Health B2B Marketing

GE Healthcare's "Healthymagination" B2B marketing campaign helped their audience see the how health care IT could transform the health care system.

2010 was the year that health care IT hit the big time. It started in 2009 with the ARRA stimulus package that promised as much as $17 billion to providers who put electronic medical records to meaningful use. And those two words—”meaningful use“—were the hottest words in health IT. It seemed everyone had an angle on meaningful use. And they should have. But it’s the actions of two big players that really made 2010 a banner year for health B2B marketing.

IBM and GE, two of the biggest names in B2B, made a big play in health care IT. IBM folded healthcare messages into their Smarter Planet campaign, and GE hit their Healthymagination campaign hard in 2010, especially during the Winter Olympic games in Vancouver. The New York Times reported that GE would spend $80 million on Healthymagination in 2010. IBM didn’t disclose their budget, but it didn’t seem trifling.

While everyone else was talking about meaningful use, GE and IBM were inspiring their audiences with what health IT can do. So, what can health care B2B marketers learn from health care IT’s big year?

Go big. The iron’s hot, and it’s time to strike. Your prospects and customers have budgeted IT expenditures for EMR, HIE, and ICD-10 projects (and a few other acronyms that escape me). They’ll not only need the technology; they’ll also need wrap-around services to make it all work. Your competitors know this, and they’re going to be pushing largely the same messaging that you will. The challenge you have is to rise above the clutter. Healthymagination and Smarter Healthcare work so well because they’re big, inspiring ideas. What’s your big idea?

Be real. The problem with a big idea is that it too often has nothing behind it. You can spend a lot of money and strike just the right tone, but if there’s no reality behind the campaign, all you end up with are jaded prospects and unhappy customers. In my experience, the best campaigns are planned with key people from the executive team, marketing, product management, sales and finance. When all these stakeholders are involved and working towards the same objective, a big idea can become a big seller.

Photo credit: Roland Tanglao (cc)

When President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law, it had ramifications on the entire health industry. What can you learn from last year's health reform experience?

The year 2010 will go down in history as the year the United States passed health reform. It wasn’t as sweeping as many had hoped. And it went way too far for some people. But the fact of the matter is this: the country saw that the number of uninsured was unacceptable, and they passed sweeping legislation to help fix the problem. To me, that’s historic.

The target of the law was mainly health insurance companies. It required them to cover certain services, the details of which have yet to be ironed out. It prohibited them from medical underwriting and from spending less than 85% of their premium receipts on patient care. The law also gave regulators greater power to eliminate fraud and abuse, and it allowed for greater authority to challenge insurance rate hikes.

Rate hikes were the subject of much public debate in 2010, with HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius speaking out against WellPoint’s proposed rate hikes. She also pressured the CEOs of other major insurance companies like UnitedHealthcare, Aetna and the Healthcare Services Corp to justify their own premium increases.

What can marketers and PR pros learn from the health reform experience?

Keep tabs on politics and politicians. You know that your company’s fortunes can be helped or hindered by politics. One best practice is to understand and plan for what lies ahead. Your company’s government relations team can educate you on how legislation up for consideration this year could affect the company’s long-term prospects. Schedule some time with your government relations people now.

Assume the partnership position. Early on in the health reform legislative process, insurance companies behaved like partners with the Obama Administration. Remember the much publicized meetings between the Administration and the health industry execs back in 2009? That all changed, from my perspective, when public support for health reform started waning. The administration abandoned its conciliatory approach and reverted back to their old reliable way of demonizing insurance companies to gain public support. Such is life for health insurance marketers. Here’s hoping for a less turbulent year in 2011.

For the health IT market, we are well-positioned to be partners. Our products and services are generally designed to remove costs from the system. We can help insurance companies drive down administrative costs. We can help hospitals attain the lofty goal of driving up quality while lowering costs. We can help physicians meet the goal of electronic medical records without breaking the bank. If we are viewed as partners with government, insurers, providers and patients in becoming more efficient and driving down costs, we can avoid being in the difficult position that the insurance industry finds themselves in.

