In healthcare marketing, leaders often face the challenge of helping their teams become more efficient in a field full of regulations and diverse patient needs. Balancing new regulatory demands and accommodating diverse patient needs requires finding smart ways to streamline processes and maximize productivity. In this week’s episode, discover how to amp up your healthcare marketing team with Jenny Bristow, CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp.
Jenny explores innovative approaches to streamline workflows, maximize collaboration, and amplify success. She hits on project briefs, scorecards, case studies, and in-house knowledge-sharing to revolutionize your approach. Tune in to learn how to utilize these actionable steps and empower your team toward greater efficiency.
Jenny’s book Recommendation: Traction by Gino Wickman
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
00:02
Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am your host. I am the CEO and founder at Hedy and Hopp. We’re a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. We work with payers, providers, and folks driving innovation in healthcare all across the country.
I’m really excited to be here with you today and share some insights. We just wrapped up our monthly all hands. So once a month, our entire agency gets together to be able to talk about status updates for ongoing initiatives within the organization. We do shout outs related to our core values. One of the things that takes up a big part of the agenda though, is talking about ongoing operational improvements. And an interesting conversation I have often with the marketing leaders that are our clients or folks wanting to be our clients is ways that they can improve their own marketing team’s performance.
01:06
So we’re a marketing agency, right? We work with marketing teams within healthcare companies. Sometimes those teams are two or three people teams. Sometimes they are 40 to 50 people teams. It really varies based off of the size of the organization and the budget prioritization of marketing within that organization. For example, we have a variety of children’s hospitals that are clients and at one maybe they have a five person team and at another they may have a 40 person team. So you can see big variations even with the same category within the healthcare space. But often folks come and ask me, you know, Jenny, “How can I manage my team more efficiently? What are some ideas to be able to kind of tighten up our deliverables, work more effectively with your agency or agency as a partner?” And as we are going through our all hands today, I jotted down a couple of things that I thought could be really helpful to share.
02:05
So if you manage an internal marketing team at a healthcare organization, here are four things you can consider to incorporate into your processes or the way that you view your work that can make your team more effective. The first one.The very first thing my team does whenever we land a new client, whether it is a project, a one-time piece of work that has a set timeline, as well as a set deliverable, is we create a project brief. And that’s again, if they’re a project or if it’s an ongoing retainer client. A project brief is a simple document that outlines why the project or work needs to exist, what the objective is, how we will know if it’s successful. And then often it will include details such as geography, service line, or any business unit information that you need.
It’s designed to be one piece of paper that you can hand say to senior leadership if they’re asking why you’re spending money or time on work, a contractor or an agency, if you need somebody to lean in or even another member of your team, if they’re net new coming into a project or a piece of work, they can read the brief and easily understand what is going on. We create the brief right after the scope of work is signed, in conjunction with the client kickoff meeting. And then that brief for us is the north star for that work. We’ll update it throughout the life of the work if we get additional facts from the client or any additional information just needs to be added to provide clarity for the team that’s either working on it or that will be reported to.
03:48
So if you are not yet creating a project brief for your internal work with your internal team members, pause and ask yourself if creating a brief for all of the asks, all of the work that you do before you begin working on it, could help reduce the chaoticness or the confusion within your organization. And I’m gonna bet the answer is yes, ’cause there’s certainly a reason why we do it here at Hedy & Hopp and most agencies do it. It’s a pretty standard practice.
So again, number one, number one tip for making your internal marketing team more effective is standardizing the creation of briefs for every single project or piece of work that goes out your door. And maybe you have, you know, a campaign brief and then some tactical pieces are underneath it. You don’t necessarily need to do a brief for a newspaper, a local newspaper ad that you’re doing, that should roll up to a bigger brief that more summarizes the work.
04:44
That’s number one. Number two, scorecards. So at Hedy & Hopp, we are an EOS organization. So EOS stands for Entrepreneurial Operating System. There is a fabulous book called “Traction” and it walks through the importance of measuring what’s important. Not only measuring it, but also providing visibility throughout the organization. It helps ensure that everybody is truly rowing the boat in the same direction.
We’ve been an EOS organization for about two and a half years, and the standardization of processes, the ease of communication within teams and our ability to set and achieve goals as an organization has increased massively over those two and a half years. So, I’ll link to the book itself in the show notes, but think about if you were to create a scorecard to be able to measure the effectiveness of your team at doing their jobs, what are some things that individuals and the departments within your team could actually report on or on a weekly or a monthly basis?
