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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Sure, there may be some non-pediatricians out there who disagree with me. But before you do, please consider a few things.

According to First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” initiative, nearly one in three children in America are overweight or obese. In African American and Hispanic communities, that number rises to nearly 40%. If the problem isn’t solved, one-third of all children born in 2000 or later will suffer from diabetes at some point in their lives. Many others will face heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer and asthma.

And, a report published by the New England Journal of Medicine tells us children today are likely to be the first generation to have a shorter lifespan than their parents. As a parent, that’s extremely alarming to me.

Now, if you still need a little more motivation, consider all of the articles out there that address how consumers are more likely to partner with organizations and companies who are socially conscious. There’s nothing more important to a parent than their child. And nothing more precious to a grandparent than their grandchild. A healthcare provider who looks out for Grammy and Poppy’s little guy is bound to gain respect and business.

So, what can you do?

• Refer to Michelle Obama’s letsmove.gov website and the President’s Challenge Active Lifestyle Award website – presidentschallenge.org – for ideas on how you can encourage healthy eating and active lifestyles.
• Dentists buy back Halloween candy. Perhaps doctors could pass out apples instead of suckers. Or even pedometers with their logo on them.
• Partner with local children’s hands-on museums to create fun and educational exhibits. For Ohioans, an excellent example is Imagination Station’s newest experience, “Eat It Up!”, presented by ProMedica. Don’t have the resources to take on such a grand project? Give away free tickets to one that’s already established.
• Advertise healthy lifestyle tips to all generations.

Have other ideas? We’d love to hear them. Disagree? We want to hear that, too.

The problem is that while the building and construction is excellent at innovating, they’re far less experienced at recognizing and promoting it. And in such a competitive environment, the ability to innovate is a likely tiebreaker for prospective clients as they decide between your company and another. But as a savvy marketer, you can capitalize on this scenario by capturing innovation and selling it as one of your company’s differentiating qualities.

To capture innovation, you must first cultivate an environment that recognizes it and allows it to percolate to the surface. And it’s often up to marketing to create this environment. You’re in a unique position. While project managers are often totally immersed in “getting the job done,” you’re in a position to recognize when innovation – marketable innovation – occurs. You’re often the best qualified to know what will and won’t have marketing legs. You know how to tease out the details in a way that will resonate with the media, prospective clients and other industry stakeholders.

So how do you find innovation? Start by asking questions. Project team brainstorms, sit-downs with your managing director, or weekly (or bi-weekly, or whatever your company favors) project status meetings are the perfect spots for this.

Start with:

• What was the challenge you needed to overcome?
• How did people traditionally address that challenge?
• How did you do it?
• What led you to that approach?
• Why do you think people didn’t do it that way before?
• How will this improve the position of the client?

Once you can get your team to reflect in this manner, examples of innovation will flow. And then you can use your skills to turn that innovation into marketing gold.

As innovative as your company may be, prospective clients and industry influencers won’t give you any credit for it if you don’t first recognize it yourself, and then promote it through the proper channels. For many in the building and construction industry, this might seem a bigger challenge than building a skyscraper, but it’s one that must be overcome to ensure future marketing success.

What do you think? Is this a familiar story in your company? Have you run into similar challenges? We’d love to hear how you addressed them and transformed them into marketing opportunities.

It’s certainly a question on the minds of many marketers these days. In a global study of chief marketing officers recently conducted by IBM, channel/device proliferation and keeping up with the technology curve were identified as two of the top four concerns CMOs had about leading their organizations’ future marketing efforts. When asked more specifically about their digital concerns, mobile/app design experience ranked number two on the list. And most said they felt ill equipped to deal with these challenges.

For a medical device company like this one, there are certainly compelling reasons to build an app. Content could be continuously updated and pushed to salespeople’s devices, eliminating the worry of old materials floating around out there. Leads could be captured and cataloged. Products demonstrated via video. Trade shows brought to life right in a surgeon’s office. And that’s just the obvious list of possibilities.

But ultimately, for them and any other marketer, the question isn’t, “Is it time we build an app, and what kind of cool stuff can we stick in it?” The discussion needs to start as a research and insights question. Start with, “Is an app the best way to achieve our business goals at this time?” An app might be the right solution, but before making a substantial investment, we as marketers need to do our due diligence.