That vendors could be perceived as contributors to—not solvers of—the problem should be a real concern. There is skepticism about this industry’s sustainability. Congress is questioning HIT contracts. We need to be advocates within our organizations for words and actions that show that we are truly “solution providers.”

Photo credit: Progress Ohio (cc)

One lesson I've learned as a business owner: Never spend a dime unless you'll make (at least) two.

Last year was my first full year in business as Lumeno Marketing. I had been working in a stable corporate environment (as stable as any corporate environment is these days), but felt a strong need to spread my wings. So, without any previous experience running a business, I set up a shingle 16 months ago. It’s been one of the best decisions I’ve made. All the knowledge I’ve gained over the years has helped me tremendously in my current venture. But nothing has been more valuable than learning on the job.

One common knock on marketers and PR practitioners is that they don’t see the full business picture. We often have great ideas, but those ideas may not always match up with our leaders’ business priorities. As a business owner, I’ve learned a few things as a business owner that have made me a better marketer. Maybe they can help you, too.

Lesson 1: We are in the service business. If you’ve read “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,” you’re no doubt familiar with one of the maxims of author Robert Kiyosaki: Mind your own business. He tells a story of one of the founders of McDonald’s who was speaking to a group of graduate students. When he asked them to tell him what business he was in, they were taken aback. Of course we know what business you’re in, they said: you’re in the fast food business. No, he replied, I’m in the real estate business. He knew what made him money, and it wasn’t burgers. It was location.

As marketers, we need to know our real business. We’re not in the marketing, advertising, public relations, communications or marcomm business. We’re in the service business. As an agency owner, I don’t have a business if I have dissatisfied clients. So, happy clients is my business, and it’s your business, too. Your clients are your company’s executive team members. You need to set goals that will make them happy, and then do all you can to reach those goals.

Lesson 2: Don’t spend a dime unless you’re certain to (at least) double that dime. I bootstrapped my agency from zero. There was a lot of penny-pinching in those first few months, and I’m still running things very lean today. As a business owner, revenue is a resource that I must grow to stay in business.

You should know that when you plan a budget or request a budget increase, your leaders will need you to spell out very clearly how that marketing spend is going to yield a healthy return on investment.

Lesson 3: Time is money. You and I both know there aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything we need to do. As the owner of my business, I’m responsible for everything, and I need to be very careful with how I spend my time. Wasting time reading about my friends on Facebook: out. Using Facebook to increase my business’s visibilty: in. Reading articles about my favorite sports teams: out. Reading articles that will help me see trends in health care IT and finance: in.

Think about all the things you do each day that may be less effective, then be disciplined enough to remove those things out of your day. It’s not easy, but it’s worth it. Having the discipline to prioritize the less important, the important and the very important is also crucial. I’ve shared on this blog a few ways that I stay productive—check them out.

Lesson 4: Be optimistic. I eat what I kill, so to speak, and there are a lot of wolves out there just like me, trying to find their next meal. That’s reality for every business owner. But for me, thinking in those terms is toxic. Sure, I need to see things realistically, but a large dose of optimism is necessary to help me push through the tough times.

Marketing is hard work. Persuading people to pay attention to your message and to take action takes lots of time and resources, and, on a large scale, you’re going to fail more than you succeed. But the successes make all your efforts worth it. Being realistically optimistic will help you learn from your failures and continue creating and executing better strategies.

Photo credit: Linus Bohman (cc)

Abby Coplan of HRS says marketers need to roll-up their sleeves and do more so they can spend less.

Last week, Mike Schouten of Ingenix shared his perspective of yearly planning within a large health B2B marketing organization. This week, I wanted to give voice to the smaller organizations. So I asked my friend Abby Coplan, marketing director for the coding, auditing and outsourcing company HRS, to offer her take on marketing planning. As you’ll see from the interview, Abby is dynamic and opinionated, and she does a great job of helping her company succeed in a competitive market.

Full disclosure: HRS contracts with my agency, Lumeno Marketing.

Don Seamons: You work for a company that could be termed as a “Mom and Pop” business. Describe some of the give-and-take that you experience as you plan for next year.

Abby Coplan: Well, first of all, it’s a “Mom” shop. It’s a woman-owned, woman-run company, and that makes a huge difference in terms of our culture. We’ve been around a long time and we’ve been successful.

