Strengthen the Marketing Value Stream

Solidify Your Value to Insulate Against Financially Lean Times

A 2024 Pulse Survey by PwC reported that only 40% of marketers strongly agree that marketing is understood by key decision makers in their company. Though it’s not uncommon for people in one division or line of work to not understand the value or work of another, it becomes a critical issue when revenues are not meeting forecasts and leadership is looking for low-value activity to cut. Don’t wait until this crucial moment to build internal support and demonstrate marketing ROI and value to the bottom line. Optimizing the marketing value stream should be a feature of your marketing strategy.

Know What Your Internal Customers Need

Marketing is part of an internal value stream. You deliver value to the organization and leaders and peers across the enterprise. Knowing what these stakeholders expect from marketing, and how they currently assess marketing’s impact, enables you to focus on value creation. Value stream maps visually diagram the entire development, production, and delivery process of a product or service, and applying this lean process can ensure marketing’s contribution is targeted to meet internal customer demands.

To start optimizing your value stream contributions: 

• Identify the internal stakeholders who depend on or would benefit from services, contributions, or information from marketing. Include those you rely on for support (like budget allocation) or partnerships. These may include your boss, staff, CFO, COO, and service line leaders.  
• Interview each stakeholder and invite them to tell you how marketing meets their needs and expectations and what it can do better. 
• Use these insights to develop new programs, services, reports, processes, and communications. 

A best practice is to hold these meetings quarterly. This cadence allows you to set 90-day goals and report back on progress. You aim to gather feedback, remove barriers, build relationships, recognize staff contributions, and demonstrate marketing’s relevance to their business or clinical unit. Quint Studer’s Hardwiring Excellence addresses this topic of internal customer rounding as a leadership “must have”. By understanding your internal customer needs first, you can increase the value marketing delivers to them and the organization. 

Deliver Customer Insights

Though acquiring and serving patients is an imperative of most hospital clinic practices and service lines, many operational leaders lack insights into what consumers experience when engaging with the health system. Though their staff engages directly with patients and likely has access to patient experience survey results and comments, they may not have narrative insights that share what patients need or hope for in their care. 

Bringing qualitative and quantitative intelligence to the table is an excellent way to enhance your value to operational leaders by filling a gap in their business intelligence. Take the time to analyze and synthesize your patient research insights, quantifiable market data, and information about your competitors to complete the package of true intelligence for operational leaders. Through quarterly meetings with internal stakeholders, you can share these insights and agree upon gaps that will inform your research agenda. This creates a positive feedback loop—valuable insights lead to better outcomes and stronger financial performance, boosting demand for insights and reinforcing the value of marketing.

Increase the Mix of  Digital Marketing

Demonstrating value has been challenging for healthcare marketers who have struggled to attribute patient and procedure volume to specific marketing investments accurately. Like it or not, the product or outcome of your marketing is measured in financial terms. It’s the language common throughout the organization. While you must nurture your team’s creative spirit and output, the ultimate result will be measured in patient volume and revenue. Adding digital to your marketing strategy enables you to demonstrate results measured in terms the organization understands. 

Digital marketing offers attribution and measurement that traditional media like broadcast TV, print newspapers, and billboards never could.  Shifting your strategy to include more digital enables you to demonstrate accountable results. You can create highly targeted audience segments focused on specific service line growth goals for digital outreach, making it a more efficient tactic than traditional media. 

Using de-identified population data, you can report the number of new visits or encounters from the audiences who see your digital advertisements. This data is easily converted to revenue using your internal revenue cycle data. LIFT Healthcare’s measurement system relies on claims, eliminating the burden on IT departments to connect to the EHR.  This measurement process offers a lower hurdle to getting compliance approval by avoiding the collection of pixels that HIPAA now prohibits. 

Extend Your Digital Strategy To Referral Growth

Many healthcare marketers focus entirely on digital strategies targeting consumers and miss the rich opportunity to directly reach physicians in their market with digital messages.  You can leverage NPI-level (National Provider Identifier) data when targeting physicians. NPIs enable exact matching of physicians who have engaged with your advertising to those whose patients have encounters or procedures in your system.  

Digital strategies targeted at physician referrals can strengthen your brand reputation and build awareness of specialty programs, in addition to increasing referrals. You can also use targeted digital marketing to support recruiting physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants. This tactic opens up a new key internal stakeholder for marketers who may not have been tapped to support recruitment, but whose skills in targeting and communication may surpass those of HR recruiters. 

Turn Internal Stakeholders into Marketing Advocates

The more you take a customer-centric approach to your marketing, the more indispensable you become to internal leaders. You can solidify marketing’s value proposition by proactively engaging with them, delivering actionable consumer insights, leveraging digital marketing for measurable patient acquisition results, and extending these strategies to referral growth. These actions transform marketing from a cost center to a strategic partner, ensuring its marketing ROI and contributions are recognized and championed, even during periods of financial constraint.  

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.