MARKETING

B2B Marketing: A Team-Based Approach

Business-to-business (B2B) marketing is arguably one of the more difficult tasks that health system marketing and communications professionals are facing today. Unlike retail settings, for example, the target audience “isn’t pulling your product off a shelf” to assess its value and compare its attributes with those of its competitors, says Loren Farquhar, principal at Loren Farquhar Marketing + Communications, a marcom consultancy that works with health systems.  

In addition, for many health care specialties, there’s a long consideration and “purchase cycle.” Finally, established referring patterns are often hard to break, which means health systems must develop internal and external relationships first, before launching effective initiatives to boost referrals. 

Farquhar and Shelly Caldrello, director of physician relations at Phoenix Children’s, together developed strategies designed to mitigate these challenges for the hospital’s Center for Fetal and Neonatal Care (CFNC). The two spoke about their experience at a session titled “Referral Marketing: A Team Based Approach in the B2B Space” at the SHSMD Connections Conference 2023 in September. 

Settled With S.W.O.T. 

B2B marketing in health care refers to programs designed to generate additional physician referrals—primarily those from a more general practitioner to a more specialized practitioner. As with any marketing approach, the first step in designing a referral marketing strategy is to understand the business goals and objectives of the service line.  

“Marketing can make a difference [and] that means we have to have a seat at the table,” Farquhar explains. 

Having a clear understanding of the service line’s marketing readiness is a close second—and that requires a S.W.O.T. analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats). According to Caldrello, the assessment they conducted at Phoenix Children’s listed strengths that included already strong patient satisfaction scores. And there was a tremendous opportunity—Phoenix is one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country, and its population of families with infants and/or young children was fueling much of that growth.  

Unfortunately, there was no “B2B marketing function,” Caldrello recalls. “We had to start from scratch.” 

For Phoenix Children’s, the goal was to leverage the CFNC as a feeder for the entire hospital. 

“Once you get them in as babies or even prenatally, these patients can then go to the other service lines,” Caldrello explains. “This is a primary driver of volume [because] it touches literally every other center of excellence at Phoenix Children’s, as these patients can have any number of diagnoses.” 

However, the relationship between CFNC leadership and hospital marketing efforts in the past had not proven effective. Consequently, building trust between the two was the key early step in developing a B2B marketing plan. 

“The No. 1 thing that I can recommend that you do is roll up your sleeves and build the relationships that you need to be successful,” Caldrello says. “That is really the foundation for everything else that comes after.” 

For Farquhar, a key part of building the relationship involved her attending the CFNC’s monthly strategy meetings to get a sense of how the center worked and its approach to patient care. 

“From there, we just started cultivating this relationship,” she says.  

‘Smart’ Marketing 

Once that relationship became more established—a process Caldrello compared with dating and evolving a relationship toward commitment and partnership—the focus turned to setting specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound (S.M.A.R.T.) goals for the B2B marketing plan.  

“We had a unique challenge in that we needed adult specialists like [obstetricians] and [maternal‒fetal medicine specialists] to make referrals to a pediatric health system,” recounts Farquhar. “Taking the time to define our goals brought our work into focus.”  

In the absence of a hospital customer relationship manager, Farquhar worked with advertising vendors to review performance data. Based on the success—or lack thereof—of existing initiatives, the team worked together to craft a new marketing strategy that reflects the values of the health system generally and the CFNC specifically. This approach includes identifying a compelling value proposition for the CFNC. 

“At the Center for Fetal and Neonatal Care, our unique value proposition is really about the doctors,” Caldrello notes. In addition, administrators wanted to have their B2B marketing strategy reflect the culture of CFNC, which strives to have patients and their families “feel supported” when receiving news about their unborn or newborn child. 

“Our medical director was inspired to start this program years ago because she wanted the system to come and wrap their arms around these families,” Caldrello explains. “And that's very unique to us and we feel like that is our selling point.” 

Caldrello and Farquhar also advise marketers to “think like doctors” in developing their marketing programs, with the goal of ensuring that content is relevant and of value to referring physicians. This strategy includes creating doctor-to-doctor communications that are more clinical and focused on outcomes. 

Ensuring Readiness 

“At Phoenix Children's, we had a couple of things that were major challenges; we did not have a provider-focused section on our website,” Caldrello recalls. “We wanted to start a B2B campaign that reached the maternal‒fetal medicine specialists in the area to make referrals into our program, but we had nowhere to send them.” 

From there, the task was to create compelling content for the specific audience. This part of the process can be made easier by marketers using their resources to “curate rather than create” content by highlighting research and publications from hospital specialists, leveraging continuing medical education (CME) and grand rounds programs, and releasing video interviews with specialists, as well as surgery livestreams to target physicians. 

“My job is to make the phone ring and your job [as the physician] is to answer it, so it becomes this partnership,” Farquhar says. “When we started thinking about what we wanted to include in this campaign, I thought, ‘Well, we need a carrot.’ What’s the incentive to get providers to engage with our content? I kept coming back to CMEs.” 

To leverage these tools optimally, Phoenix Children’s created a health care professionals microsite that allows visiting referring practitioners (and potential referring practitioners) access to CME programs, clinical information and patient referral information. Ultimately, the goal is to create depth of content that will allow site visitors (again, health care professionals) to sort materials relevant to them. 

“This is also a reputation play,” Farquhar explains. “We want other physicians to really see us as experts in these fields.”