In terms of us being a smaller company, our budget is smaller, but I make every effort to make each dollar go as far as possible. I would also say that because we’re a small company, we can adapt quickly. There aren’t a lot of layers that we have to go through to make decisions. I can go right to the top. I have immediate access to the decision maker.

Don: What are some of the benefits of yearly planning in a small business?

Abby: Things aren’t as segmented in a small business, whereas in a larger company, things can be compartmentalized. Sometimes the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, which I ran into at previous positions I held.

When you work in a small company, you have to be willing to do more than just your job. That’s part of the fun and that’s part of what makes it tougher for some people, but I happen to like working in a small company. I like being involved in both the details and the big picture. Also, at a small company you have to be willing to do all sorts of work no matter what your title. I might be the marketing director, but you can bet that I’m there moving tables and putting together our booth or whatever is needed at the time. Because we are doing the work ourselves, we take a great amount of pride in our projects.

Another aspect of planning in a small business is the opportunity to be involved in the actual success or failure of the company. Marketing decisions directly affect the bottom line, and in a small company, those decisions can affect a bigger piece of the pie.

Don: You’re competing with bigger companies that presumably have bigger budgets. How do you counteract the advantages that your competitors may have?

Abby: I would say that I don’t think about trying to compete with the big guys. One of our advantages is that we’re not the big guy. On the other hand, you can’t act like they’re not there. But I think by focusing on what we do and on the factors that make us different, it’s the best way to bring out who we are. To try and beat 3M or Nuance, that would be wasting money and we can’t afford to do that. Plus, it almost doesn’t matter how big the budget is if you can create a marketing plan and a brand that is true to who you are as a company.

Don: How do you go about choosing the right marketing tactics?

Abby: I choose based on our past experience and the mileage we’ve gotten out of previous tactics. And we try to assess new opportunities that are available. I will say that I don’t just do that on my own. Wendy (Coplan-Gould, HRS’s president and founder) has long and deep expertise in this business and I try to use her as much as possible to get more information. She’s not a marketer, but she knows the market, and I try to pick her brain. I would say that I use Lumeno Marketing as a resource as well. We’re an outsourcing company, and we use outsourcing, too. To get expertise that augments our own is of value to us.

Even though I’m the marketing director, I don’t make the decisions on my own. We try and gather information from as many places as we can to make a good decision. Sometimes we need to make really hard choices to stay within the budget. We don’t have money to waste. Every time we’re making a marketing decision, we’re making an investment.

Don: Do you have any advice for other marketing directors who want to do more with less?

Abby: Don’t be afraid to roll up your sleeves. You have to do more with less money and make it work for you. There might be some actual elbow grease that you have to exert. And be prepared to make difficult decisions, because no one has an unlimited budget.

Don: What’s your favorite money-saving idea?

Abby: Be creative. A creative idea doesn’t have to cost a lot. Several of the promotions that we used at this year’s AHIMA show didn’t cost much, but it seemed to me like our audience appreciated the thought of a good idea. If you can take a creative idea from concept to execution to fruition, people will react to that.

Photo credit: Jennifer König (cc)

Mike Schouten, senior director of provider marketing with Ingenix, shares his insights on the subject of yearly planning and budgeting.

One of the goals of the HealthB2BMarketing blog is to share best practices peer to peer. Since this month’s posts are on the topic of yearly planning and budgeting, I asked Mike Schouten, a friend and one of the most talented marketing leaders I know, to share his insights on the subject.

Mike is the senior director of provider marketing for Ingenix.

Don Seamons: In planning, everything depends on the budget. How would you recommend marketers make a case for budget dollars?

Mike Schouten: From my vantage point, the conversation starts with the question of how much value do we as marketers bring to the equation. By addressing the question of value, Marketing is positioned appropriately as a strategic component of a company’s growth. If value is overlooked, Marketing is placed in the perilous position of existing only as an expense. With that in mind, there are three key areas of focus for any organization to ensure that value is met from its marketing activities.

The first key is becoming a company’s source for market and customer intelligence. True b-to-b marketing is built on the knowledge of a company’s current customers as well as its prospects that are in the best position to buy.

