Itsy Bitsy Spider Syndrome
Marketing involves inherent risk.
You never know whether or not your efforts will pay off, and if you’ve been burned before by ineffective marketing strategy, you may have picked up what I call “Itsy Bitsy Spider Syndrome.” You took a risk and crawled up the spout. Rain—the nursery rhyme equivalent of a low return on your investment (ROI)—washed you out. You were back where you started with a lighter wallet and a new suspicion of marketing.
Even if you’ve enjoyed some success with your marketing efforts in the past, the current economic weather probably makes you uncomfortable—cloudy skies, eighty percent chance of rain. After all, the National Bureau of Economic Research declared that we’ve been in recession since December 2007. Your spider-sense tells you to protect the bottom line, cut unnecessary expenditures. Marketing dollars begin to look like a luxury. You’d be a fool to launch a new marketing campaign, right?
Wrong.
Dozens of studies since the Great Depression have proven that businesses that maintain or increase their marketing efforts during a recession stand a much better chance of surviving and flourishing than their competitors.
Raise Your Voice
Given a little thought, the studies make sense. If you lose your clientele, your budget dries up. People are your bottom line. When the sun comes out, your efforts to weather the storm will have backfired. People will have forgotten you.
In other words, if you lower your voice, people will have trouble hearing you, and by the time you speak up again, nobody will be listening. On the other hand, if you raise your voice while your competitors lower theirs, you can grab market share much quicker than in more stable times.
Thus, the worst thing that you can do is slash your marketing budget.
Practical Strategies
So, here are 7 recession-savvy strategies for healthcare providers:
1) Bring in someone to do marcom (marketing communications) audit. Educate yourself now on the strengths and weaknesses of your marketing strategy.
2) Answer the following question: if you had no marketing budget, what would you do? Start writing a blog and white papers? Create a profile on social networking sites? Press releases? A space to “Refer a Friend” on your waiting room sign-in sheet? Choose five of your best ideas and follow through with them.
3) Anticipate your competitor’s next move. Keep track of their websites, advertisements, promotions, and any type of presence in the community-at-large. Now is not a time for timidity or passivity, although you shouldn’t necessarily spend more money on marketing. Concentrate on staying one step ahead.
4) Do some corporate introspection. What do you do really well? What special value do you offer your customers? What differentiates your practice from your competitors? What are the benefits of doing business with you? Now, build your identity and message around these unique points of difference.
5) Know your audience. Mature women make 80% of healthcare decisions.¹ Your marketing strategy must target this demographic. If you don’t know what these women want, then you need to find out as soon as possible.
6) Focus on superior customer care. Develop a questionnaire for your current clients. Ask them to critique the experience they had with you and make suggestions for improvement. Implement changes, then follow up with them. Let them that you responded to their wants and needs. Thank them for their input. Research suggests that two minutes of conversation are all that stand between your practice’s vitality and malpractice litigation.² Listening matters.
7) Partner with a marketing firm that offers healthcare-specific strategies. Even consultation will help you prepare for future growth. Healthcare marketing and advertising have unique challenges and pitfalls, so tapping into some category expertise will enable you to get the most bang for every marketing buck.
Marketing during a recession is simple in concept—communicating the right message to the right people at the right time requires—and complex in execution—human beings are mysterious creatures. Their purchasing motivations and desires change with the wind.
The good news is that healthcare industry is resistant to recession and recovers faster than other sectors.³ Now is the time to be bold and grow.
²Malcolm Gladwell, Blink (New York: Little, Brown, 2005), 40-43, 75-76, 131, 167.