There was once a time when healthcare consumers didn’t make many choices for themselves. Their employer picked the insurance provider, the insurance provider picked the PCP, the PCP put forth the diagnosis and controlled access to specialists and hospitals, and so on. But that paradigm is rapidly changing.

Today, more employers offer multiple insurance options, better informed consumers ask more questions, some even self-diagnose via WebMD and choose their own specialists based on Google Reviews. And with millions of consumers about to make choices on individual insurance plans as a result of the Affordable Care Act, this trend will no doubt accelerate rapidly.

Healthcare consumer choice is becoming increasingly important, but relatively few healthcare providers are well prepared to fight a battle in this new communications landscape – one in which marketing metrics like “consumer satisfaction” or “net promoter score” may determine who wins and who loses.

Other industries have known for a long time metrics like these have a direct impact on purchase decisions and customer retention – and it shows. A recent Harris Poll measuring consumer satisfaction reveals that the experience provided by the healthcare industry doesn’t measure up, especially when compared to industries that have been focusing on making customers happy for decades.

Healthcare providers should find the following Harris Poll numbers somewhat alarming. They represent consumer dissatisfaction rates with the following experiences.

• Last visit to a restaurant: 6% dissatisfied
• Last online purchase: 6% dissatisfied
• Last stay at a hotel: 6% dissatisfied
• Last visit to the bank: 8% dissatisfied
• Last visit to a healthcare provider: 17% dissatisfied

The lesson here is healthcare providers need to get serious about consumer experience. The quality of that experience is going to have a huge impact on the decisions made by an empowered, well-informed consumer.

The good news is many of the things consumers want are relatively quick fixes and can often be driven by marketing (with a little help from IT). Just look at what consumers told Harris they wish their healthcare provider did for them but doesn’t.

As a healthcare marketing professional, you should be concerned about the disparity between consumers’ wants and the reality of what they’re being offered by healthcare providers. But you should also recognize the opportunity. Adding the above services is a relatively easy way to sweeten the deal for consumers when compared to adding another three MRI machines or renovating your labor and delivery wing. And each of the above enhancements to consumer experience is another way to differentiate yourself from your competition in the eyes of a newly empowered consumer with many choices.

Has your organization recently sharpened its focus on consumer experience to gain a marketing edge? What worked well for you? We’d love to hear about your experience.

As if battling cancer isn’t tough enough, a new study published in the Annals of Family Medicine shows that after beating the disease, many survivors face a new kind of challenge – where to turn for their new and unique healthcare needs. Cancer follow-up care isn’t just about keeping cancer in remission, it’s about caring for new conditions and issues that may be a result of the cancer treatment itself.

The study goes on to tell us the majority of survivors would prefer to continue seeing their oncologist post-cancer because they aren’t confident their primary care physicians are equipped to deal with their new medical circumstances. However, economics, a shortage of oncologists, insurance and sometimes doctors themselves dictate that patients rely more heavily on their PCP for follow-up cancer treatment.

Perhaps patients concerns are justified, or perhaps they’re just not well informed about the role their PCP really can play in their post-cancer health care. Either way, it represents a challenge for the medical community and an opportunity for the healthcare marketer – an opportunity to educate and inform patients, differentiate their physician group or healthcare system, and provide a better experience for patients along the way.

What steps can marketers take to reach out to these patients who often feel as if there’s no place for them to go?

• PCPs can position themselves as experts in this space by marketing their qualifications, experience, processes, procedures and anything else making them well suited to catering to the needs of the cancer survivor.
• Hospital systems or larger physician groups can promote their integrated care model, one that builds bridges between oncologists, PCPs and cancer survivors.
• Fill the information vacuum. Give patients the knowledge they’re trying so hard to find. Physically provide them with a cancer treatment roadmap that tells them what to do, when and where they can get care, when to call their PCP and when to call their oncologist.
  • Differentiate. For example, the University of Pennsylvania’s LIVESTRONG™ Survivorship Center of Excellence promotes programs that bridge the transition from patient to survivor, including programs specifically designed for underserved populations and survivors of childhood cancers.
  • Don’t leave it all on the patient. It can feel pretty lonely for patients when they’re told they need to take on the responsibility of transitioning to primary care on their own. Physician groups, healthcare systems, pharmaceutical companies and medical device companies alike can provide PCPs and oncologists online and offline materials, training and practical guidelines that say, “Here’s how to handle this type of patient.”

