This post is part of a series that explores how Unlock Health makes great work easier.

Without even thinking about it, we take in data and use it to make decisions in our everyday lives. The bigger the decision, the more insights you’d like to have, and the more effort you might have to put in to get them.

Fortunately, technology has made getting and using data to formulate and measure your marketing strategy easier than it has ever been. The kind of data you have access to and how you use it varies at different points in the marketing process, but considering the value of insights from this data should be a go-to task throughout.

At the front end

Before you begin to develop a marketing strategy, you need to gather insights. The Unlock Health BrandNEXT^® framework is structured around four areas of internal and external insights — organizational, category, human and market.

Organizational and category insights tell us about you, your culture, and your goals. They also tell us what kinds of trends and challenges you’re experiencing.

Human insights tell us about your audience. Your consumers and the communities they live in have a fundamental impact on your mission, your brand, and how you interact with them. You need to understand their demographics and what kinds of social risk factors are present and how they define your primary and secondary service areas.

Market insights are derived from solid intelligence on your competitive environment. Before you can develop campaigns that will build brand awareness and highlight your differentiators, you need to know exactly what they are. You need to know how your competitors are similar to you and how they’re different. What’s their brand promise and what’s their favorability like in their primary and secondary service areas? How do the services you provide compare in meeting the needs of your patients and the wider community?

It’s important to understand those differentiators from both the consumer and operational perspectives. So, consider things like:

• The physical locations placement throughout the community
• The clinical strengths and operational capabilities of each of your competitors
• Their payor and service acuity mixes
• The impacts of delivery network integration on the patient journey and market share

With these details in hand, you’ll determine what experiences and interactions to leverage, and the channels, traditional and digital, you can use to effectively reach the audience(s) you’re seeking. The energy and enthusiasm mount, and you arrive at launch day! Time to move to the back end and see how you’ve done.

At the back end

The back end is where the proverbial rubber meets the road — measuring performance. This is where we consolidate data, design, and build dashboards, and measure our performance against the marketing goals and KPIs we established during the strategy phase.

As Matt Russell said in his recent blog, marketers were historically more focused on creating visibility and less focused on establishing downstream impact. But good marketing does have an impact on overall business results, and it’s important to understand what it is — and to communicate to your organizational stakeholders.

Once campaigns are launched, you can use Unlock’s reporting solutions, or your own existing reporting, and cull through the various campaign initiatives to capture what worked well and what could have gone better. Your executive audience will be most interested in the high-level goal achievement, while marketing teams focus on the detailed tactic and channel performance.

When you’ve assessed your results and compared them against relevant benchmarks and achievement of campaign goals, you can then work to optimize your campaign. You can adjust the channel mix and audience targeting based on what you’ve learned to achieve the best possible results. You may find operational or digital system performance opportunities that reduce friction in the patient’s journey. This process is iterative, introducing new ideas and possibilities that can be assessed for traction — sometimes as an A/B test in-market — leading us to an important point.

The main purpose of your dashboarding and reporting should be to learn, learn, and learn some more. You will never have complete and perfect knowledge before you begin to execute. Adopting an analytics-based test and learn mentality enables learning to occur in increasingly impactful waves.

Moving to the middle

The move-to-the-middle is the transition to using more in-house data to inform decision-making. Think of it as a refining phase, where you have leveraged external data and learned from in-market campaign. It’s time to bring your learning in alignment with company goals, and partner with other internal stakeholders to prioritize future investments and their focal points. This often involves refining who you want to reach, what business outcomes you are striving to impact, and how best to go about reaching that goal. That depends on several factors.

• Service lines: You’ll need to understand which of your service lines have capacity to take on new patients. You may not want to attract new orthopedic patients if you know that you have a twelve-week wait for appointments in that service line.  If you have profitable service lines with capacity to take on new patients, then those are excellent areas to focus on.
• Payor mix: You’ll also want to understand the payor mix in your current payor population. For example, you may be heavier on public payors and want to attract more commercially insured patients. The payors for patients you have versus the patients you want to attract may affect how you structure your campaign.
• Audience: How will you define engagement and set scoring for your campaign? You’ll need to expand on what you know about your current patients, especially where and how they’re engaging with you. Past studies tell us that 10% of current patient base yield roughly 80% of revenues. Challenge your teams on the mix of acquisition versus retention and development campaign efforts. And use your knowledge of your current patient base to form acquisition strategies.

Connecting knowledge of your consumer audience with the decisions you made about service lines and capacity, makes up the base for an alignment of marketing to corporate strategies. This alignment is critical in establishing budget allocations, their alignment to acquisition or development strategies, and communication of operational capabilities that support retention and acquisition goals. You can also leverage the insights from this combination to define user experiences for distinct patient audiences and create distinct positioning of your services that align to patient and consumer needs and improve your overall patient experience.

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.