05:46
So for example, here at Hedy & Hopp, some of the things that we report on are; are projects being completed on time? What is the quality? And we have a variety of ways to measure quality within our agency. So, you could come up with your own quality factors, but is the quality of work at a standard that we are setting for ourselves? Is the work being done on budget and on budget? It doesn’t necessarily mean need to mean out of pocket dollars. It could also mean hours. So did you estimate correctly as far as how many hours it would take your team to complete something. And then results. One of the key ways, whenever marketing leaders come to me and say, “You know, Jenny, we historically have not been a data driven organization. I’m a huge believer of being data-driven. What are some ways I can improve the way that we are talking about and sharing metrics within our organization and measuring results within a weekly and monthly dashboard within our team?”
06:48
By far, one of the number one ways to make that happen is you’re setting a standard about what your expectations are for how campaigns should be managed and reported upon within the organization. And it’s a really great way to do it. So, that also ensures you go back to the brief. Number one, you have to report on what the expectations are for performance and the brief in order to report on and to see if you hit that goal in the weekly or monthly dashboard that you’re creating. Again, this doesn’t necessarily have to be something that you share with senior leadership. It can just be something within your own team structure that you report on to understand like what makes your own week, month, and quarter a success for the marketing team. It can be something you can hold yourselves accountable to or as a leader you can hold your team accountable to. But I would totally recommend looking into setting up some dashboards.
07:37
Number three case studies. So this is something as an agency, of course we create case studies, right? We wanna highlight the work that we’re doing so we can help more patients access care. We wanna work with even more providers, payers, and innovation groups across the country. We’re very passionate about it, right? So for us to showcase our work means we can get more work. But as an internal marketing team, showcasing the success of your work and do a couple of things. And there’s a couple of different reasons that you wanna start thinking about standardizing the development of a case study after specific and certain kinds of projects wrap within your team. The first is, again, if you’re trying to become a data-driven organization, it certainly will help if you have people within your organization report on the results.
08:27
If in the brief you said you needed to have X number of leads come in for a specific service line, if in your weekly monthly dashboards you’ve been reporting upon that, and let’s say you hit the ball outta the park, gosh, that’s a great case study to be able to put it together and then showcase not only to your entire marketing team, ’cause perhaps only a certain percentage of them worked on that piece of work, but you can highlight it and say, this is the way we view success within our marketing team, right? We view it by having an understanding of the number of patients we wanted to reach and then achieving that, and we’re gonna share that. But number two, it also allows you to have some really great ammunition to be able to share with leadership to be able to say, here is why you approve that marketing budget that we requested. Here is the impact we are having on revenue today based off the new patients we’re bringing in the door.
09:16
And then a third exciting one is, as a marketing leader, it’s also an opportunity for you to be able to submit your work for awards. And again, if you go back, there was an episode I did about why and how you submit to awards. This is a great example though. If you wanna showcase your team’s work as far as being data driven, really excelling by maximizing your budget, driving certain service line success, having a case study will allow you to submit for those awards and then really make your team feel super proud of the work that they did. And then fourth and final, one of the things that we actually measure within Hedy & Hopp is our subject matter experts within our organization sharing their subject matter expertise, right?
09:58
We are an organization that is very focused on continually growing, learning, and expanding our skill sets. We have the ability to do a lot of education and training even just within our own ecosystem, and you do too. So creating some sort of system where you’re doing lunch and learns, maybe it’s a morning zoom session every other Tuesday where certain team members have half an hour to be able to showcase a new technology they’re using, a smart way to integrate AI into your processes (There’s episode coming on that soon), or perhaps it is somebody giving an update on Google’s algorithm changes and how that potentially could impact your budget planning for the balance of the year. A lot of expertise lives within your own team. And finding a way to standardize the sharing of that in a way that, again, twofold not only helps your entire team, but also helps your individual team members get experience sharing and talking about their expertise.
11:07
One thing that great leaders know is that by helping other people become more comfortable at public speaking and sharing their knowledge, that’s gonna help them tremendously with their own professional career. Short and long term, even after they leave your organization, they are gonna be a better communicator of ideas and thoughts because of their time working with you if you implement something like that. So it’s really a win-win.
So if you are an internal marketing leader within an organization, again, four things I’d recommend integrating, thinking about how you can make this standardized during 2024. A brief, every single thing that you do needs to roll up to a brief within your organization. Weekly and monthly Scorecards, how are you reporting on the work that you’re doing and how do you know that it’s up to the standard that you want your team and your organization to perform for? Number three case studies, you’re doing great work. Get into the process of standardizing and talking about it internally and externally. And then number four, knowledge sharing. You have lots of smart people on your team. Really find a way to be able to help them and you shine.
So that’s it for today’s episode of We Are Marketing Happy. Thank you so much for tuning in. Again, I’m gonna share a link to the book, “Traction” in the notes, show notes if you are really wondering and curious about how you can make your department more data driven. It talks about becoming an entire organization that follows EOS, but if you’re just really thinking even about your own department, there’s a lot of great practices that you can integrate that could make you more effective and efficient at communicating. So thank you again for tuning in. We will see you on next week’s episode. Have a great day.