Have you faced this challenge as a healthcare marketer? How have you approached it? Feel free to share what has, or hasn’t, worked for you.

Google “daily deals” and you’ll find article after article touting the incredible growth of daily deal sites. And I’m not just talking revenue growth for sites like Groupon and LivingSocial, but also the rapid influx of new sites. A good reference point is YipIt. At last look, the site gathers 30,000 offers per month from 855 daily deal sites.

Naturally, all of this success has many business owners and retail marketers wondering if daily deals are right for them. And while I can’t offer a blanket answer, I can certainly give you some things to think about.

Crunch the numbers.
It’s important to remember daily deal sites have to get paid, too. So they’ll take a percentage of the revenue you generate – usually somewhere in the area of 40% to 50%. Be sure to conduct a careful cost-benefit analysis to ensure you’ll be making money and not losing it.

Do you have the ability to handle an influx of customers?
Attracting hundreds of new customers sounds pretty amazing. That is unless you’re a small business who has attracted too many. Imagine being a tailor who just got stuck hemming 250 pairs of pants at half-price. What’s more, you don’t want to lose loyal customers because you’re too busy trying to accommodate an influx of new ones. Prepare employees, raw materials and whatever else might be necessary. What’s more, be detailed on the terms and conditions. For example, set an expiration date.

Are daily deal customers loyal?
According to a recent study by Utpal M. Dholakia (PDF), sustainability often depends on what type of business you own. For instance, he found that daily deals appear to be sustainable for about 30% of businesses, and smaller, newer businesses have sustainability rates closer to 40%. He also discovered that smaller businesses with annual revenue below $500,000 had a 41% retention rate versus larger businesses which had a 15% retention rate. So it’s true, your daily deal might attract new customers. However, these customers may or may not return. That said, why not try enticing them into repeat business by offering them an incentive before they leave your premises?

What kind of business are you?
Dholakia’s study also found quite interestingly, that different types of businesses had different results. When it came to the percentages of profitable daily deals, there was quite a range. For instance, photographers had a 75% rate of profitable daily deals; health and fitness: 69%; doctors and dentists: 66.7%; retailers: 50%; and cleaning services: 27.3%.

What are you trying to accomplish?
Do you have a warehouse full of something that’s about to expire? Are you trying to gain awareness? Are you hoping to put a spike in your bottom line? Whether it’s one or none of these, make sure your offer is crafted to meet your goal.

At least for the foreseeable future, it seems daily deals are here to stay. And many businesses have seen impressive success. Just make sure before you jump in, you do your research. Deal?

Have an opinion to share? We’d love to hear it.

For most firms in the building and construction industry, a labor shortage is far from top-of-mind these days. However, a recent study by McGraw-Hill tells us 70% of general contractors expect a labor shortage by 2014. That’s right – labor shortage. Skilled tradesmen laid off in previous years are likely to have found other careers, and top executives and thought leaders who took retirement packages also took their knowledge and experience with them. That is going to be a problem that ultimately lands in a marketer’s lap in the form of recruitment advertising if this recovery comes to fruition.

So what’s the solution? In lean times, there’s not much room to invest in job boards, full-page glossy ads in Engineering News Record, industry events and headhunters.

Building and construction marketers frequently ask me what they should be doing in social media.  Well, social media presents a perfect opportunity to collaborate with your recruiting department and get ahead of the rush without investing significant amounts of money.

There are certainly a myriad of social media options to consider when searching for your next generation of employees. Although many are worth testing, I’d recommend you start with the three platforms that will give you exposure to the most people: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Here’s how to get started.

Facebook

It’s unlikely that Facebook will be your most prolific social recruiting platform, but it can certainly be a valuable one. The key: don’t try to force Facebook to be something it’s not.