The second key is developing internal alignment with Sales, Client Management and Product Management. A market-lead organization is one that is structured and aligned so that these functions work together to identify, engage and retain customers in a credible, effective way.

The third key is measurement. At every stage of the marketing process, the ability to measure puts Marketing leadership in the driver’s seat in managing the budget and proactively recommending changes to the marketing mix over time.

Don: As you develop your marketing mix, how do you factor in measurable marketing activities, such as lead generation, and activities that aren’t as easily measured, such as branding?

Mike: I believe that everything that we do as marketers can be measured, to a certain extent. Of course, some things are more measurable than others, but the reality is, if we deem something as worthy to invest in, it should also warrant a measure of accountability. The practical challenge is to determine as an aligned organization which measurements are essential to the success of the business.

The backbone of our b-to-b marketing infrastructure is our closed-loop marketing system. Tools that once cost large organizations millions of dollars to implement are now available to companies of all sizes through web-deployed systems. The ability to source campaigns and track the advancement of marketing leads from initial contact to subsequent signing of contract is amazingly powerful.

Of course, not all marketing activities feed as cleanly into our closed-loop system. Brand strength and company perceptions, for example, require separate research measures. No less specific, but very different. Client retention and satisfaction also requires separate research methods that allow us to score our performance across our entire customer base and identify areas for improvement.

The bottom line to me is to understand the progression of clients from their initial introduction to our company to their satisfaction after our services and/or technologies are put into place. With that progression mapped from beginning to end, the right measures are built around one, company awareness and perception, two, volume and effectiveness of lead generation efforts, and three, proof of ROI performance and overall client satisfaction.

Don: How would you recommend balancing the need to be innovative with the need to get a return on investment?

Mike: That’s an interesting question, given the proliferation of marketing tools at our disposal. Ten years ago, a typical b-to-b marketing mix entailed events, trade advertising (with print still more prominent than online), direct mail, a web 1.0 presence and print collateral. Contrast that to today’s available tools and the gravitational pull of social media, and it’s obvious that innovation drives us to change over time. I believe that innovation is essential to ROI success, so long as the ability to compare to prior results is built into the process.

I think it’s healthy for a company to recognize and acknowledge up front the portions of the marketing mix that are the most risky. A new event by an unproven vendor, a new social media effort that requires a 15% shift of marketing staff’s time, reduction in direct mail in favor of email marketing efforts, eliminating a client conference in favor of online client engagements via webinars, these are all examples of innovation that carry a certain level of risk. As a result, there are portions within a plan that I characterize as “Marketing R&D,” where the outcomes are uncertain, but promising.

Don: As the health care B2B market changes, to what media do you see more dollars flowing? At which medium’s expense?

Mike: Health care has moved more slowly than other industries, but it’s apparent that the role of print advertising is truly waning. Trade publishers have now fully embraced an integrated model, with events, online content and direct outreach efforts the core to their success. Of course, the web and social media are rapidly advancing, and I would expect within the next few years, that we’ll see some amazing marketing approaches developed there. The reality is that as contemporary communications evolve, the way we communicate with our customers is becoming more direct, with capabilities—and results—published more rapidly and frequently. This direct communication model favors webinars, case studies, Twitter updates, and video, built on a foundation of a web experience that is less about documenting every last thing that we do, and more about how we help solve the industry’s and our clients’ problems. Finally, as much as many of us marketers would like to see otherwise (due to the logistics and expense involved), the number of healthcare industry events is growing dramatically, rather than decreasing. This is being fueled by such hot topics in the industry as EHRs and meaningful use, changing reimbursement models, compliance challenges, and the looming switch to ICD-10.

Don: Planning is never an easy process. As a director, what do you do to make that process easier for the people you manage?

Mike: We work hard to align our planning activities to the broader calendar of activities that occur within the business units, in Sales, and with Finance. This is in order to reduce the number of iterations to the marketing plan, and to make sure that our focus is in line with the revenue and profitability targets set forth across the enterprise. We also invest in the right data in the form of market research, industry reports, and internal sales and lead data to give our teams the right information to shape a strategic plan. Finally, we recognize the time required to build a good plan. We start our planning activities for the next calendar year in August, and usually lock the plans down in mid-November.

