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Budget Cuts? Outsmart When You Can't Outspend

Your CEO has just told you that your marketing budget has been cut for next year—what do you do?

Don’t panic. While an unlimited marketing budget seems like the answer to many, there are ways to market your brand economically without letting it fade into obscurity. In fact, not only will the following ideas help you stretch your marketing dollar, they will also provide you and your team with a discipline that will serve you well in good times as well as bad.

When the Minneapolis advertising agency Fallon McElligott Rice (now Fallon Worldwide) opened its doors in 1981, it ran an introductory ad with the headline: “A new advertising agency for companies that would rather outsmart the competition than outspend them.” This sentence can easily be revised to suit our purposes: Outsmart your competition when you can’t outspend them.

Effective Branding
If you’re lucky enough to have a brand, treat it like gold. If your hospital has just merged with another health care system or is otherwise undergoing re-branding, you’ll have to create a brand. Though this can be difficult, it does present several unique advantages––not the least of which is the ability to dispel a negative brand image by effectively “wiping the slate clean.”

Your brand is the intangible sum of everything your hospital represents in the minds of consumers. As such, it has equity and is something you need to protect vigorously––especially in tougher economic times. In order to keep your brand at the top of consumers’ minds, it must constantly be nurtured and fed, or it will fade away. To prevent this, there are several strategies to consider.

One method to raise, or at least maintain, your brand’s awareness is to identify a niche not currently occupied in the marketplace. For instance, one of our clients is a community hospital in a small Midwestern university town. Because the other major tertiary health care facility in the region is a large teaching hospital, we felt that positioning our client as the warm, friendly hospital––one that has served as the community’s health care partner for almost 130 years––would differentiate it from the large and impersonal-seeming university hospital. So far, this approach has worked very well.

If not warm and friendly, perhaps your hospital is the academic hospital, or the high-tech hospital, or the maternity hospital. Survey your competition and ask yourself, “What’s missing from this market?” If what’s missing is something your hospital can claim (uniquely, if possible)––go for it. Remember: to differentiate yourself, you must first be different.

Once you have positioned your hospital, it is crucial that you remain focused on your brand image. All brand marketing communications messages should be consistent and clear. Any deviation from your image will cause confusion in the minds of consumers and contribute to the eventual dilution of your brand. A consistent brand voice is even more important during lean times. If you can afford only a limited number of consumer brand executions (brochures, ads, etc.), make sure they work together to reinforce one another. If your executions look, sound or feel different, your limited voice will seem even smaller in an already crowded marketplace.

Another way to focus your brand is to communicate your message through one or two key service lines. If you highlight these centers of excellence, they will invariably cast a positive halo over your entire institution, effectively killing many birds with one or two stones. This can be tricky politically, but consider the alternative: if you spread your small budget across many service lines, you’ll fail to give any of them the attention they need to make an impact in consumers’ minds.

Practical Media Placement
No matter how compelling your creative executions, no matter how on-target your messages, all will be quite irrelevant if they fail to reach the consumer. Hence, the irrefutable importance of effective media placement.

Here, demographic research is key. You must first make sure your medium matches your target audience. You must also make sure the medium matches the message. For instance, if your message is somewhat complicated, perhaps a print execution or direct-mail piece, both of which can be viewed and reviewed at leisure, would be the best choice. For a less-complicated branding message, a combination of radio and television might do the trick.

Media Alternatives
In addition to traditional media (television, print, radio, outdoor, etc.), there are several lower-cost alternatives that can be vital to communicating a hospital’s message, including public relations, community relations and physician relations.

Public Relations
An effective and sustained public relations campaign requires that you establish credibility with your local and regional media by providing them with meaningful stories about hospital services and individual patients on a regular basis. It is important that you target the media carefully while positioning your hospital as the “expert” in your areas of excellence. You should reserve follow–up efforts for media for whom you have a specific angle––and an identified reason why the story is right for them.

Writing letters to editors of magazines and newspapers is a good way to show your expertise in health care by providing more information on, or a correction to, a previously published article or letter to the editor. A letter can also open a dialogue by raising an issue or topic of interest to readers, so long as it is timely, relevant and accurate. You could also encourage local publications to print weekly health tips from your hospital, or run a regular medical column ghost written by one of your physicians.

A tactic that can be a quick and easy way to promote your hospital’s service lines is to create an online pressroom that provides press releases, photos and background sheets.

