Maybe It’s Not Marketing’s Fault
How to use data to identify the real culprits inhibiting encounter volume growth.
// By George Danner //
I am not a marketer, but I have listened to conversations among our marketing team members and their clients about the difficulty of the marketing role in health care. When patient volumes and/or market share are down, the organization’s reflex is to push a single lever — marketing — in hopes of re-establishing normal business activity that the system depends upon for survival.
“If we had more billboards…”
“Competitor X is marketing more than we are…”
It’s not an unreasonable reaction, but often the picture is more complicated.
A solution to all of this is computer simulation modeling.
Sound, data-driven strategy starts with a realistic model of consumers coupled with the structure of the marketing pipeline. This creates a laboratory whereby a range of marketing actions can be tested, and the outcome, in the form of a set of KPIs, can be shown.
Veterans of business structure analysis recognize that the best outcome of any system arises from many small, surgical doses of improvement at targeted points rather than large, across-the-board interventions. Don’t like that outcome? Try another experiment with a different set of actions. And another, then another.
As you’ll see, a good model can settle debates about what’s working — and what’s not.