From Order-Taker to Leadership Role

Jenny: Hi Friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy 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 excited to be here to chat with you today about repositioning marketing inside your health system. We get calls from senior marketing folks within health systems all of the time, and they are frustrated because they are stuck as an order-taker within their organization.

So I’m sure many of you have at least heard of, if this hasn’t happened to you directly, but heard of marketers being asked to quickly create a flyer for something by Friday or get a billboard over here. There’s no strategy. There’s no downstream measurement impact for this activity, and you’re really stuck in an order-taking trap. Today isn’t about working harder.

As a marketer, what we’re going to talk about is being seen differently. You want to be seen as someone who drives revenue, not just designs postcards. So if you have been frustrated that you have not been invited to the leadership table, this episode is for you. So we’re going to talk about five concrete moves that can help leadership see your marketing function as something valuable to the growth of the organization starting this quarter.

Starting right away. Right? So let’s start first. First tip: when you’re building your marketing strategy for the year, make sure it ladders up to the organization’s strategic roadmap. This is something that we see as misses all of the time when we’re brought in to work with a new health system, is the CMO, or head of marketing, put together a marketing strategy that really was based off of the prior year strategy with a little bit of refinement.

The problem with that is if leadership is focused on a handful of service lines or organizational growth goals, and your strategic roadmap does not ladder up to that, it is a huge missed opportunity to make sure that you’re speaking the right language and focused on the right priorities. So get a copy of your organization’s strategic plan, or annual priorities.

This could include everything from service line, growth targets, market expansion goals, quality or access initiatives and literally map your marketing plans objectives to it line-by-line. For every marketing objective, be able to answer things like which strategic pillar does this ladder up to? If you can’t answer that, question whether it belongs in your plan. This is what is going to make you sound like you belong in leadership rather than ladder up to leadership.

So because what you’re going to start saying is not here’s the activity that we’ve done, you’re going to say, here’s how marketing drives the three priorities that you already set.

Next, stop reporting activity and start reporting outcomes. It can get really, it can be very difficult to transition from reporting and talking about activity-based metrics such as “we published 12 posts and created three fliers” to outcome based conversations, like “for service line X, we saw 14% lift in appointment requests,” right? It’s very difficult to make that vocabulary change.

It used to be that it was difficult because the data didn’t exist. Now it’s difficult because the data isn’t something that system leaders are comfortable referencing because it’s new. It hasn’t been around that long, and it isn’t part of your reporting frameworks and the way that you talk. So first of all, you have to address the objection up front.

Yes, healthcare attribution is messy. Multi-touch journeys, long consideration cycles, offline conversions. But you have to insist that imperfect attribution still beats vanity metrics. So we’re going to assume that these metrics that we’re looking at, once they’re fully vetted and set up, of course, are directionally correct, and they’re tied to a business outcome that outperforms a perfectly-tracked impression count every time, every time it’s going to be better to be able to have something that directionally informs us about real business growth than a vanity metric that’s about impressions or clicks.

So here’s a practical tip, is pick 2 or 3 metrics that you feel comfortable that you can confidently connect to a service line’s actual patient volumes. So for example, call volume to a scheduling line, perhaps you use CallRail or Invoca you can confidently talk about the number of inbound calls that were over 30 seconds and led to an appointment.

Appointment request form fills, new patient volume in a specific specialty, and report on those consistently quarter over quarter. Really make it clear that marketing is driving this growth and these different impacts that we’re communicating on. So an ideal world, once you identify the 2 to 3 metrics and identify the strategic roadmap and how you’re going to communicate, rolling up to leadership, a mini script that you could use is something along the lines of, you know, instead of saying, “we posted 12 times this month,” say “our campaign for orthopedics was associated with a 14% increase in appointment requests, and we can trace roughly X in downstream visit value.”

Big difference. Right? So we’re changing the way that we talk about our strategic priorities, and we’re changing the way that we’re incorporating data into the conversation. And that takes us on to the next tip. Tip number three: learn to speak CFO. We talked about this a little bit in our board episode a couple of weeks ago. If you haven’t listened to that one yet, go back and tune in.

It was how to make sure that your strategy sessions land when you’re talking to your board. But it’s still true if you’re just thinking about your leadership team. You need to understand leadership’s dialect. So marketing has its own vocabulary, impressions, engagement, reach. Leadership doesn’t care about any of that. They care about revenue margin, acquisition cost. You need to be bilingual.

You need to be able to speak both. So what you need to do is translate your campaign results into terms that they already track and care about. So downstream revenue: what’s a new patient worth across the full episode of care? Not just the first visit. Patient acquisition cost, which is marketing spend divided by new patients generated by service line, and then contribution margin, which is what specialties are actually profitable to grow, helps you really understand, for example, that if you’re driving new patients to ortho and imaging, it’s going to be much more effective to help the organization grow revenue and profit than primary care.

So a simple habit is before your next leadership team meeting, take one campaign result and rewrite it twice, once in marketing language, and then write it out again in finance language. And then notice how different the room’s reaction is whenever you’re talking in finance language, it’ll be received much more warmly and positively. We already talked about in the episode around boardrooms that you need to have a relationship with finance and strategy early, so asking them and understanding what data sources within the system they trust, where they’re getting their numbers and use their exact terminology, not yours.

