Marketing and Outreach
Earlier this year, Toshiba America Medical Systems, Inc., surveyed its customers who use the vendor’s Image Maker Marketing toolkit to understand the role of marketing in this challenging economic time. The survey results showed that marketing and outreach are more important than ever in tough economic climates. While the vast majority of respondents (from both imaging center and hospital environments) said that marketing was more important to their organizations in a difficult fiscal environment, 30 percent of imaging centers and 18 percent of hospitals represented don’t even have marketing budgets.
“If you speak to marketing professionals, they’ll always tell you marketing is more important in difficult times,” Jim Burch, director of communications at TAMS, Tustin, Calif., explains. “Most companies’ actions tend to be the opposite, however. What this survey indicates to me is that healthcare professionals understand the importance of being competitive, and in a downturn, they understand the importance of getting visibility for the type of services they offer, compared with the competition.”
The Image Maker survey reveals the ways hospitals and imaging centers market their new technology to referring physicians and patients, in spite of limited budgets. “If healthcare organizations have no marketing budget, they’re reliant on their partners to provide them with any marketing materials,” Burch says. “With the Image Maker program, we offer co-marketing underwriting, which dramatically increases the budget dollars available to them. We also provide assets like professional photography and design for promotional materials.”
Image Maker materials range from clinical images to templates for brochures and mailers, all customizable according to a facility’s individual branding and distribution requirements. In addition to providing pre-made marketing templates, Toshiba offers customers live consultation and assists customers with the design and copywriting for special projects upon request. “Our customers are front and center in the ads we help produce,” Burch says. “It’s not a Toshiba ad with their logo on it. It’s their advertisement, and we’re supporting them. The relationship is consultative.”
Burch notes that clinical images are a particular boon to facilities attempting to promote new equipment. “We supply images and information about the capabilities of the product,” Burch says. “If I’m in a facility with a new product, I may not have any images to show yet. That’s where Image Maker comes in; being able to show what the product can do is an important component of any marketing campaign.”
The survey indicates presentations and meetings are, by far, the number-one strategy employed for referring-physician marketing. “If you don’t have your referring-clinician population behind you, you can do all the direct-to-consumer marketing you want, but you’ll never be as successful as you need to be,” Burch notes. “Sharing best practices and showing what you can do for patients that’s different from the competition, or from what you could do in the past, adds another level of trust and confidence in your facility’s expertise.”
When it comes to targeting the patient population—an increasingly critical factor as health care becomes more consumer-driven than ever before—hospitals and imaging centers favor direct mail and print ads. “In the professional community, an event will probably resonate for a longer period,” Burch says. “The consumer world needs constant reminding and refreshing. More frequent communications through print ads and direct mail help make that happen.”
The survey also highlights marketing opportunities that the majority of organizations are neglecting in favor of more tried-and-true methods. For instance, few facilities are using Web-based outreach in either referring-physician or direct-to-consumer marketing. “I don’t hear a lot of people talking about electronic outreach,” Burch says. “This survey leads me to believe that the people marketing imaging services are tied more to traditional methods and need to explore other options. Those who do will probably have that field to themselves for a while, which gives them a competitive advantage.”
Burch was encouraged to see 30 percent of survey respondents reported that C-level executives were engaged in marketing and outreach. “That tells me it’s important to the mission of the organization,” he says, “and that’s what a marketer always likes to hear.”
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Tags: Patients First
Category: Community —