Scaling Shared Marketing Services

Jenny: Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, A Healthcare Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. Today we are going to talk about scaling shared services. So we have been inundated over the last couple of months with inquiries about rolling out a shared service model to local offices.

So this really can come into play really usually about three distinct areas. So first you have the private equity play. And that’s in situations where groups have been acquired, but decision making and budgets are still partially left then individually acquired offices. So they’re still able to hire their own marketing vendors, make their own marketing creative, etc.. Next would be an M&A hospital system scenario, and this is when health systems that have experienced rapid growth through M&A still may have some marketing control at the local hospital level, so they still hold some regional power.

There are still some local nuances. And we also have found often that within hospital systems, you may even have certain departments that are trying to go rogue with a pink t-shirt, for example, that is completely off brand. Everybody has heard that horror story, right? And then another final example is nationwide organizations or health plans that are nationwide, but they have a lot of state or regional departments, decision making powers around marketing, positioning, lots of autonomy to really be able to drive their own marketing strategies and tactics.

And there’s also different regional regulations that they’re working with. So let’s talk about best practices here. This is something that Hedy & Hopp has been leaning in on and helping organizations figure out for over a decade, and we’ve gotten pretty good at helping folks really walk the line, because one of the mistakes that we see often is folks trying to force the hands of those, let’s call them local offices, right?

Just picking a word division, whatever. But these local offices, if they have autonomy or believe they have autonomy, the worst thing you can do is try to force their hand and force them to do what you want them to do with marketing. Unless you have a decision coming from the very top down that is literally stripping them of decision making and marketing ability, then you need to think of them more as your clients and get them excited about collaborating on marketing and advertising initiatives.

So let’s talk about four different pillars or strategies of ways that you can kind of pull them in and get them excited about collaboration. The first is making sure that you have an easily accessible, self-serve brand toolkit. So you really need to have some easily accessible brand guidelines and templates for really inexpensive, print-ready local customization. This is how the hot pink t-shirt that Sally had her neighbor print 30 versions of end up happening is because there isn’t a way for folks to be able to easily create things within brand standards.

If it’s too difficult, if it takes too long, or if it’s too expensive, they’re going to go rogue. So you got to figure out how to make it easy for them, make it easier for them to actually use the tool that you want them to use than to go rogue, right? So one of the first things you want to think about is a DAM or a digital asset management tool.

There are tools like Canva Enterprise or Mark where corporations can really lock down the logos and fonts and the template if you will. But local teams can swap out things like headshots, local phone numbers, etc. to really customize it for what they need. That is way easier for folks in trying to design something from scratch. If it takes a local office three weeks in an email chain of 20 people to get a flier approved, they’re going to go rogue.

So a DAM is absolutely the way to go here. And there’s lots of different options. Now, it’s your decision, at that point, if you just want to allow them to access the templates, the brand templates, do some customization and then take the print ready files and go to their own printer that they may have a relationship with. Or, if you even want to lock down the production where they actually have to use your t-shirt vendor, your print company, etc. That is a separate decision that you’ll need to decide. But as you’re setting up your DAM with all of the different templates, you could really make that decision about how much autonomy you give them on that last step of the production process. 

The second pillar is the network effect or knowledge sharing. So one of the things that we find the most valuable is making sure that if folks are pooling their resources or participating in some sort of a joint marketing campaign, that they know they’re benefiting from the learnings of others.

So give it a catchy name or productize it in some way. Call it like the “marketing laboratory effect,” where you’re going to be testing out strategies like perhaps a TikTok strategy or a YouTube pre-roll strategy within one market. And then once you have a win, you productize it and roll it out to locations B through Z, right? That way, the offices aren’t just buying menu items, they’re buying collective intelligence and processes that you know are going to be successful.

They will be much more excited if you productize and systematize the rolling out of that. If you do it quietly behind the scenes, they won’t know that it’s happening and you won’t get the credit for it. So you really have to figure out a way to productize it and then evangelize it, as you’re working with all of these different offices.

The third is centralized strategy with local execution. So figure out a way for the headquarters to absorb the heavy lifting. Think strategy development, creative concepts, even asset development. So it’s financially worthwhile for those local markets to opt in. This is really the carrot versus the stick dynamic. You’re saying, hey, you’re going to save a lot of money.

If you work with us on this, we’re going to do all this upfront heavy lifting. We’re going to work with an agency or we have in-house talent to be able to do all the big picture strategic thinking, and then we’ll be able to hand over the things for you to actually do the local media buy. So if they have the local radio relationships, or they’re really passionate about placing in local newspapers, they can still do those things.

But you will know that the creative assets have been taken care of, and they will feel confident and excited about it, because that’s honestly where a lot of the upfront money and time goes in getting campaigns to market. So it really will become a financial no-brainer for them to participate. 

And then finally thinking about a shared dashboard of some kind, a lot of groups that we work with to put together a shared services model, really find a lot of value in building with us a reporting platform that allows leadership to see the macro view, so the total ecosystem spend and results while letting local teams drill down into their specific microperformance so you can see what the spend is per tactic or across your entire campaign, what the results are, what the patient volume and revenue is that’s been driven. 

And then you can drill down either per tactic across the entire network or per local office. That makes it really helpful because then you can understand, and they get value, because reporting and analytics is a really difficult thing to be able to set up from an infrastructure perspective, if you’re just at a local office, you they may not have the relationships or the technical access to be able to set up something like that.

So if part of participating in the shared services models, also getting access to a reporting dashboard that they simply have to log into to be able to see the results, it’ll be very exciting for them and wonderful for your leadership team to be able to then actually understand financially what is happening. So everybody’s had situations where local offices go rogue.

Hopefully this will give you some ideas about how to better structure a shared service model. So it is a win for Corporate and a win for all of the local offices. If this episode was helpful, please give us a like. Give us a follow. Share this episode with a colleague who you think may find it valuable, and give us a follow because we drop new episodes every Friday.

Thanks for tuning in to this week’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. We’ll see you soon! Cheers.