Making the Case for Strategic Marketing Investment
Turning Your Budget into Shared Strategy
Marketing Budgets Are Business Plans
Once each year, you enter what some health system marketing leaders dread: budget season.
Some years, you might be defending last year’s allocations. Other years, you’re building from scratch—positioning marketing not just as a cost center, but as a strategic driver of growth, access, and brand value.
No matter the context, budget development is a time to do more than count dollars. It’s a chance to align your investments with your system’s most important goals—and to position your team as essential to delivering on them. The best hospital marketing budgets don’t just tally tactics. They articulate a strategy.
We’ve worked with CMOs and marketing VPs across the country. Many face the same budgeting hurdles, year after year:
- “How do I quantify the value of awareness?”
- “How can I justify brand investment in a system laser-focused on service line growth?”
- “How do I connect marketing spend to volume and revenue impact?”
- “What do I do when I’m handed a top-down number and asked to ‘make it work’?”
These aren’t easy questions. But they’re navigable—especially when marketing has a seat at the strategic table and the data to justify its role.
Three Levers to Focus Your Budget Conversation
Here are three budget conversation frameworks we’ve seen resonate with CFOs, CEOs, and clinical leaders:
1. Link Investments to Volume, Not Just Visibility
You understand that marketing isn’t overhead—it’s how health systems compete for consumer trust, engagement, and choice. And trust, engagement, and choice are what drive volume.
When you align your marketing plan with specific service line volume goals, you elevate the conversation from “dollars and impressions” to “growth and access.” Frame your investments around how marketing will help:
- Fill primary care panels and specialty clinics
- Increase scheduled surgeries or imaging appointments
- Drive awareness and activation in new markets
Use historical encounter data and market intelligence to establish baselines and realistic volume targets. If you’ve conducted consumer research, you’ve likely uncovered strategic insight you can now act on.
If not, now’s the moment to advocate for a research study, like MarketVoice, Consumer Experience Research, or an NPS survey. The right research can shape your annual plan—and protect your investment.
2. Treat Brand as a Business Asset
There’s still skepticism in some C-suites about investing in brand. But the data tells a clear story: brand strength drives consumer preference, system loyalty, and revenue resilience.
According to a 2024 Kaufman Hall survey, 62% of health system executives say brand is essential to future growth. Yet only 34% believe they’re investing at the right level.
Your budget request should define what brand investment will do for the organization:
- Support key growth areas (e.g., cardiology, primary care) with emotionally resonant, high-visibility messaging
- Create consistency across sites, service lines, and community partners
- Build long-term preference in competitive or underpenetrated markets
This is where solutions like Brand Audits and Creative Audits can deliver data-driven justification. These tools help you measure perception, creative alignment, and audience relevance—giving you tangible evidence to bring to budget conversations.
3. Show the ROI of Insight
When budgets are tight, insight can feel like a luxury. Our experience has shown that insights reduce waste.
Research—both qualitative and quantitative—ensures that your messaging resonates, your media spend is efficient, and your creative hits the mark. It helps you avoid generic campaigns and tactics disconnected from what people need, want, or understand.
Our most successful clients build in a budget for:
- Deep qualitative and quantitative studies to shape service line positioning and buyer personas
- Consumer Experience studies to uncover friction in access, trust, or navigation
- NPS Surveys to monitor loyalty and spot service recovery opportunities
Our clients are turning insight into volume. And that’s a budget line item worth defending.
Case Study: What Justification Looks Like in Practice
The justification stage isn’t just about making a case—it’s about making the right case, to the right people, in the right language. That begins with insight and culminates in alignment.
Here’s how that’s working in practice.
Example 1: Clarifying the Gap Between Brand Promise and Digital Experience
In one recent engagement, a health system’s marketing leaders suspected their digital front door wasn’t supporting consumer trust. But they lacked the data to prove it. Our team conducted Consumer Experience Research—including secret shopping and digital audits—and uncovered critical experience breakdowns between service-line marketing and actual online scheduling experiences. With these insights in hand, the marketing team was able to make targeted content updates, improve scheduling clarity, and show leadership a direct path from messaging improvement to patient conversion. In the following campaign cycle, they saw a double-digit increase in online conversions and a measurable uptick in new patient appointments.
Example 2: Aligning Service Line Messaging With Patient Motivations
Another health system used MarketVoice to evaluate consumer sentiment and behavior around a high-margin surgical service. Through a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods, the research revealed unexpected barriers to conversion—patients were not only unclear on the procedure but were emotionally hesitant about the recovery process and confused by scheduling steps. With these insights, the team developed new personas, restructured their digital content, and trained staff on new messaging. Within a few months, they saw a significant increase in first-time appointments and a corresponding rise in completed procedures.
Final Thoughts: Budget Season Is Strategy Season
Budget season isn’t just about what marketing costs. It’s about what marketing contributes.
If you’re in the middle of building your next budget—or advocating for the one you just submitted—consider this your permission slip to ask for what you need: insight, alignment, and the ability to shape not just campaigns, but the future of your organization’s growth.
If you’d like help crafting a justification plan, developing supporting research, or facilitating alignment between departments, we’re here to help.
Explore our services—or let’s schedule a working session to align your goals, gaps, and opportunities.
Let’s turn your budget into a strategy.
Alex Sydnor, FACHE, VP of Marketing and Comm.
As a senior health system executive, Alex has led healthcare strategy, marketing, patient experience, and community health programs for 17 years. Alex works with healthcare marketing teams to develop strategies that deliver measurable results powered by LIFT’s deep expertise in human understanding.