me that I think applies to you and your business. It has to do with vision and values.

The training was run by the Boy Scouts of America, an organization for which I volunteer. There were about 50 other men and women there, most of whom are also volunteers. We all spent $185 of our own money to attend this camp, which would teach us to be better volunteer leaders. Why would we spend six days away from family and work, and pay our own way to do so? From my experience and my conversations with most of the people there, the answer is this: we believe in the vision of Scouting.

The vision of Scouting, if I may offer my interpretation, is that young men can become great men if they are driven by values such as duty to God and country, integrity, service, personal development and high moral standards. I have two sons, and I would call them successful not only if they end up with solid professional careers, but more importantly, if they exhibit Scouting’s ideals: trustworthiness, loyalty, courtesy, kindness, good cheer, thrift, bravery and reverence. Using those ideals, I see them blessing the lives of their families and improving their communities.

Scouting helps them learn and practice those ideals. And so I volunteer, not only for my sons but for their friends. I have weekly meetings with the Boy Scouts, I chaperone them on camping trips, I even help with fund-raising, both for the local group and for the national organization.

Now, most health care B2B vendors have highly loyal customers, so loyal that they pay extra for your trainings, that they are enthusiastic participants in your user groups, that they attend your annual conference religiously. What is it that drives them to be so loyal to you? And how can you encourage the same type of action in other customers?

You can do so by following a simple principle: communicate a vision that reaches their values.

I would venture that the benefits you offer your most loyal customers satisfy at least one of their deeply-held values. I’m a supporter of Scouting because it helps me to instill within my boys the character traits I think will help them be successful men. You could call that my “parenting” value. What values do your customers hold that motivates them to action?

When you know what their values are, articulate your organization’s vision in a manner that illuminates and inspires. The Boy Scouts of America did it for me. You can do it for your customers.

How have you seen a customer’s inner values motivate action? Can you share any examples of how you have communicated your company’s vision? Please share in the comments…