Yearly planning is tough, but it can also be rewarding. When you think in terms of evidence and ROI, you also focus more on what makes marketing valuable.

It’s October, and, for most of us, that means it’s the fourth quarter. As a marketer, “Q4″ is often a time for ratcheting up your efforts to see if you can make your numbers. It’s also a time for planning and budgeting—a time when you get to make a case for marketing dollars for the coming year. Makes you all toasty just thinking about it, right? Well, maybe not.

Yearly planning is tough. As a marketer, you’re often expected to justify your budget request with the suits in your company, some of whom don’t buy in to the value marketing can bring. If you’re not prepared, that can be a harrowing experience.

But yearly planning can also be a cathartic experience. It’s a time to purge your psyche of some of the frivolous issues you think about day-to-day, to roll-up your sleeves and get down and dirty with numbers, evidence and ROI. As you prepare your case for your executives, you start to focus more on what makes marketing valuable. That, in turn, can help you put more emphasis in your plans on things of greater import.

As you’re about to get neck-deep in planning, the Health B2B Marketing blog will share some insights from other marketers, myself included, that can make this year’s experience a little less harrowing and a lot more rewarding.

Photo credit: eric731 (cc)

Had a chance to talk with Roger May, Senior Marketing Director for Siemens Medical Solutions, who shared some insight on yearly marketing planning. Marketing planning, by the way, is the planned topic of discussion in the October posts on the Health B2B Marketing blog.

Had a chance to interview Bob Turk, chief marketing officer of Precyse Solutions, at the 2010 AHIMA Convention in Orlando. He had an interesting booth—the brand wasn’t front and center. He discusses his reasoning behind diminishing the brand name in the Precyse booth. He also shares some of his thoughts on marketing planning (the October topic on Health B2B Marketing).

The ICD-10 conversion will affect the systems and processes of every health care stakeholder. As a health care B2B marketer, what are you doing about ICD-10?

Health care B2B marketers: If you think ARRA was a big deal—to quote the immortal Randy Bachman of Bachman-Turner Overdrive—you ain’t seen nothing yet.

The impending conversion from ICD-9-CM to ICD-10-CM/PCS has been on provider’s radar since 2009, but it hasn’t received widespread attention until this year. Its effect on the health care industry has been compared by many to the Y2K conversion, and one organization has called it “the biggest change in health care since the advent of the computer.”

That’s high rhetoric, and, by all accounts I’ve seen, it’s not hyperbole. The ICD-10 conversion will affect the clinical, financial and IT systems, processes and workflows of every stakeholder in the health care industry: doctors, hospitals, insurers, government agencies. And it’s conversion is not that far away; it is mandated to be the method used for coding and reimbursement by October 1, 2013.

As a health care B2B marketer, have you jumped on the ICD-10 train? Since the conversion will affect so many organizations, it’s likely that it will affect your customers, too. How can you use marketing to set your organization up as an ICD-10 resource? To answer that question, go to your subject matter experts and pick their brains. Ask them questions like, “How does ICD-10 affect our customers?” “What will they need from our industry to prepare?” “What products or solutions do we have that will help our customers today?”

Once you’ve answered those basic questions, find out more about the ICD-10 challenge. I recommend reading the following:

Is ICD-10 the Industry’s Wake-up Call?
A good article in a recent Health Data Management issue on how (un)prepared the industry is at this point in time.

ICD-10 Watch
A microsite provided by Healthcare IT News, Healthcare Finance News and InfoSys that keeps readers updated on the latest ICD-10 developments.

American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) ICD-10 site
This page does a good job of explaining the benefits of ICD-10.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) ICD-10 Overview
Resources to help different industry segments prepare for ICD-10, plus information on ICD-10′s close cousin, the HIPAA 5010 transaction set.

Then comes the fun part: marketing your ICD-10 story to your customers. The only piece of advice I’ll give you is to move as fast as you can: chances are, your competitors have already gone to market.

What have you been doing to market your ICD-10 products and services?

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.