Open Letter to Healthcare Leaders

What Your Healthcare Marketing Team Wants You to Know

Healthcare is experiencing significant change and upheaval. To all the healthcare professionals and friends who have faced job loss through reductions in force, been replaced by leaders seeking "new ideas," been fired and needed legal intervention to secure severance, been pushed out by those who didn't understand their work, or been told AI could do their job—and to those hanging on for all the right reasons—you've got marketable skills and you will be fine.

To the doctors, nurses, clinical staff, and operational leaders, we admire you. How you show up every day for patients AND for all of the complex shenanigans that are healthcare is a miracle most days of the week: thank you for all you do.

In my nearly 30 years of professional life, I've rarely seen the commitment, tenacity, intelligence, and resourcefulness I've witnessed in the healthcare vertical. The world needs what you've got. But marketing, technical, operational, clinical, and leadership teams need to work better together. Less silos and more alignment on the problems we need to solve together. We're all tribes with our own, preferred language and your marketing team wants you to learn theirs.

Goals & Objectives

A goal is the outcome you want to achieve. An objective is a specific and measurable action that can be reached in a specific and usually shorter amount of time.

• The question marketing teams wish you'd ask: "Is stakeholder (clinical, operational, or c-suite) happiness our goal, or is our primary goal related to patients?

Strategy & Tactics

Strategy is the action plan that takes you where you want to go. Tactics are the individual steps and actions that will help you achieve your goal.

• "What's the ROI of this project?" vs. "We need more billboards"

  • The question marketing teams wish you'd ask: "How are billboards part of our overall strategy?"

• "What are we putting on Facebook this week?" vs. Strategic thinking

  • The question marketing teams wish you'd ask: "How is Facebook part of our overall strategy?"

Content Confusion

• "We need more content" vs. "We need less content"

  • The question marketing teams wish you'd ask: "What will the new content help us achieve toward our agreed-upon goals?"

• "We need more content calendars" vs. "We don't need content calendars"

  • What marketing teams want you to know: Content calendars provide a framework for Marketing & Communications goals and objectives

Organizational Alignment Issues

• "Marketing and Communications are the same" vs. "Marketing and Communications aren't the same"

• "Make it so" vs. Resource reality

  • The question marketing teams wish you'd ask: "What will need to be moved so we can prioritize this new initiative?"

Data and Follow-Through Challenges

• "We need more HRAs (health risk assessments)" vs. "No one has time to follow up on HRAs that result in high-risk assessments"

• "Why aren't we using our own data to make decisions?" vs. "Get the data from the revenue cycle team" vs. "Revenue cycle doesn't have time for this request"

Lead Generation Paradox

• "We have too many leads" vs. "We don't have enough leads" vs. "There's no one to follow up on the leads"

SEO and Digital Presence

• "What are we doing for SEO?" vs. "We shouldn't worry about SEO"

• "What are you using AI for?" vs. "You shouldn't be using AI"

Planning Contradictions

• "Why don't we have a comprehensive Marketing Plan?" vs. "Why do we need a comprehensive Marketing Plan? We can tell you what to focus on this week/month/year."

Operational Disconnects

• "Cardio/cancer/peds/ortho needs more patients" vs. "Clinic managers don't have time to answer phones, questions, or surveys from patients or prospective patients"

• "If you want information about providers, clinics, and services, it's in Epic" vs. "We can't share patient records info in Epic to drive patient volume."

Dear doctors, nurses, and other clinical leaders, 

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

We understand that maybe you haven't had to invest in marketing to stabilize and grow the "business" of healthcare, but that time is here. Please don’t ask us to create more content or build more websites when patients are calling to schedule appointments because our provider, location, and clinic data can’t be trusted. Also, please let us know what’s happening on those calls. Healthcare is the only vertical I’ve ever worked in that doesn’t often cross-pollinate customer service with marketing. That is audience research gold. 

We start with the goal, then apply the strategies and supporting tactics.

The website or app is a mission-critical business asset. Websites and apps aren't free—they are "free" like puppies are free. Also, the website isn’t where you’re patients are starting their journey. 

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

When you ask marketing teams to make a brochure or buy you a billboard, you're missing out on expertise that can impact your business and user experience goals. Brochures might be the answer, but their creation shouldn't exist in a silo.

• 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. We 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.

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

• Digital technologies, including AI, are changing the patient journey.

• Convenience and availability of data are driving patient expectations.

• We need to speak to healthcare patients' needs as consumer needs because they often have a choice.

• If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority

• Our resources are finite. When every department head treats us like their personal agency, you take away time and resources that could be placed on meeting clinical goals and better serving patients.

• Solutions are emerging to solve these problems—don't select them without us.

• Digital management, content creation, social, creative, and brand work 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.

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

Marketing wants to be your partner in measuring all the touch points before and after the clinical encounter. The clinical encounter is usually the best part of patients' experience with healthcare. It's the other experiences that are dissatisfiers:

• Understanding a diagnosis.

• Understanding our differentiators for treatments and services.

• Scheduling an appointment.

• Finding a location.

• Calling a clinic.

• Paying a bill.

Marketing can’t impact what we don’t have responsibility for:

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

• 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 doesn't have to be perfect or accurate.

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

8 Crucial Questions for Healthcare Marketing Success

1. Are people able to bring their data to problem-solving?

2. Is it clear how decisions get made?

3. Is it clear that the outputs aren't as important as the outcomes?

4. Is it clear what success looks like?

5. How will we know when it works?

6. A decision is an experiment. Did you execute against the decision and share data around the outcomes for learning?

7. Do we as partners have the ability to be flexible because we're all at the table for these decisions and the learning from outcomes?

8. Money and time will accommodate what we prioritize. Do we have a plan that reflects our values?

On Sharing Your Truth

Not sure who needs to hear this, but sharing your truth as you navigate your work and your worth is not a revolutionary act. It's a superpower that not enough of us (regardless of where we work) exercise. Where I'm from, sharing your truth is the rule, not the exception. Ask yourself:

• Did you mean it?

• Can you defend it?

• Did you say it with love?

Then let 'er rip! Love ya'll like chicken.

Y'all got this.