Physicians are a tough-to-reach audience. Jennifer Farias, marketing director for TopLineMD, tells me how her company has avoided traditional mass marketing expenses while still making inroads with physicians.
Josh Elson of Fluent Care, a provider of real-time location services on the Intelligent Insites platform, took some time to speak with me at HIMSS11.
After meeting with with Hyland Software at last year’s HIMSS conference in Atlanta, I’ve kept an eye on what they’re doing with social media. This year, I caught up with their Twitter account manager, Kaitlin Maurer, who gave me the details of her tweeting and blogging success. Check it out:
Had a chance to interview Marshall Votta, VP of network development for NaviNet, at HIMSS11. Marshall shared some info about his company’s move into mobile healthcare and the idea behind their “unified patient information management” campaign.
I had a chance to meet up with Matthew Browning at HIMSS11. Matthew is a nurse and healthcare IT entrepreneur, whose product—YourNurseIsOn.com—is getting a lot of buzz. Matthew talks about how important Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are to his marketing efforts.
The economy, regulatory requirements, congressional inaction and meaningful use penalties are changing the provider market, with hospitals the likely winners. But hospitals are feeling the budget crunch, too
With all the great things happening in the health IT market in 2010, it’s easy to forget that the economy continued to be a strain on providers. Add the down economy to regulatory requirements related to ICD-10 and EMRs, and those who provide care will continue to be burdened by financial worries in 2011.
Consider these factors:
- There was no permanent fix for the Medicare physician payment formula. Physician organizations like the AMA are saying that this could cause doctors to stop seeing Medicare patients and military families.
- Doctors are wary about meaningful use requirements. There was a ton of excitement in 2009 when the stimulus package was announced. Providers were eligible for up to $44,000 in incentives. That excitement has waned a bit. Many physicians are skeptical of the benefits of EMRs. Some docs are wondering if it’s really cost effective for them try to qualify for the package. ARRA’s penalties may make meaningful use difficult to avoid, but that doesn’t make docs feel any better.
- Some doctors are getting out of private practice and opting for the safety of a large group practice or working for hospitals. Group practices allow docs to focus less on business and more on patients. At the big practices, clinic managers and billing offices take care of the messy financial details. Hospitals rightly see physicians as a source of referrals, and the closer their relationship with them, the more beds they can fill.
- Hospitals, however, are feeling the squeeze as well. They are trying to eek out as much money from their supply chains as possible, and they don’t seem to be making the margins they used to.
What can marketers take away from 2010′s tough financial environment?
The hospital market is going to grow. As hospitals buy up private practices, and as Accountable Care Organizations become more viable, hospitals will have a lot of market power. If you’re used to marketing to 250,000 physician groups, your world will get a bit simpler as many of those physician groups coalesce into one of the 6,000 or so hospitals in America. But reaching hospital decision maker can be even more tricky than reaching a clinic decision maker. Time to bone up on your knowledge of the hospital market.
Focus on value. No one holding purse strings these days is willing to spend more than they have to. It’s on you as a marketer to tell a convincing value story. But more often than not, decisions will be made based on price. If your product or service isn’t the lowest priced, you may be able focus on your total cost of ownership, or the costs that fall outside of the check they write to your company. If you can show that the total cost of your product is less than your competitors, tell that story!
Photo credit: The Doctr (cc)
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)
Health B2B PR is much more than being personable. You have to be persuasive, persistent, patient and positive, as well as good at developing relationships.
When I was a year or two out of college and working in public relations, I remember going to some local PRSA gatherings and listening to PR students in the room introduce themselves. Invariably, there was always one or two students who stood up and announced that they were getting into the PR field because they “liked working with people.” I remember thinking at the time, “You’re in for a rude awakening.”
Not that liking people isn’t a good attribute when you’re working in public relations. My first job out of college, I worked a lot with people, and I liked it. But they didn’t necessarily like me. I worked for a heavy highway construction company, which at the time was re-building the main interstate freeway that runs through Salt Lake City. As a member of the company’s community relations team, part of my job was working with business owners whose business access was to be severely curtailed. Needless to say, I wasn’t the most popular person around.
In the years since, the public relations work I’ve done hasn’t been nearly as polarizing, but my opinion about public relations is the same: it’s tough work. You have to be persuasive, persistent, patient and positive, even in the face of inevitable rejections. You have to have a nice mix of left- and right-brain thinking. And you have to be good at developing relationships.
In the B2B realm, you can have all of the above attributes and still not be successful. If you don’t have the elements of a good story, or if you can’t tell that story effectively, you’re not going to get much attention for your organization, product or service.
This month on the Health B2B Marketing blog, we’ll discuss Health B2B PR: What makes a good story and how to tell it, how to go about working with the media and how social media is changing the face of B2B PR. If you have ideas about any of these things or a request on the topics you’d like to see covered, please share in the comments.
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)
What is the one thing B2B marketers should do to get budget buy-in? I posted this question on a few LinkedIn groups and got the following responses.
What is the one thing B2B marketers should do to get budget buy-in? I posted this question to a few LinkedIn groups (including the Health Care B2B Marketing Group—please join!), and got the following responses from a few B2B marketers from “across the pond.”
The key thing would be to show how what you’ve done in the past has driven the business to achieve better results, or if you haven’t got that, commit to achieving those results in coming year. The chances are your marketing dollars will be competing against other departments so you’ve got to prove that the company would be better off spending the dollar on marketing rather than saving it or spending it elsewhere.
Depending on your company’s objectives, that may not be just hard cash in the till (over time) but also brand awareness, customer satisfaction or other non-monetary measure.
But I think in many companies, it would be more likely that you’ll “only” have to fully justify any request for increases in budgets or for any amount over a top line guideline change.
— Stephen Mills, Head of B2B Marketing Campaigns, Communications, Events and Hospitailty at Telefonica O2 UK Limited
In my opinion the question every marketer should be asking themselves is ‘what is in this for the business?’ and the measures need to be in terms of long-term profitable clients that will be loyal customers for many years. This is the report you take to the board when seeking permission to spend £ on marketing.
— Iain Lovatt, Founder & Executive Chairman Blue Sheep Limited
What do you think? Share in the comments or discuss on the LinkedIn Health Care B2B Marketing Group.
Photo credit: dullhunk (cc)