Health B2B Marketing

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)

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.

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.

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?

It's New Year's Resolution time again. How high will you set your goals?

Some people dread setting new year’s resolutions. Not me—setting goals is the thing I look forward to most about New Year’s. It was about this time last year that I resolved to start a health care B2B marketing agency. This year, my goals won’t be as life-changing as last years, but that doesn’t mean they’re not as important. Here are five professional goals I’ve set for myself in 2009. I’d love to hear what your goals are.

I resolve to daily study of the health industry. Even after 10 years in health care, it’s not time to coast with the knowledge I have. Health care, especially health care IT, is in major upheaval, and there will be new marketing opportunities because of the changes. To keep up with these opportunities, I will read an industry magazine or newsletter or blog every day and keep notes on what I learn. (I’m sure you’ll benefit from some of that learning through this blog.)

I resolve to think big. I’m a task-oriented person—do something, do it well, then go on to the next thing. There’s always a “next thing,” and in my rush to get things done, sometimes I neglect thinking about how I can do things better. So this year, once a week, I’ll take time every week to think big–for my clients, for my friends and for me.

I resolve to give back. There’s more to business than just making money. I want to use my talents and experience to contribute to something else. I’m not exactly sure to what I’ll be donating my time. Maybe an industry organization; a nonprofit; a political campaign. Any of these things will work; I just need something to give me a break from the daily dollar dash.

I resolve to delight my clients. Goes without saying that I’m nowhere without my clients. The best part of my work is using marketing to help clients accomplish their business objectives. So in 2010, I will do everything I can to make them happy. To do that, I’ll stay in constant contact with them, solicit feedback consistently, and resolve concerns as soon as they come up. My clients will help me know if I’ve accomplished this goal.

I resolve to balance my work and my life. I run my own business and I could in the office every waking moment. There’s no end of things to do, and honestly, I love my work. But I need to remember that I work so that I can have a life. My life is my family. So there will be days and times when I will completely shut down work and just focus on my wife and kids. I’m sure my wife will let me know how I’m doing.

What about you? What are your professional goals for 2010?