MARKETING

New Orleans Health System Targets Women Along Every Step of Their OB Journey with One Integrated Campaign

The numbers were nothing short of eye-opening for leaders at LCMC Health, so much so that executives believed there must have been a mistake when presented with them.  

Overseeing one of Louisiana’s largest labor and delivery centers, the New Orleans-based health system had a hand in thousands of births each year. And yet, its employed pediatricians were only retaining about 8 percent of those patients for ongoing care. This trend was even more alarming, given the reality of declining birthrates, increasingly fierce competition for obstetrics (OB) care, and millennial moms’ willingness to shop around for OB/GYNs and pediatricians, regardless of how satisfied they were with their last experience, according to local market research.

Touro Infirmary and Children’s Hospital New Orleans first came together under the same organizational umbrella as LCMC Health in 2009, in the shadow of financial challenges following Hurricane Katrina. They’ve evolved into an operationally integrated health system with five hospitals over the last decade, but there’s been a growing need for more brand and marketing cohesion between these once-separate entities, explained Kristen Robinson, director of marketing and communications for Children’s. For example, the hospitals both have their own marketing departments that were focusing on the same patient population, with clear opportunities for synergy.

“We’re in a very tight geographical area with five hospitals, so we needed to make sure we were unified in our marketing efforts to figure out where our strategies aligned and how we could work together, versus apart,” said Robinson.

Recently, the marketing departments collaborated to identify distinct audience personas and devise a single customer relationship marketing (CRM) campaign. CRM data has helped them reach their target audiences with the right message delivered at the right time.

“Today’s consumers expect this level of personalization and health care has been behind the times,” Robinson said. 

Getting Started

For marketers at LCMC Health, Robinson said the first step in the CRM process was diving into the data to better understand young mothers, the vast majority of which (about 83 percent) are between the ages of 18 and 34. They held focus groups to confirm some of the common beliefs about Generations Y and Z, such as that they are tech savvy, likely to share experiences online, juggle careers and motherhood, etc..

Robinson and colleague Jessica Muntz — her counterpart at Touro — then worked to map out each OB patient’s journey, and how they choose providers for delivery and, eventually, pediatric care.

Armed with this knowledge, they created a unified CRM campaign that simultaneously targets new OB and pediatric patients to help drive volumes for maternal and child services across the enterprise.

Part of the “secret sauce” to this effort, they said, has been separating health care consumers into three distinct groups — women who are considering conceiving, pregnant women and new moms. Then, they created three unique but connected campaigns aimed at women along each stage in their experience, co-branded by both hospitals to create system alignment. A new obstetrics patient, for instance, might receive branded materials from Touro on what to expect if they’re thinking about a child, while new moms would hear from both Touro and Children’s about pediatric and post-partum offerings.

Muntz and Robinson have also used consumer mapping to target women with information about clinics and services that are located in their own neighborhoods. Outreach has been carefully timed so women with different patient profiles receive marketing materials at different points in their health care experience.

Web landing pages were also tailored to each consumer segment, with content that fits their profile and answers questions about such issues as newborn immunization or maternal nutrition. All were built using information from LCMC Health’s existing online health library. “This is a great way to repurpose content we already had, so we didn’t have to reinvent the wheel,” Muntz added.

Paying Off

Leaders believe the hyper-targeted efforts are already beginning to bear fruit. In the first three months alone, the Touro obstetrics campaign has logged nearly 12,000 impressions through email and direct messages. Muntz said they were able to acquire seven new patients, all of whom delivered their babies at the hospital, generating more than enough net revenue to cover the investment in the campaign. The pediatric retention efforts have similarly logged thousands of impressions and generated enough net revenue to make the marketing communications spend worthwhile.

The Children’s Hospital and Touro marketing teams are now looking for additional ways to collaborate beyond this initial campaign, including sponsorships and events that would incorporate obstetrics and pediatrics providers to enable further cross-promotion. They’re also exploring bigger-picture ways to steer pediatric patients into adult care at the two hospitals when adolescents reach the age of 18.

“From a health system perspective, it advances the LCMC Health brand and shows that we’re here to care for patients through all stages of life,” Muntz said.

 

This article features interviews with:

Jessica Muntz
Director of Marketing and Communications
Touro Infirmary
New Orleans, Louisiana

Kristen Robinson
Director, Marketing and Communications
Children’s Hospital New Orleans
New Orleans, Louisiana