Today’s healthcare marketers are under increasing pressure to squeeze more and more value from their existing activities. With lean budgets and a laundry list of competing objectives, your team may struggle to keep its head above tactical waters, let alone increase your ROI. But there is something you can do to immediately boost ROI — and free up additional dollars to put toward your existing efforts. And that is to ensure you have well-defined and optimized marketing and brand operations.
The key to efficient healthcare marketing
Ask yourself if your brand and marketing operations as they exist today maximize your speed to market, the impact you make, and use resources as efficiently as you can. If you are like most healthcare marketers, the answer is a resounding “no.”
There’s no doubt that healthcare organizations are highly complex. And it’s also true that the more complex an organization is, the more critical marketing and brand operations become. That’s because brand and marketing operations are the nuts and bolts of your organization—how the marketing sausage is made, so to speak.
By improving your processes and workflow, you become more agile, with the ability to plan proactively and pivot quickly, and reduce manual work, rework, and redundant tasks. This frees up resources that can be redeployed allowing you to achieve more or support more strategic efforts.
Marketing and brand operations: An emerging opportunity for healthcare marketers
The best place to start to achieve repeatable, sustainable improvements in marketing and brand operations that deliver savings year after year is with a structured assessment which leads to an action plan. A good action plan considers your specific needs, how easy/achievable the change is, and includes the benefits: the specific cost savings of each suggested action, as well as other benefits such as quality and positive impact on organizational culture.
Start by seeking answers to key questions such as:
- How do you manage the purchase and production of major marketing and brand expenditures?
- What are the capabilities and costs of all your vendors, including agencies, and is there redundancy?
- Do your internal and external team members have the proper training to understand how to use the brand and do their jobs efficiently?
- How efficient is the workflow that underpins the production of physical and digital assets, from websites and collateral to signage and workwear?
What we’ve found is while these are the right questions to ask, healthcare marketers don’t have time to dive deeply into exactly what is being done, and how, or the bandwidth to identify gaps and research best-in-class approaches to brand and marketing operations used at other healthcare organizations.
That’s where BrandActive comes in. We can help you figure out how to eliminate redundancies, avoid overspending, and provide your team with the tools and processes marketing needs to work efficiently and express your brand consistently. We work with healthcare organizations every day to help them achieve more and spend less.
We provide insights and make practical, actionable recommendations in four key areas
Opportunity analysis
We identify the gaps in your current marketing and brand operations, and develop a roadmap that enables you to realize your optimized future state. This includes such things as analyzing current brand governance, vendor management, brand management technology, processes and training to name just a few. And most importantly, all recommendations are rooted in defined quantitative and qualitative benefits.
Branded asset optimization
We work to unlock repeatable, sustainable improvements in how you create, manage and use your brand and marketing assets. Informed by a deep understanding of your organization and best practices, we take a detailed look at how you initiate and produce physical and digital marketing materials, signage, and other branded assets. What does each of your vendors and agencies do? Is there redundancy? What is the workflow? Depending on your needs, deliverables may include process redesign, a plan to rationalize your vendors and agencies, including management and selection processes, and/or changes to RFP and procurement, management and execution.
Integrated program management
To enhance the productivity of your team, we recommend how to economically tap into specialized skills and short-term resources. The goal is to help you deliver optimized internal and external marketing and brand programs and campaigns.
Process redesign and implementation
We help you improve your brand operations by empowering your internal teams to deliver brand and marketing initiatives more effectively. Through streamlined processes, playbooks, and training, your organization becomes more agile and equipped to deliver better ROI across initiatives.
The time to improve your marketing and brand operations is now, given the pressure on budgets and the need to serve as a catalyst for the financial health of your organization. BrandActive can help you figure out how to use your day-to-day marketing dollars and branding budgets more effectively—so you can do more with less. Ready to get started? We’d love to talk.
