Another tale from the front lines of ROI
I met with another frustrated healthcare marketer yesterday, who told me of her latest battle with a leadership group that struggles to understand marketing. The strategy in question was a service-line initiative supported in part by, let’s say, $50,000 in awareness advertising (the names and numbers have been changed to protect the innocent). After outlining the campaign, the service-line manager turned to the marketing director and said, “So can you guarantee me that if we spend this $50,000 in advertising, it will bring me $100,000 in business?” The inference, of course, was that if you can’t demonstrate a financial return, then it must not be a smart strategy.
(Excuse me while I pause to use my meditative techniques to restore peace and calmness to my aura. In…and out. In…and out. There, better.)
If you’ve listened to our podcast or heard us speak at a conference, you know our position on the increased use of Return on Investment (ROI) as a tool to measure quantifiable results in healthcare marketing: we’re all for it. The more hospital marketers can demonstrate the results of their efforts, the better. And ROI is the ultimate measurement – the actual return in dollars on the money spent. (Of course, there are other important potential results, such as building awareness, perception, mindshare, etc.).
But here’s the problem. ROI is a double-edged sword that can be used to chop down smart strategies and new ideas simply because they’re hard, or even impossible, to measure. Frustration sets in because too often, we hear of circumstances where a legitimate marketing initiative is held up or shot down because ROI is wielded as a weapon of mass-marketing destruction. As in the example given above, most healthcare services do not lend themselves to immediate action by a consumer. In many cases, awareness and perception needs to be created to support other aspects of the marketing strategy, all in the hope that more patients will turn to your service if and when they need it. So, for example, it should not be expected that advertising used to promote a hospital’s general surgery offering will drive people in to try out an appendicitis.
Marketers should always try to demonstrate the value of their ideas, but many important success factors for an organization – brand building, the patient experience, social media adoption, etc. – simply cannot be measured using true ROI. The quote I always use, borrowed from healthcare experience evangelist Fred Lee, comes from Albert Einstein: “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
As marketers, it’s up to us to help others in the organization understand how various marketing strategies can be measured, and what success should look like. We recommend a book by long-time healthcare consultant David Marlowe, “A Marketer’s Guide to Measuring ROI”, as a great tool for understanding how and when ROI is valuable, and when it isn’t.
Maybe we should run a contest: what are your favorite examples of ideas wrongly shot down because ROI couldn’t be proven?