So if your system has a finance or decision support team, request their existing service line profitability reports as a template for the what language leadership speaks internally, because that will be a really big clue as far as what reports they’re looking at and how they’re communicating with each other. Okay. Tip number four is pick one winnable proof point.

You are not going to be able to convince everyone that your marketing is doing great everywhere all at once. And honestly, it may not be. You may have some campaigns that are performing stronger than others. So win one visible battle first, in order to begin getting credibility. So choose a single high margin service line. Ortho cardiology and imaging are great examples because there’s clear volume metrics and there’s a real financial upside.

Definitely likely that it is one of the high growth areas that your system is looking to target. And then run one measurable, well-scoped campaign for that service line. Keep the goal singular, like grow appointment requests and joint replacement consults by X, right? Be very very laser focused and then instrument it well from day one. Make sure all of the tracking technologies like call tracking, UTM tag landing pages, a dedicated phone number, whatever you have access to, make sure it’s fully integrated so you know that you’re tracking and attributing as much as possible throughout this campaign.

If you are an Epic-based organization, I’ve got to give a shout out again to our UTM connect tool. It can help you put the UTM campaign parameters into the patient record, and then we can help you pull it back out into a dashboard so you can have actual number of appointments and amount of revenue driven within your dashboard.

So very, very useful. Give us a holler if you aren’t already working with us to build that out for your organization. And then after you allow it to run, turn it into an internal case study. So one pager or a couple of slides, one chart, one clear before and after. Use it in the next leadership conversation as a proof of concept.

This is what marketing is able to accomplish whenever we have all of the tools and technologies in place. So again, this is definitely not about forcing your hand to do only a specific kind of marketing campaign, like a service line volume, for example. But it’s about showing when marketing has all of the tools and processes in place, not only can it be executed,

But the technology can help us track exactly what we should be given credit for, or how marketing contributed. And then you can scale that across different kinds of campaigns. And then tip number five is get in that room earlier. Perception shifts whenever you show up with market insights before anyone asks for it. That’s the difference between oh, we made a bunch of fliers this month to they know the market.

So some concrete examples of what to bring unprompted to strategy meetings is search trend data. So what are patients in your market searching for? Perhaps there’s a rise of interest in a procedure, a competitor service line, a symptom cluster. Pay attention and figure out where you can get this kind of data to be able to help see trends before perhaps strategy or your leadership team sees it.

So then you can help provide some strategic recommendations about how to capitalize on that opportunity. Patient sentiment, themes from reviews, patient satisfaction comment, social listening, and then competitor moves. If there’s a new health system billboard campaign, a competitor opening a new rival outpatient location, perhaps an ad spend shift or a new social media content strategy, have all of this content together and bring it to them before they ask for updates on the market.

So how would this look in execution? If I were in your shoes, I would go to my agency partners and I would say, what data can you provide to me on a recurring basis to help me have some useful insights for my leadership team? Lean on them. That’s what your agency should be doing, is they should be providing you with these resources and these data points.

They likely have access to a lot of subscriptions and tools to be able to do this exact kind of thing. So ask for them to do it. Carve out some time in your marketing retainer to have them prepare slides for you in advance, and then have a simple one-pager or slide, or a couple of slides, and send it to leadership proactively, monthly or quarterly without anybody asking for it.

Give them a couple of bullet points in the email, and then have them open it to be able to review it. Proactively showing up with insights before you’re asked for those insights is what’s going to flip the tables where they then begin asking you to be involved in these conversations. So when you show up with market intelligence and you can speak in financial terms, you’re then going to really shift from a doer to a strategic participant.

So hopefully this was helpful. So many folks are dealing with this right now. Marketing has become so technically complex and strategic that this is a pivot we all have to make. We have to move from the order-taker to a strategic contributor. And hopefully these five tips will give you some useful things to think about as you’re making your own career and department transition.

I would encourage you to pick one of these five and try to implement it before, you know, within 30 days, before your next leadership team meeting, whenever it is, whether you’re invited or not, I’m sure you know when it is, proactively try to get some content or something out to them ahead of that meeting, and just pick one of the five that you focus on first and then begin inching in.

One other thing that I would recommend as a tactical tip is as you’re going through all of these steps, don’t hesitate, while it’s ideal to have somebody in finance be your right hand, and I love when I see that that’s happening for marketers, sometimes finance is unnecessarily,

You know, not willing to be able to, or unable, to share time with marketing, to be able to talk about things like data points and strategic positioning. Talk to Claude or an AI tool whenever you’re trying to learn different vocabulary and the way that a different function thinks, it’s really great to practice and to get some quick gut checks from a tool like Claude or Gemini or whatever tool.

Now, this could be your own personal account on your own personal device, because we’re not going to be uploading or sharing any sort of proprietary hospital information or health data. Instead, you’re going to say, you know, right now I’m working on strategic roadmaps. I’ve been stuck kind of sharing information from an order-taking perspective, here’s what I plan to share next month,

How can I have this resonate deeper with leadership, and then see how it helps. Do not copy and paste what it gives you. Again, nobody wants to read AI-generated garbage, but the vocabulary and the framing can be a good starting point for you to really reimagine how you should be putting content together and just challenge some of your vocabulary and framing perspectives.

So I hope this episode was helpful. If somebody else in your industry or on your team is struggling with a similar issue, please share this episode with them and like and subscribe. New episodes come out almost every Friday, so thanks for tuning in to this episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. We’ll see you next week! Cheers!