Healthcare marketing strategyData and ROI3 min read How to align your marketing strategy with your organization’s business goals

When healthcare marketers make decisions in a silo, they’re often left wondering why their strategy fell short. When you’re developing a marketing plan and defining how you’ll measure success, it’s all pointless if you can’t trace activity back to a meaningful business outcome—your goals.

A well-developed business strategy will ultimately define your marketing campaigns. But strategies are often developed independently, and administrative and marketing teams don’t always collaborate during the initial planning stages.

What’s your why?

If your marketing strategy isn’t aligned with organizational goals, then why are you doing it? We can all agree that you want results. But you’ve got to set yourself up for success.

So what does success look like? In general, success can be measured by moving the bar closer to achieving the organization’s goal.

A seat at the table

For healthcare marketers, it’s important to make sure you are seen as a strategic partner and that C-suite executives recognize the value of your work. When you have a seat at the table, marketing is seen as a source of revenue rather than an expense. But if your organization’s strategic planning is a closed-door session that excludes marketing, you’ll need to have a clear understanding of the goals that have been developed.

So, let’s start there…

Know your business goals

Understanding what your organization’s business goals are can help you turn them into something quantifiable and measurable. And they help guide your marketing decisions and keep things on track.

When you align your marketing strategy around these goals, you are demonstrating marketing’s long-term value. If you don’t have a set of goals to work toward—and a way to measure them—then you’ll never know if you are succeeding.

Measuring success

The metrics you use to monitor the results of your marketing plan will provide the feedback needed to improve the alignment of your marketing and business strategies. Start with your end goal and figure out how you’ll measure success for that specific goal. The key is to define specifically what engagement or conversion looks like and to make sure you have the tools in place to start collecting that data immediately.

Be agile

Once you know your business goals, check back in on your marketing plan. Do your tactics address those goals? If not, be agile enough to adjust your strategy. Make sure your plan includes:

• Consistent branding. Ensure that your brand messaging is consistent across all marketing channels and represents organizational goals.
• Consumer experience. Assess how well your brand is perceived in the market. Identify any barriers to the business goals.
• Content strategy. A solid content strategy amplifies brand credibility, lets you control the conversation and drives conversions.
• Use thoughtful targeting to improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Your metrics will be more useful.
• Alignment with the buyer’s journey. Understanding the buyer’s journey will provide great insight into the thought process, challenges and decisions that are being made by your consumers.
• Conversion data. Make sure you have a plan for strong calls to action, tracking links and phone numbers, and other tactics to measure your conversions.
• Patient retention. Assess your patient retention strategies to move this metric in the right direction.
• Resources and processes. Assess how efficiently you and your team are working, and identify opportunities for refining the workflow.

Remember, when you’re creating your marketing plan and defining the metrics of success, it’s all pointless if you can’t trace activity back to meaningful outcomes—your goals.

Whether you are a current Coffey client or not, our team can help you take on your day-to-day communications challenges. If you’d like to find out more about our print and digital content services or custom digital tools, call 888.805.9101 or email us. We’re here to help.