MARKETING & COMMUNICATIONS

How Hospital Marketing-Communications Leaders are Preparing for the Post-COVID Futured
SHSMD connected with experts from three top health systems to pick their brains about departmental planning in 2021 and beyond.

COVID-19 completely upended hospital marketing and communications last year, forcing departmental directors to reduce budgets, manage teams remotely and adapt to rapidly evolving consumer expectations. As vaccination distribution ramps up and optimism spreads, leaders are left wondering: What comes next?

The Society for Health Care Strategy & Market Development (SHSMD) recently sat down with three experts from top health systems based in Michigan, Utah and Ohio to pick their brains about future planning. What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation.

SHSMD: As you contemplate the post-COVID future, what skill sets are going to be most important for health care marketing teams?

Jennifer Carbary, marketing director, Beaumont Health*: There’s definitely an expectation that our teams be more agile, digitally savvy and collaborative across traditional siloes. We’re in the middle of a new brand campaign that demonstrates our commitment to the community, and it requires intense collaboration among internal communications to find the stories, our content marketing team to produce and distribute those stories, the media team to make their pitches, and the brand team to turn them into radio and TV spots. It requires our team to lean into the idea of one piece of content distributed in multiple ways to different audiences. The need to collaborate across siloes is a big change for us, post-COVID.

Kevan Mabbutt, senior vice president and chief consumer officer, Intermountain Healthcare: Clearly, digital-first is where we’re at and now even more so since COVID hit. We’ve probably all developed relationships we never thought we’d need to have with infectious disease docs. Collaborating across functions is going to be more and more critical to health care marketers. In terms of the marketer of the future, the mindset continues to shift as the need does. Our profession will require people who are adaptive, comfortable in ambiguity and can lead through change. People who are resourceful, consumer-centric and able to influence clinical, operations and technology peers.

Peter Miller, marketing and communications administrator, Cleveland Clinic: I see it as a new application of old skills: empathy, communication and innovation. Everything we do — from presentations to onboarding new employees or listening to clients — needs to involve building a virtual routine. These new processes are awkward at first. But once they’re in place, for example, doing digital huddles in a more frequent manner, it becomes comfortable and routine. All of our support services are rotating through safety stations at our locations. Graphic designers and data scientists are greeting patients and visitors. So, what was a necessary, all-hands-on-deck duty has become in some ways an opportunity to be closer to patient care and it connects us all more closely to the mission.

SHSMD: A year or two from now, what do you expect to be some of your strategic priorities, given that your budgets might still be constrained?

Mabbutt: I expected to see some resurgence around sponsorship. But we’re trying to adopt a fewer-bigger-better approach there because we’ve literally had hundreds of sponsorships to support and it’s not sustainable or effective. That’s not a COVID-specific concern, although, being able to activate in a post-pandemic world will be important. The consumer truly has arrived in health care and our big tech and retail competitors are hardwired to be consumer-centric. We’ve got to think that way, too. A lot of our investment will be in that space which will drive not only our experience work, but of course all that we do from a go-to-market strategy and communications perspective. We’ll also continue to see ever-greater focus in digital. We’ve seen it as a great way of reaching and activating people where they are and becoming that influencer in the moment, but also in developing long-term relationships with our consumers.

Miller: Digital delivery tools and content will be critical. It is really continuing a trend: less print, less direct mail and more advertising that complements public relations and owned resources, like your website or directories. Leaders will also increasingly demand more direct attribution of contribution margin from marketing activities, an expectation we’re anxious to meet. Less office space, more working from home and a more mobile workforce will continue to be the norm. And I expect to see more collaboration between providers and other community resources to overcome some of the inequities in health care delivery that COVID has shown, in stark nakedness.

Carbary: I also think it will be important to stay connected to hospital operations so that those efforts that we have directly with consumers can be turned on or off as operations have to flex to support either COVID, the flu or any other surges that might happen.