Facebook is not a job board. If you try to make it function like one, you’ll likely end up extremely disappointed. Facebook is, however, a great place to build and foster a community. Use it to highlight corporate culture, show how your company provides employees an ideal working environment and extend a dialogue to a targeted group of people. Facebook gives prospective employees an opportunity to “date” you before getting into a serious, long-term relationship.

Twitter

Twitter is often the biggest source of frustration for marketers running a social recruiting strategy. And, if you simply use Twitter as a tool to push job openings out into the ether with no interaction, you’ll likely end up frustrated as well.

Like Facebook, Twitter is about community. Seek out and network with existing communities of professionals most relevant to your company: marketing professionals, architects, engineers and the like. They’re all on Twitter and all vocal about what they do. Engage with them, become part of the group, and in the process you’ll build relationships with passive candidates, putting you in perfect position when it’s time to hire.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is certainly the most powerful and robust social recruiting tool of the group. But far too few employers ever leverage anything more sophisticated than the Premium Account upgrade. LinkedIn offers many opportunities to attract the right candidate.

So, when you utilize LinkedIn, don’t forget to:

• Fully customize your company’s profile page
• Use video to showcase featured jobs and key projects in which your firm is involved
• Start and lead LinkedIn groups for subject matter experts, graduating college seniors, your company’s alumni, etc.
• Add a widget that integrates with your website’s careers page, allowing prospects to dynamically search job listings right from your LinkedIn profile
• Run banner ads on each of your current employees’ profile pages, all linking back to your website’s careers page
• Experiment and measure: LinkedIn unveils new features all the time; a little trial and error goes a long way

Social recruiting will take time and effort, but it’s a low-cost investment in long-term benefits for your company – benefits that will pay dividends in busier times to come.

How about you? Have you used social media in your recruiting efforts? We’d love to know what has, and hasn’t, worked well for you.

Social media is full of niches – communities of people passionate about something, whether it’s finding quality healthcare, selling their building products to a general contractor, manufacturing beer bottles or something else altogether. Chances are that somewhere out there in the vastness of the Internet, an online community exists that is directly connected to your product or your industry. Your challenge as a marketer is to tap into that niche, leverage that passion and turn it into a business advantage for you.

But before you start, you need to put some serious thought into just how you’re going to accomplish that. You can’t just start creating content haphazardly and broadcast it to the masses. You need to start by identifying the goals you’d like to achieve within these online communities. Are you aiming to build brand awareness and reputation? Generate business leads? Increase sales and shorten the sales cycle? Do you plan on using social media as a customer service tool?

Along with identifying your goals, you also need to zero in on your target audience. Remember, your job as a marketer is to tap into your niche. Your target audience is never “everyone.” Put yourself in your target’s shoes, internalize their challenges; your content strategy will be that much stronger because of it. Take the time to understand their needs and what makes them tick.

The next question is, “Where in the social space does your audience reside?” So, which social media platform is right for your brand? Too many marketers don’t look past Facebook or Twitter. Again, you’re looking for your niche, and these broad-reach platforms may not be the right answer.

I’ve written previously on determining which social networks make sense for your brand, specifically geared toward the retail space. You can read the article in full but I wanted pull out a few key points that are applicable for any brand, whether B2B or B2C:

• Can you provide real value to members and your brand within this platform?
• Is the user experience of this platform a high-quality one?
• Does the platform allow members and hosts the opportunity to cultivate a sense of enthusiasm and passion?

Of course, you just might discover there isn’t a good online congregating space for your audience, in which case you have the opportunity to build your own online community from the ground up – but that’s another post for another day.

When leveraging social media to build a community of advocates for your brand, it’s easy to fall into the “If you build it, they will come” mindset. Well, if you build it with your target audience in mind, using platforms that are of value to them, promote it effectively, and provide a reason to keep coming back – then yes, it’s a good bet they will.

Remember, like Rome, your online community won’t be built in a day. But, if you plan strategically and continue to nurture the community with relevant content, you will see measurable results over time.

What challenges have you encountered when building communities in the social space? Do you have any advice for those just beginning this endeavor?