Effectiveness in Channel Marketing: A CEOs Guide2Basics

Failure happens when you have not defined growth expectations from each channel for your hospital. Acceptance that each hospital would have a different contribution from each external channel. Failure is when management allows every new CEO to experiment and change the original long-term plan upside down basis their anecdotal views. Hospitals which long-serving CEOs have taken marketing actions to its logical state of maturity by finetuning the channel approach basis rational response to market and competitive forces.

CHANNEL CLASSIFICATION

1.      Communication Channels

• ER Admissions
• OPD Appointments (Call Center – Voice & Non-Voice | Inbound and Outbound)
• Website (Doctor Consultations & Admissions | Domestic & International)

2.      Offline B2B Channels (Internal and External Efforts)

• Internal Doctors
• Internal Departments
• External Doctors within < 10 to 15 km of the hospital
• External Doctors in extended locations (in the city peripheries and other towns)
• Corporate Offices (Private and Public enterprises)
• Communities within < 10 to 15 km of the hospital
• Strategic Business Partners
• International Business Associates
• International Government / Quasi-Government Ministries

3.      Digital Channels

• New Customers – Search Marketing & Online Health Aggregators/Partners
• Existing Customers – Drip/Nudge Marketing

Increasing your business will be possible if you size up your expectations and deploy staffing to meet the strategy. Just going by hearsay and deploying staffing will be futile. Let me try to detail briefly on each channel effort that should be rationally deployed.

COMMUNICATION CHANNELS: FIRST IMPRESSIONS ARE GENERALLY THE LASTING IMPRESSIONS

1.      ER Admissions

Objective: The ensure timely response during the most critical hours – the very existence of us running a tertiary care hospital. Getting this right for each patient must be the sole driver.

Functionally: The role of the person deployed here as a task manager in shifts would be to ensure timely convenience to the patient relative/s, while the doctors handle the patient. Generate testimonials of as many cases of direct discharge from ER and remarkable recovery post-hospitalization. Both are equally important. All this effort will be to guarantee to each patient about the best clinical outcome (through monitoring and effective coordination) and hence increase word-of-mouth.

Expected Staffing: Shift based task staffing with clear roles and empowerment. The staff selected must be high energy, extremely compassionate with high morals.

2.      OPD Appointments (Call Center – Voice & Non-Voice | Inbound and Outbound)

Objective: Facilitating seamless and fastest appointment booking for doctor consultation (real-time basis) is their singular role.

Functionally: Closely working with the operations teams – getting this done with military precision is the singular task. All of you working in hospital ecosystems know that – we fail to deliver this basic expectation at so many of our hospitals. Bringing walk-ins to <5% is essential and for such cases providing empty slots such that a planned consultation is not disturbed is essential.

Expected Staffing: Load based shift staffing. Identifying a full-time lead to manage the show is essential

3.      Website (Doctor Consultations & Admissions | Domestic & International)

Objective: To help provide convenience to anyone and everyone to make a valid choice for their healthcare needs – preventive-care and sick-care. Our world is moving to digital space and this becomes the chief anchor – so make this mobile-first.

Functionally: This must be a corporate managed function – were updated information plays a key role. Clear handshake with the call center for fulfillment must be established. A good website rightly indexed and having simple interface is all that succeeds. Small dosage of trust boosters would help in the form of patient testimonials – graphics and video. Deployment of live-chat or chat-bot on the website is purely to achieve convenience.

Expected Staffing: Essentially should be handled by a digital agency with an internal content team responsible for content updates. This could be a task-staffing or full-time staffing at corporate for a group hospital.

OFFLINE B2B CHANNELS (INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL EFFORTS)

4.      Internal Doctors / Internal Departments

Objective: Engage doctors and support them to express themselves to their prospective patients and external stakeholders effectively.

Functionally: Managing expectations of internal doctors through an annual calendar of commitments on marketing their specialty and exposure to the existing programs. Monthly in-formal meetings with them to transparently share progress will go a long way in achieving their confidence and participation. 

Expected Staffing: This is to be managed by the CEO and the Marketing Head directly alongside Head – Medical Services

5.      External Doctors within < 10 to 15 km of the hospital

Objective: Collaborating with external doctors and nursing homes to ensure continuity of treatment and care. Create an ecosystem which is based on mutual trust and collective learning.

Functionally: Meeting around 500-1000 doctors depending on the density of doctors in the geography considered by your hospital as the neighborhood is what is essential. Over a practice of a year, you will find a few sets of doctors having good business in their clinic or supporting your doctors over other hospital doctors due to our hospital doctor’s success rate and openness to engage with them while their patient is admitted for continuity of care. Also what matters is the hospital's knowledge sharing and co-monitoring programs that the doctors are listed into and the benefits they derive from the same.

