73 Things Healthcare Marketers Wish You'd Ask, Wish you WOULDN'T ask, or Wish You Knew

What's the ROI of this project? 

It's important to measure the campaign against the goals.

We need more billboards.

How are billboards part of our overall strategy?

What are we putting on Facebook this week? 

How is Facebook part of our overall strategy?

Make it so. 

What thing is going to get moved so we can make this new thing so?

Marketing and Communications are the same.

Marketing and Communications aren't the same.

We need more content.

We need less content.

What will the new content help is do to achieve our agreed upon goals?

We need more content calendars.

We don't need content calendars.

Content calendars provide a framework for our Marketing & Communications goals and objectives.

Cardio (cancer, peds, ortho) needs more patients.

Clinic managers don't have time to answer the phones, questions, surveys, from patients or prospective patients.

We need more HRAs (health risk assessments).

No one has time to follow up on HRAs that result in high risk assessments.

Who's in charge of getting this work done?

We don't need Lean (Six Sigma, PMs, etc.) to lead process for our work.

We're laying off the Lean team, people can do their own project management.

If you want information about providers, clinics, and services it's in Epic (or other EMR).

We can't share patient records info in Epic on order to drive patient volume for ortho (cardio, cancer, primary care) or other business need.

The name of the clinic depends on who you're talking.

Not sure why we need so many people involved with projects related to providers, locations, and services.

Why didn't you include more people on this project?

Why aren't we using our own data to make decisions about marketing projects and campaigns? 

Get the data from the revenue cycle team.

Revenue cycle doesn't have time for this request.

We have too many leads.

We don't have enough leads.

There's no one to follow up on the leads.

What are we doing for SEO?

We shouldn't worry about SEO.

Our credentialing team keeps track of provider status, why isn't it correct on the website (app, online scheduling, Google, LLMs, brochures, etc.)

What are you using AI for?

You shouldn't be using AI. 

Why don't we have a comprehensive Marketing Plan? 

Why do we need a comprehensive Marketing Plan (we can just tell you what to focus on this week, month, year).

Dear clinical leaders, you are intimidating. You save lives so it’s hard for us to tell you you’re wrong. But sometimes, you are. You are not the user. You didn’t hire us to tell us what to do. You hired us to do a job. 

You haven’t had to invest in marketing to stabilize and grow the “business” of health care so we understand that it’s not yet a priority.

The website or app is a mission critical business asset. Websites and apps aren't free, they are free like puppies are free.

Reach and visibility are (hardly ever) the problem. The problems lie in user experiences (way finding, understanding services, finding providers, scheduling appointments, following up on care).

When you ask Marketing teams to make a brochure or buy you a billboard you’re missing out on the expertise of that can impact your business and user experience goals. 

We’re not here just to make the message pretty, we’re here to be a business development and user experience partner. 

You can’t just build it and they will come. Once the content is complete, that’s when the hard work starts. 

Marketing shouldn’t be a checklist of things to complete. They should be your partner in garnering loyalty and (when needed) expanding your patient base. Growth isn't always the answer. 

Even if we don’t think of ourselves as a “system” our customers do.  

Searches in Google and AI drive visibility and engagement. Google is just a user that doesn't accept cookies. 

Search is ubiquitous and a big part of the relationship and experience our health care customers have with us. 

Provider visibility online is becoming more prominent and more complex. 

Digital technologies including AI are changing the patient journey.

Convenience and availability of data is driving patient expectations for their experience. 

If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. 

Solutions are emerging to try to solve these problems, don’t select them without us.

We know it makes health care uncomfortable, but we do need to speak to health care patients needs as consumer needs because they often have choice.

Our resources are finite. When every department head treats us like their own personal agency that’s here to execute their every whim, you take away time and resources that could be placed on meeting your clinical goal and better serving our patients. 

Digital management, social, creative, brand  working together is where the magic happens.

If you silo digital disciplines you get a fragmented user experience. 

Successful marketing depends on alignment of clear goals and laser focus on an audience. 

If you’re not aligned on priorities, we can’t be aligned on priorities. 

Teams, goals and project plans should be built around an audience (patients, referring providers, students, job seekers, etc.) not around our departments.

Everything we do should be digital, mobile and measurable. 

People aren’t service lines. Rally around the user need, not our services. 

You are always Marketing to the machine. 

Measuring the patient experience with the provider is an enormous priority. Marketing wants to be your partner in measuring all the things before and after the clinical encounter. That’s usually the best part of their experience with health care. It’s the other experiences that are dissatisfiers: 

·     Understanding our differentiators for our treatments and services or understanding a diagnosis

·     Finding a location

·     Paying a bill

Governance matters. Just because everyone can write doesn't mean everyone should be a writer for the brand. 

There is more to the voice of the customer than post care surveys. 

No stories without data, no data without stories. 

You're not making a tech decision or marketing decision, you're making a business decision.

The data needs to be precise and directional, it does not have to be perfect or accurate.