Speaking Boardroom: How to Pitch Marketing Metrics to the C-Suite

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. I’m really excited to come with you today and chat a little bit about speaking to the boardroom, how to pitch marketing metrics to the C-Suite.

So we have had lots of conversations with our clients about this over the last couple of months as folks kind of prepared for budgeting conversations or progress update conversations with their board. And one of the things we really enjoy doing at Hedy & Hopp, as being a true partner to our clients and helping prepare even the content, the slides, making sure they have access to the metrics that they need to be able to justify the progress that they are making with the marketing investment, even outside of what Hedy & Hopp,

Maybe we are their media partner, but perhaps in how they manage organic or social. We are happy to help them, you know, put together that story about the progress that we’re making. And we have seen, you know, time and time again, it’s really difficult to make the transition from the marketing metrics that you’re used to talking about with your team and with your agency partners to metrics and data points that the C-Suite care about.

So today we’re going to talk about exactly that. We’re going to talk about the disconnect. We’re going to talk about and identify three financial metrics that your CFO is actually going to care about. We’re going to talk about building the executive-ready dashboard. And then we’re going to talk about how you can use these same metrics on the defense.

If you’ve been told that your budget is going to be cut. How can you actually frame the cost of inaction? So let’s jump in. Typically, as marketers, we’re always talking about things like, you know, more upstream metrics to be able to understand the reach that a campaign may have. And then, of course, getting down to that cost per lead metric.

One of the things that has been very difficult to actually accomplish in healthcare marketing is actually fully understand the revenue that marketing’s leads are driving, the growth that can be directly attributed to marketing’s work. And that has been because historically, there’s been a bit of a firewall kind of around the EHR and all of the, you know, clinical metrics.

That is shifting rapidly. We have successfully been able to put tracking metrics like UTM parameters into patient records within Epic, and then pull campaign reporting out. That allows us to understand the number of patients and the downstream revenue that specific campaigns drove. So the days of having, you know, that that walled garden and not being able to fully report on the entire journey and revenue that your campaigns are driving, luckily, is over for most organizations.

You just have to act to be able to stand up all of these different reporting technical capabilities. But once you’re there, what we need to focus on are a couple of different things. First, really understanding. And instead of talking about cost per lead, reframing it as a patient acquisition cost. So this is still on the cost side of the equation versus the revenue.

But it’s really important to be able to understand how to calculate the patient acquisition cost by service line. So as you’re talking about, to the board, objectives for the organization to be able to drive volume, you can actually put some dollars behind it through the lens of what is it going to take from a marketing dollars investment at a certain patient acquisition cost to be able to accomplish your goals?

So that’s the first metric. Second is really fine tuning it from downstream revenue, which again, we’re excited to even have in healthcare nowadays. So downstream revenue for many organizations is going to be a win. But if you really want to win the hearts and minds of the board, switch that over to contribution margin. So the board knows that revenue itself can be misleading.

So if you phrase it through the lens of contribution margin, that is the revenue generated by marketing driven patients minus the variable costs of their clinical care. So that helps them understand the true financial impact of the patients that marketing was able to drive. And then finally service line ROAS which is return on ad spend. So don’t look at a blended ROAS for your campaigns.

You really want to break it down and identify specifically those high margin clinical procedures like cardiology or orthopedics and neurology, where the financial return is going to be the highest, because that will absolutely enable you to be able to help justify additional dollars for some of these, service lines, especially if there’s additional, access to bring in additional patients.

Next. Second, let’s talk about an executive-ready dashboard. So the golden rule of a board presentation is less is more. You do not want to have to spend five minutes explaining a slide. That means it’s too complex. You’re trying to communicate too much. So an easy way to think about this is really like a three-column framework. Tell a story in five seconds.

First the input. What capital was deployed? What was the marketing spend by service line? In the middle is what is the output, the clinical volume that was generated. Again you can pull EHR, verify new patient encounters. And then third is the impact. So what does it mean for the bottom line? Hopefully you’re able to pull again contribution margin.

And then also estimated lifetime value. This is a really easy way in a screenshot. You know on a one slider to be able to quickly explain what progress marketing is making to achieving those operational and organizational objectives. A couple of things I want to call out. I failed to mention this in the first segment. In order to truly get to contribution margin, you’re going to have to become BFFs with your CFO.

So to actually be able to understand what that calculation needs to look like, what are those variable clinical costs? To be able to do that calculation, you need to become BFFs with them, help them understand what you’re trying to report on, because for them, they want that data just as badly as you do. So really working together to be able to report at that level of granularity is a big success for both of you, so it should be a pretty easy conversation.

And then finally, let’s talk about the defensive play. Let’s talk about the cost of inaction. So right now we are seeing budgets being slashed across the board in healthcare. Regardless of if you’re a privately held organization, you know, PE-backed whatever. Budgets are being slashed right now. So how are you going to help the board understand the impact of these budget cuts?

So marketing often is first on the chopping block. So it is your job to defend it. So first talking about and framing it as a market share leakage. So what happens if marketing stops actually calculate the patient volume that will be turned off if you turn off or reduce marketing budgets and really phrasing it not as a, you know, this is we’re saving money, but this is what’s happening.

But hey, we’re ceding market share to our primary competitor down the street. You know, here the number of patients that our marketing is absolutely going to no longer be bringing in the door. So big impact there. And then finally showing the board the direct correlation. If your hand is forced and you do have to reduce budget, actually look at and track the financial implications of what happened, what was the trajectory of, say, high margin elective procedures for a three month time period if marketing was turned off compared to what your expectations were, based off of that strategy that you had presented probably a year ago.

You know, based off those patient volumes, you expected that it would drive so really phrasing it as a choice. Like we can reduce our spend by 20% in order to hit this quarter’s cost cutting goal. But our historic models show we’ll reduce the 150 K drop in surgical contribution margin next quarter. Right. It’s data. And then if they still need to or want to reduce it, that’s fine.

But you’re actually making sure that they understand and meaningful numbers what that impact is going to be. So again this is a difficult mindset shift for marketers that have reported with different metrics and terminology their entire career to all of a sudden be talking to a completely different audience that oftentimes doesn’t care what the campaign is. They don’t care what the creative is.

They just want to actually know if it, you know, drove and contributed to growth of the organization. So definitely encourage you to step back, kind of think about the data points that you’re using, think about your analytics tech stack. Do you have the data pipelines in place to even accomplish reporting at this level? If not, give us a call.

We’d be happy to help you, but once you have it in place, then actually start reporting on it, and I guarantee your seat at the table will be much more valued by others than when you’re simply talking about marketing metrics, which they may consider vanity. So thank you so much for tuning in today. I hope this was a helpful episode.

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