This post is the second in a series on our approach to performance marketing. Read the first one here.

In my experience, marketers are often the outcast of the C-suite. In general, they don’t get the same level of respect as the CFO or COO — or any other stakeholders at the top. That’s because there’s still a lot of disconnect between traditional marketing goals and organizational financial performance.

Generating revenue has traditionally been viewed as the domain of business development or service line leadership teams, often operating separately from the marketing function. This creates a familiar tension between driving patient interest and delivering patient care. Healthcare marketers tend to focus on soft metrics, such as community outreach or brand favorability, while other business leaders prioritize more direct, performance-based metrics like patient volume and service line profitability. When there’s a disconnect between these roles, it can lead to significant gaps in strategy and outcomes, which is particularly problematic in the complex healthcare environment.

The truth is that these are not different functions at all. They’re very much the same function, and marketing can often do a better job of creating performance opportunities for other areas of the business. The feedback that those areas of the business give to marketing can then help to create a virtuous feedback loop.  

Build a shared understanding about marketing impact

Marketing and finance leaders need to develop a common language around how marketing efforts and KPIs translate into business results, even down to tactical things like shared dashboards. There should be a correlation between the number of people reached with how many people engaged, and then how many took the next step, then the next, and the next — all the way through every single patient engagement thereafter.

Marketing and finance also need to work together to build internal credibility, which then enables expanding marketing scope. If they’re not able to create and maintain that connective tissue, then marketing will continue to be seen as a cost center instead of a revenue generator.

All marketing should perform to drive the business

Brand and performance marketing aren’t mutually exclusive. You need both, but you need to be able to demonstrate that they both drive financial impact.

Performance marketing approaches are very tailored. Business leaders need to be able to say, “I want this specific patient archetype. I know how this person is likely to behave and how that behavior affects the overall sustainability of acquiring people like them as patients.” On the opposite end of the spectrum there’s been the more traditional approach. “I’ll put a billboard on the highway or run a TV ad, and it’ll reach who it reaches.” But even if you’re doing that, why not apply the scientific rigor that makes performance marketing great?

You can test these things. You can run billboards just in particular areas and be quantitatively rigorous in terms of measuring whether or not you can see an uplift in service line performance for particular locations. You can look at total lift in certain areas and determine that when you run billboards around a hospital you get more calls.

Healthcare organizations with strong brands get comfortable with the math and comfortable connecting hearts and mind branding to performance. They know exactly what they’re getting for their brand dollars because they’re drawing correlations at scale.

When you combine your brand marketing and performance marketing into a holistic approach, it’s efficient and cost-effective. One study showed that a brandformance approach created campaign results 58% higher than campaigns singularly focused on brand or performance.

The challenge for marketing and finance, working together, is to create a deeper understanding of how brand work connects to business results. The better you demonstrate that top of the funnel initiatives like brand awareness and affinity connect to middle and bottom of the funnel performance metrics, the more credibility you will have.  

For today’s healthcare marketers, the job is made even harder because achieving your goals has required a roster of agencies – the strategic agency, the creative agency, the tech agency. And yet there’s always been the missing partner — the agency who understands healthcare so deeply that it makes great work easier. Unlock Health is a full-service agency that makes great work easier through a combination of art and science — creativity fueled by data, insights, and deep expertise in the business of healthcare.

Like what you’re reading? Stay tuned for the next post in the series.