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It’s no secret that healthcare organizations are complex and multi-faceted.
But– they still share a similar goal – guide patients through their healthcare journey and keep them engaged with the health organization.
Strategic healthcare marketing integrates omnichannel, segmented, and targeted digital and traditional tactics to accelerate growth, drive engagement and nurture patient and staff relationships.
However, in the healthcare niche, it’s not always easy to follow the latest trends in marketing. It doesn’t help that the healthcare and marketing industries are changing rapidly.
The ever-evolving healthcare landscape can present challenges to some marketers. For example, it’s essential to be careful with messaging and communication, as there can be red tape due to healthcare regulations and sensitive topics.
All of this aside, marketing does work, but only as well as the strategy behind it.
That’s why we’re a “Strategy First” agency and recommend a Strategy Session as the first step in working with us.
What is a Strategy Session?
Our strategic marketing team works closely with your entire team and stakeholders to gain a comprehensive, in-depth understanding of your vision, needs, and goals in a strategy session. Then, based on your precise needs, we’ll discuss your goals, current marketing strategy and tactics, target audiences, and much more.
Why do you need one?
It’s easy to plunge right into marketing decisions without having a bigger-picture marketing strategy in mind. However, decisions that aren’t based on a more extensive understanding of your brand, position, audience, and strategy can result in wasted time and dollars.
Let’s be realistic–most clients don’t have an infinite budget, so it’s important to be resourceful from the beginning. A Strategy Session ensures a thorough approach and that all marketing tactics work towards results.
What goes on in an LMC Strategy Session?
Strategy Sessions incorporate guided conversations with you and your stakeholders to help us define an effective marketing strategy and establish a relationship with LMC. Sessions generally last 2-4 hours.
1. Situational + SWOT Analysis
2. Determine + Prioritize Marketing Objectives
3. Define Unique Selling Positions
4. Determine + Prioritize Target Audiences
5. Define Messaging
6. Determine Budget
7. Measurement
What Happens After a Strategy Session?
You’ll walk away with a Strategic Marketing Plan.
This means you’ll receive a comprehensive summary of our recommendations, plus suggested next steps based upon your determined marketing budget/s. This strategic roadmap includes a robust marketing plan that you can implement on your own or partner with LMC to execute.
Strategy Sessions At Work
Get ready to meet some of LMC’s healthcare clients. We dive into their unique situational analysis, before, during, and after an LMC Strategy Session.
Situation 1
Healthcare organizations, particularly in rural areas, have a lot going on as they typically are trying to serve as their service area’s all-in-one healthcare team. These organizations are usually continually growing, expanding, and adding services and people. It’s hard to keep up with growth management, but then marketing it is a whole other hill to climb.
Enter Clay-Battelle Health Services Association (CBHSA).
For Clay-Battelle Health Services Association, their rural healthcare experience spans from 1973. This amount of time serving the rural communities of Blacksville and Burton, West Virginia, makes them a trustworthy and dependable healthcare organization for community members.
Throughout the years, CBHSA has expanded from its dental program to include various other services to the community, including family care, behavioral health, and pharmacy services.
An initial strategy session determined goals and priorities for marketing services, including a detailed marketing plan to increase brand awareness through strategic social media communications and new website development, and invest in video marketing to capture and share CBHSA’s unique history and story.
Situation 2
Every department, team, and program has unique marketing and communication needs. Managing and controlling the organization’s brand identity and voice can be challenging when so many team members have communication needs.
Enter Coplin Health Systems (CHS).
Coplin Health Systems has 10 locations offering various services, health events, and opportunities for healthcare patients. With its vast patient base across West Virginia, their robust strategic marketing plan includes mixed marketing tactics, including paid media, a series of educational videos, and more.
From their Strategy Session, LMC determined that efforts would be needed to place media in all appropriate markets with an extensive and targeted paid media plan from the beginning.
Situation 3
It can be difficult for an organization to know where and how to grow at times. However, with the execution of community health needs assessments, we can see what the population would like to see your organization begin to offer and strategically invest grant and federal dollars into that expansion – based on what the people are asking for.
Enter Barbour Community Health Association (BCHA).
In 2017, LMC met with BCHA for the first time and fine-tuned a marketing plan fit for its current situation. Since then, BCHA has seen tremendous growth in staff, patients, and services. To help pave the way for this newly evolved healthcare organization, a Strategy Session took place between the BCHA and LMC team in 2021 to help set new goals and pinpoint opportunities.
A Strategy Session resulted in an action plan full of marketing recommendations to fuel growth and expand its reach and services to the Barbour County community. At the top of the list of marketing recommendations was a community health needs assessment to help navigate where to invest their marketing budget.
A LMC Strategy Session is the first step to a marketing plan that will achieve the results you want and require! Interested in learning more? Let’s chat!