So, consider these steps as you begin to deliberate moving your marketing onto a new digital platform:

• Talk with your salespeople. Understand what a day in their life is like. What works well for them? What causes them problems?
• Talk one-on-one with the people they’re selling to – doctors, nursing staff, hospital procurement. You want to better understand these stakeholders’ perceptions of your product. Understand how they like to receive information. What’s the best way to communicate with them given their busy schedules? What aren’t they getting from your company’s communication efforts now that they wish they were?
• Assemble focus groups or panels comprised of your target consumers. Brainstorm your digital concepts. See what they have to say.
• Test your preliminary ideas and assumptions through further qualitative and quantitative research. Make sure your concept will resonate before you make a significant investment.
• Tap into secondary research. Some of these questions may have already been answered for you. No need to re-research the wheel.

What you’re looking for are the insights to make a much better business case for, or against, an app. Will it increase productivity? Help move more product? Generate a return on investment? Once you know these answers, then you’re at the point to discuss whether you need an app – or a mobile site, or maybe even new print collateral. Once you’ve answered these questions, then you can ask yourself, “Is it time we build an app, and what could it do?”

How about you? Have you been through this process with your marketing department? What did you learn?

True, when the 2012 retrospectives start popping up in December, it’s quite possible that one of the taglines could very well turn out to be “the year of the niche social network.”

Case in point: Pinterest. The buzz surrounding Pinterest hit a fever pitch earlier this year, culminating in Pinterest becoming the third most popular social network in the U.S. in March 2012, based on number of visits, according to Experian.

Instagram shed its iPhone-only status in early April with the release of an Android-compatible version of the photo-sharing app. Instagram for Android hit 1 million downloads less than 24 hours after its release and, by the end of April, the photo-sharing app boasted over 50 million users. And, of course, we’re all aware of its subsequent $1 Billion acquisition by Facebook.

However, one of these popular new platforms will not solve your marketing challenges automatically. Before you start setting up that new account, you need to first look at your strategy and target audience.

At this stage in the game, your retail brand should have a social media strategy in place. So ask yourself, “Will having an active presence on this new social network help reach the goals and objectives identified in my social media strategy? How does this new social network tie into the other channels I’m currently using?”

Moreover, does the audience you are targeting even exist on this new social network? If it doesn’t, can you make the case why your audience would add this platform to its social media mix if you built a community in this space?

Other questions to ask yourself:

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

An explosion in registered users and an obscenely high number of monthly page views is enticing, but if this new social platform isn’t a good match for your strategy or your audience, those numbers mean nothing.

I am looking forward to seeing how the rest of 2012 shakes out. Which niche social network will have its moment in the sun next? Which players will still be around a year from now? Whatever develops, as long as you keep your target audience and social media strategy in mind, you will navigate these choppy waters just fine.

What has your process for evaluating emerging social networks looked like? Have you added any to your marketing mix? Which have worked well for you? Tell us about it.

Newsweek recently ran an article citing many studies that have found this all-too-often missing link can actually affect a patient’s sense of well-being, number of symptoms and overall health. Newsweek specifically noted a Canadian study which audiotaped more than 300 office visits by 39 primary care physicians. Afterward, patients were asked to rate the visit when it came to their doctor-patient relationship. The researchers then followed the patients’ health over time.

“When patients reported that their doctors focused on their feelings and listened to them carefully, they not only felt better, but objective measures showed they had fewer symptoms of the disease,” wrote Shannon Brownlee, Newsweek contributor.

These days, what used to be called a good beside manner is being referred to as a “therapeutic relationship.” Google it and you’ll see it’s often used in the context of psychiatry – engaging the patient, listening, empathy, support, sincerity, etc.

There are lessons here for us as healthcare marketers as well. Forging a relationship based on listening, engagement, empathy and support shouldn’t start with the provider, it should start with us – the marketers. If you think about it, a relationship is really what patients want from all of their doctors and healthcare providers, isn’t it? And establishing this tone in your marketing message right from the beginning isn’t just good business, it just might be good for the patient’s health as well.

In short, when it comes to patient communications, whether it’s doctor-patient communications or a communications plan, it all comes back full circle to one very important thing: trust.

Have you infused your healthcare marketing with this relationship-first approach? Have anything you’d like to add? We’d love to hear it.