Five considerations for marketers during fiscal year planning

We often hear that a healthcare marketer’s role in fiscal planning is reactive. The team gets a budget with proposed goals from executive leadership, and then must devise a tactical approach to meet said goals. The marketing team rarely has a role in proposing goals based on voice of the customer and consumer market behaviors.

But the industry has changed. A data and consumer-driven marketing strategy plays a critical role when healthcare organizations are competing on price, convenience, and brand recognition. Instead of sitting idle, marketers must take a more proactive approach. In the months leading up to the actual fiscal year (FY) planning meeting, the team can establish leadership buy-in, identify high-value market opportunities, and start working on end-to-end marketing strategies.

Imagine this: Your team comes to the table with a data-driven campaign strategy that supports top-level organizational goals, including forecasted results and the marketing budget required to execute. That sets the stage for a much different conversation. Quantifying the impact of marketing on your organizations’ bottom line establishes marketing as a revenue driver instead of a cost center. 

Let’s dive into the required steps to improve the FY marketing planning process:

1. Identify key stakeholders and understand their enterprise objectives in specific, quantifiable terms

It’s best to begin this process months before the beginning of your organization’s FY. Sit down with your C-suite and inquire about their objectives:

• Chief Executive Officer, what long term goals are a priority for the upcoming year?
• Chief Financial Officer, what are our yearly margin and revenue goals?
• Chief Operations Officer, what are our yearly volume and growth goals, and in which markets?

Take the executive team’s yearly goals and create a shortlist of objectives that the team can directly support. For example, say the COO’s goal is to improve surgical volume by 2%. Your team can begin to forecast how much budget they will need to produce quantifiable results.

2. Determine opportunities for service line growth by identifying top service line opportunities in a defined geography

Sticking with the COO’s goal of 2% growth, dig into market analysis, referral patterns, and performance activity to determine which surgical service lines and procedures present the greatest opportunities. For example, a clear market increase in households with an average age of 55+ presents a ripe opportunity for orthopedic surgery.

Here are a few guiding questions to help you meet market demand with opportunities: 

• Where is our organization’s market share currently trending, by service line and by region?
• Which service lines within our organization are growing — or shrinking?
• In which markets are we gaining or losing physician opportunities?
• What are some prevalent consumer behavior trends that may impact the need for services, i.e., preference for urgent care over ER?
   

The outcome of this exercise will be a long list of areas where opportunity exists in your market environment, which should complement the shortlist of goals previously outlined by executives. Analyzing these questions will help your team understand market dynamics external to your organization, to further refine campaign strategy.

3. Understand your current clinical capacity

At this stage, marketing teams must resolve known market demands with their existing clinical capacity. On its most basic level, this means ensuring your organization can fulfill basic supply and demand requirements — for instance, using the example from above, do your orthopedic surgeons have the practice capacity to handle an incremental 10 new patients a week? 

The value of understanding clinical capacity cannot be understated — if there is not enough capacity in your organization, the demand that your marketing campaigns generate will become an opportunity for your competition. Historically, we’ve seen clients have to shut down nearly one in six campaigns due to capacity and throughput issues. Not only was that wasted marketing investment, but those patients likely went across the street. 

To identify areas of low capacity before launching your marketing campaign, consider becoming a “secret shopper.” Call practice locations and ask to make an appointment. If the next available appointment is eight weeks out, that supporting service line might be over capacity (or have other operational issues that should be discussed). From there, it’s important that marketing teams take accountability, and work with management as well as chairs of the service line to solve this problem.

At this point, capacity concerns may disqualify some potential opportunities identified earlier. While fixing these capacity challenges is possible, it requires a concerted effort that may take more than one fiscal year. Rather than welcoming new patients in service lines that lack capacity, focus on the more attainable objectives that have not yet been disqualified.

Or, pick your battle and leverage data to drive operational improvements. If a market opportunity is so significant, say in orthopedics, escalate the need for improvement to your most senior leadership. Take ownership of marketing’s ability to drive revenue by forcing internal change. 

Here’s an example of how one of our client partners forced the issue, painting a powerful example of how a precision marketing approach can fundamentally change the conversation within the organization:

The Marketing Director noticed that lead-to-patient conversion rates for their orthopedic campaign had dropped 10% from one quarter to the next. Armed with actionable data and knowing that the market demand for orthopedics was high, she called a meeting with the Chief of Orthopedics. 

After discussing the data to identify the source of reduced throughput, they discovered operating room hours for two total joint replacement (TJR) surgeons had recently been reduced to make room for a new cardiac surgeon. The Marketing Director and Chief of Orthopedics, in partnership, elevated this issue to the C-suite who promptly reallocated OR time and reduced the downstream operational issue that was proactively flagged by marketing. 

4. Get to know your target audience and understand what drives them to make decisions about their health

Before presenting your findings to the executive team and securing a budget, you must understand the two main entry points of the patient’s journey: referral-driven, and self-directed.

Referral-driven:

A serious diagnosis will encourage patients to rely on their physician’s expertise to refer them to a quality specialist. To effectively execute referral-driven campaigns, create a marketing campaign that focuses on the providers. 

Self-directed:  

On the other hand, self-directed decision making refers to patient-side, consumer-driven traffic. For example, a patient may occasionally suffer from joint pain that is typically tolerable, but after a long bike ride their pain becomes more severe. As a result, the patient seeks out a doctor with joint pain expertise on their own accord. To target these individuals, create an acquisition campaign that highlights the service line’s offerings while supporting a value proposition around cost, convenience, or clinical quality. 

Another aspect to consider in the campaign planning process is how a patient’s digital fluency influences decision making. Before budgeting spend for digital marketing initiatives, determine how many of these patients are online, how they find your health center via search, and which devices they use. 

This deep understanding of your target audience will extend to the messaging you use. Understand what they want from you — not what your organization wants from them. Leveraging a healthcare CRM will help your organization determine exactly what motivates patients to make an appointment. Remember the 4 Ps of marketing: product, price, place, promotion. Knowing when to differentiate on quality versus convenience, and for which service lines, is critical to building an effective campaign messaging strategy. These insights, powered by consumer and physician data, are essential for FY planning.

5. Project your performance

Once your marketing team has a sound campaign roadmap in place, reverse engineer the quantifiable goals set by the stakeholders in step one. We recommend using your own internal benchmarks contained within your CRM for the most accurate forecast. 

Here are critical metrics to consider when projecting marketing’s impact on the bottom line of the organization:

• Overall investment $
• Leads/Cost per lead (CPL)
• Patients acquired/Cost per acquisition (CPA)
• Return/ROI

This allows you to clearly communicate the business impact of your campaign roadmap on the bottom line. Now, rather than being a recipient of your annual budget, you are using market data to recommend the resources necessary to drive bottom line growth. 

Final thought

Creating a proactive strategy for FY planning has a significant impact on your healthcare organization’s bottom line. Imagine a future where marketing teams can directly relate their budget to how much revenue was generated for the organization. They can also attribute exactly which line item programs and campaigns lead to that growth. 

While every healthcare marketing team can attain this reality, the primary limiting factor is a lack of structure around what a proactive process really looks like. But once it’s better understood and properly executed, marketing’s strategic position at the decision-making table is greatly enhanced.