Expected Staffing: Deploy large teams at the launch or early-stage and trim it down by 20% every year hence to bring it down to a rational minimum. The working of the staff deployed here is to meet 10 doctors a day and introduce our program outcomes. Classifying A/B/C category of doctors and meeting them basis their potential means meeting them twice/once/once-in-two-months. You may hence work out the appropriate staffing count.

6.      External Doctors in extended locations (in the city peripheries and other towns)

Objective: Collaborating with external doctors in faraway geographies is a social obligation to fill the gap between urban and rural disparity in the healthcare ecosystem.

Functionally: Making this effort makes sense only under two conditions:

·        If your hospital has clinical programs of excellence (CoE) which can have patients traveling from such extended geographies

·        If your hospital is in geography which has extended towns that have a population without access to quality hospitals in their neighborhood

The effort is the first instance must be to meet convergent super specialists to promote our center of excellence programs. Effort in the second instance must be to meet selected doctors and request attention to use services at our hospital for their patients in need of quality tertiary care.

Expected Staffing: Try for task-based staffing with city team members traveling once a month every month on fixed dates to propagate the program. Once the programs or efforts rationally deserve full-time staffing working from those markets, deploy one.

7.      Corporate Offices (Private and Public enterprises)

Objective: This is an opportunity to popularize the hospital brand. Also an opportunity to help a social cause of spreading awareness on diseases and their impact on individuals and families.

Functionally: There are two types of work here. Sign-ups of corporates and key account management. Parallel work includes TPA sign-ups and engagement. Corporates either will allow or not allow preventive benefits to their employees – doctor talks or early-detection camps. Classifying this way is essential for estimating effort and hence staffing.

Expected Staffing: Try for full-time staffing at a ratio of 1:50 corporates. Add count of team only basis the key corporates with sizable employee base and those that allow employee direct engagement. The aim is to keep updating the key influencers/ key decision-makers (HR/Medical Officers) about the hospital's progress, clinical achievements, social initiatives. Also, on a monthly basis, an update on the patients from the corporate admitted and gathering on service experience.

8.      Communities within < 10 to 15 km of the hospital

Objective: Serving neighborhood communities to remain healthy and mobilize individuals towards healthcare activism.

Functionally: Meeting and knowing all possible leaders in communities in the neighborhood allows you to do BTL activations to take the hospitals offerings/benefits to the neighborhood. This ease helps your business – because when seriously sick and hospitalization is inevitable, they would prefer your hospital over the competition.

Expected Staffing: It’s task-based staffing staged approach of listing, mapping and then drawing an activity calendar that includes doctor talks or early-detection camps to be conducted need-based. Smart hospital teams will innovate here (this is the clear differentiator – and I hold my cards closed here – at this moment).

9.      Strategic Business Partners / International Business Associates / International Government / Quasi-Government Ministries

Like any other industry, having B2B/B2B2C partners helps channel more patients into the hospital. The ratio of how you do the retail to institution mix is purely a pragmatic judgment of the business basis their clinical program, location, interest, and intent. It’s a fallacy to do what others do and burn your precious resources – time, money and people. Ideally, all this must be dealt with as a centralized corporate function – that is where these will be optimal explored and optimization achieved in terms of resources invested.

DIGITAL CHANNELS (I will deal with Digital separately in a Chapter in near future)

10.  New Customers – Search Marketing & Online Health Aggregators/Partners

11.  Existing Customers – Drip/Nudge Marketing

THE IDEAL HOSPITAL MARKETING TEAM STRUCTURE AND STAFFING WOULD BE TO HAVE THE FOLLOWING:

It is not the size of the team, but the stability of the team, quality of planning and consistent set of actions thereafter, in a predefined direction that will fetch success.

1.      Head of Marketing (1 position)

2.      Lead – Doctors and Community Engagement (1 position) + 3-5-7 executives in the team (basis the rationale suggested earlier in this post)

3.      Lead – Corporate Business (1 position) + 1 or 2 executives in the team (basis the rationale suggested earlier in this post)

4.      Lead – B2C Marketing (1 position)

5.      MIS Executive (1 position)

Being open to hire the right set of candidates from outside industry and give them the right training and empowerment. Also, basis the marketing plans commit irreversible spends without detracting towards actions. Consistent smart repetitions will win the game of marketing – because marketing is not rocket science. The hospital will also have to invest in an ecosystem of partner agencies to support the marketing teams (will highlight it in a separate chapter).

Your teams will succeed and all channels will flourish if the communication calendar is weaved with smart content for impactful meetings and non-personal recall through WhatsApp broadcast messaging (I am still struggling to perfect this area at work).

Next Week: The fourth topic that I will take for discussion in this series is how to deal with ‘Effective Periodic Reviews’. This task could prove if you are able to sweat your team and also have fun working alongside them. Consistency here will help ace the goal.