Why So Many Healthcare Marketing Dollars Are Wasted
More marketing dollars are wasted due to poor planning (or failure to plan at all) than for any other reason.
The most common reasons for wasted marketing dollars include:
- Having no real marketing plan (Working Without a Net)
Many healthcare practices (and even some hospitals) engage in various marketing activities. But without a strategic, integrated marketing plan that has prioritized the optimal combination of marketing activities based on specific goals for the business, many of those marketing dollars associated with these activities are unproductive.
This can include advertising expenses as well as non-advertising marketing costs.
- “Spaghetti Marketing” (Trial and Error)
Throwing a lot of spaghetti (marketing dollars) against the wall without a plan and hoping some of it sticks is another way of describing trial-and-error marketing.
Without proper research and strategic planning in advance, most of your spaghetti won’t stick and you will experience many more painful failures (errors) than marketing successes.
- Lack Of Sufficient Data Regarding What Works (and What Doesn’t)
Guessing and experimenting increases risk. Knowing what is most likely to work (and what has worked many times before in similar situations) is a risk-reduction strategy. The problem, of course, is that you don’t know what you don’t know.
There are many successful healthcare marketing case studies if you know where to find them. There is also no shortage of performance data if you know where to look for it (or know someone who does).
- Poor execution
Even with all of the great data and case studies to guide you, if you fail to execute your marketing strategies correctly, your results will inevitably be disappointing.
One healthcare business can see a huge result from the same strategy that yields almost nothing for another healthcare business. You have to understand the elements of effective marketing strategy implementation so that you don’t overlook something that is critical to your success.
- Inadequate, incomplete or non-existent tracking of marketing results
In our digital age, there is no excuse for failure to accurately track results of most, if not all, of your marketing expenditures.
Certainly, online marketing has built in tracking mechanisms for almost every strategy, whether online advertising, landing pages, SEO, social media or reputation management.
There are also many ways to effectively track non-digital marketing costs if you know how to construct a strong tracking system.
But even if you have great tracking data, it’s useless if you don’t continually analyze and learn from that data to reduce your risk and increase your likelihood of success based on past results and future strategies.
If you think or know that you are wasting marketing dollars (and if you think you’re not, you’re wrong), you can now get monthly phone access and special reports from a healthcare marketing expert who has worked with over 2,000 healthcare practices and hospitals to help them save wasted marketing dollars while also helping them achieve more results from the marketing funds that they apply.
Call Lonnie Hirsch at 800-924-5447 or email him at Lonnie.Hirsch@HirschHealthConsulting.com to discuss your specific marketing issues or questions. The first call with Lonnie is free.