SHSMD: As you address some of these priorities, how do you justify your marketing budget?

Mabbutt: We want to be hyper accountable for the effectiveness of our spend. So, at the front end we’re building into any activity, very clear goals around the impact marketing can have to influence the way people think, believe and act. But in a highly value-based care system, some of our incentive is to keep people out of facilities, too. That creates an interesting measurement challenge because you can succeed in some ways by the inverse of volumes in that value-based model. We’re working through what that looks like. We launched our digital front door (called My Health+) and we’re looking to understand the impact it has on overall experience, and then the impact that overall experience has on attraction and retention of patients and members. There’s a long-term need to understand the drivers of our business from a consumer point of view and what influences market share. A lot of consumer work — online communities, immersive ethnography, as well as other qualitative measures — will be key to determining our strategies and then evaluating how effective we’ve been.

Miller: Anyone who is in support services in health care feels as if they have to be a chief justification officer all the time. We want to deliver on a list of transparent expectations. We try to focus as an organization on service-level expectations, and for marketing that can mean improved internal communication. We have talked about the need for improved attribute association with the brand, improved awareness and lead volume. But we want whatever that list is to be transparent. Finance leaders need to understand that we’ve committed to meeting those goals and we want to compare ourselves to other organizations.

Carbary: For Beaumont, it will continue to be relying on our CRM and in cases where we are not able to measure a consumer response with a clinical encounter — are there other ways that we can support the ask that may not require a traditional marketing expenditure? It’s not an ad or a direct mail but maybe it’s content marketing or digital lead cultivation and nurturing, and looking for other ways to solve what the organization is looking to do that don’t require traditional expenses in marketing.

SHSMD: Any other advice you’d share with professionals who are making these justifications to hospital leadership?

Miller: We all know that cutting marketing and communications resources when they’re most needed is a mistake. And we see it in some of the smaller organizations that are not yet centralized within Cleveland Clinic, a knee-jerk reaction of “here’s an expense I can reduce in my budget moving forward.” But we need to help our organizations understand the opportunity there is to reallocate resources, whether they be media production, labor or sponsorships. We are sound stewards of the dollars committed to marketing our organizations and have had an ample opportunity during the pandemic to show that those resources can be allocated where they are needed most.

Carbary: For Beaumont, it’s still about ROI. It’s being able to show genuine impact from our marketing tactics and efforts. We’ll be spending a lot of time over the next year trying to define a value for social content, for example, so that we can continue to put that dollar amount on it and justify the expenses and the resources that are needed to accomplish our goals.

Mabbutt: We’ve all realized how the consumer has come to health care during the pandemic in a more empowered way, with different expectations of how we can support them. If there’s one thing we’ve all got to focus on — it is deeply understanding those needs and expectations — that’s going to help us survive and thrive in this new future.

For more on these concepts — including benchmarking data and expert advice — be sure to purchase SHSMD’s By the Numbers: 2020 Special Edition report now available at 30% off using code BTN30. Topics covered include budgets, staffing, marketing telehealth, what worked well during the pandemic, what did not and key changes marketers must sustain. And stay tuned this summer for more information on a NEW benchmarking tool that will allow you to explore and compare how other organizations like yours are investing in marcom.

For information on building new strategy skills, read Bridging Worlds: The Future Role of the Health Care Strategist.

* Editor’s note: Jennifer Carbary was with Beaumont Health at the time of this interview, but has since left to join a different Michigan-based organization.

 

This article features interviews with: 

Jennifer Carbary
Director, Marketing and Communications,
McLaren Port Huron
Sterling Heights, Michigan

Former Director, Marketing,
Beaumont Health
Detroit, Michigan

Kevan Mabbutt
Senior Vice President and Chief Consumer Officer
Intermountain Healthcare
Salt Lake City, Utah

Peter Miller
Administrator, Division of Marketing and Communications
Cleveland Clinic
Cleveland, Ohio

Image credit: iStock.com courtneyk