Community Relations
In addition to traditional marketing and public relations tactics, community relations is a relatively inexpensive and effective approach to reaching large groups of your target audience in a way that enhances the hospital’s goodwill in the community. This can be done fairly easily at a grass-roots level. You can personally get your message out to the community’s opinion leaders by serving on the boards of local charities and clubs.

Another useful tactic is to sponsor community events and fundraisers that help position your hospital as the community’s health care partner. You can even offer your hospital as the event site and/or your CEO as the event’s emcee. Of course, you should ask the organization running the event to include you in the event’s promotion materials (press releases, direct mail pieces, etc.). Once you’ve established a community event, you can then notify the media through phone calls and press releases. In addition to sponsoring community events, you can maintain a consistent presence in the marketplace by providing regular health fairs, screenings, etc. To keep staff time to a minimum, you should consider recruiting volunteers. After the event, it’s likely that they will also serve as free word-of-mouth advertisers for the hospital, so long as their volunteer experiences are pleasant.

And finally, you should call community, business and industry organizations and schools and offer to speak at a meeting, participate in a workshop, give a demonstration, or give a tour of your hospital. The more you and your hospital positively interact with the surrounding community, the more your hospital’s image will be enhanced in the minds of consumers.

Physician Relations
Physician relations is an often-ignored yet crucial factor in generating increased referrals. High-dollar procedures are rarely elective; on the contrary, they are most often referred by a primary care provider or specialist. With that in mind, target these physicians by building stronger relationships with them (including both hospital staff and referring physicians). And remember, satisfied physicians are great ambassadors for the hospital.

Designate a marketing staff member to serve as a physician liaison. He or she should be responsible for maintaining open lines of communication between physicians and the hospital. Additionally, through direct sales efforts, he or she should promote the services/specialists to referring providers while eliminating barriers to referral.

Direct Marketing
For those who don’t blindly accept the inherently metaphysical nature of broadcast advertising, there’s nothing like a little quantifiable return on investment. And there’s nothing like a little direct marketing to give you just that.

As we all know, a traditional brand image campaign is a long–term tool intended to increase a hospital’s awareness and preference. Conversely, a direct marketing campaign can be an effective short–term strategic tool––one that is specifically designed and targeted to provide an immediate and tangible increase in business (e.g. offering a free cholesterol screening, which will reveal people in need of follow-up care). And because direct marketing requires a response from your target, it provides an excellent method of gauging the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

In addition to driving business, direct marketing events are a good way to start building your database for a future customer relationship management program. For that reason alone, you should try to find enough money each year for at least one event centered around an area of focus.

Employee Word–of–Mouth
When it comes down to it, your employees are your greatest advertisers. You can go a long way to supporting your brand by ensuring that every customer interaction is with informed, satisfied employees. Enhance word–of–mouth marketing opportunities throughout your facility by “recruiting” employees as positive spokespeople for your hospital. Simple methods of enhancing employee morale include: holding employee forums or “town hall” meetings with the CEO, running an internal marketing campaign for employees that precedes your media marketing campaigns, or publishing weekly one-page newsletters for specific messages such as benefits updates, policy changes, etc.

Research
Find the money to do consumer research. Period. If you take away one thing from this article, this should be it. Your marketing campaign will be much more effective if you know who your audience is, what captures their attention, what drives their decisions and what makes them think of your hospital (or why they don’t). It’s worth the up–front investment because it’ll save you money in the long run by helping you execute a campaign that targets precisely the right audience with precisely the right message.

The Final Analysis
Some of the challenges facing health care marketers today:

• An expanding health care market, as baby boomers age and preventive health continues to drive volume, causing hospitals to invest in facility construction and renovation
• Workforce shortages and increased union activity
• Hospitals spending more on recruitment and retention
• Hospitals competing increasingly on the basis of quality, meaning they must have the best specialists, technology and facilities — which requires an increase in money being spent on hospital operations

These factors and many others weigh heavily on hospital budgets. The first casualties in any time of economic difficulty are often the marketing portions of those budgets. This tends to be a knee-jerk reaction brought about by the fact that, to the uninitiated, marketing communications efforts generally don’t produce an immediate return on investment. While we as marketers recognize this as erroneous, it nonetheless seems to be a prevailing sentiment and should therefore be dealt with in a logical, step-by-step manner.

Whatever your approach to a budget crunch, the bottom line is: you need to build a case for defending your marketing dollars. You––and more importantly, your CEO––must understand that the best doctors, technology and facilities mean nothing if you can’t tell the world about it.