In today’s environment of needing to do more with less, CMOs in every industry find themselves increasingly pressed for time, short on resources, and low on expertise needed to address and identify operational efficiencies. Nowhere is the situation more acute than for marketers in healthcare.
Faced with rising costs, growing populations, and unprecedented levels of burnout amongst frontline care staff, healthcare marketers are truly feeling hemmed in. When every dollar of expenditure by marketing is weighed against system-wide calls for resources that impact care, like medical equipment or additional staff, scrutiny is at an all-time high. The need to save money and streamline budgets has never been greater.
Further complicating the situation, hospitals, clinics, and therapeutic care centers need to cut through the clutter and grow market share in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Understandably, that comes with some heavy lifting. Marketers not only need to focus on impactful activities that make their brands stand out, but they also need to juggle a million and one other details that keep their operations running smoothly.
What’s the solution? A carefully planned Marketing and Business Operations roadmap.
What is a Marketing and Brand Operations roadmap?
Essentially, a Marketing and Brand Operations roadmap is a strategic planning tool that aligns an organization’s marketing objectives with its overall goals. It uses data to provide a thorough understanding of where to provide actionable insights on how to improve efficiency of brand operations to save money, time, and effort. Once prepared, the detailed action plans included in the roadmap also provide opportunities for regular performance monitoring via KPIs, feedback sessions with stakeholders, and streamlined communications throughout an organization. For CMOs, this can help prove marketing value, streamline expenditures, and ensure they get more from every dollar in a cost-sensitive healthcare environment.
By implementing a roadmap, a major hospital network reduced their forms by 50%, vastly improving patient and employee experience
How it works
A great benefit of a thorough Marketing and Brand Operations roadmap is that it can be strategized and put together behind the scenes by an experienced brand partner so the marketing team can stay focused on the demands of the day-to-day. Such a partner can conduct a comprehensive assessment of brand operations, specifically the organization of roles, processes, and tools, or even a more targeted focus such as assessing brand management solutions to uncover opportunities to save money and maximize resources.
According to Philip Guiliano, Founding Partner at BrandActive, one of the key areas that can be addressed by a Marketing and Brand Operations assessment is in the realm of purchasing redundancies.
“Costs associated with redundancies can be a huge drain on limited resources,” Guiliano said. “Especially in a large-scale health system with a centralized marketing team, and additional, decentralized marketing teams for every other hospital in their network.
“Take advertising campaigns as an example. For a CMO, oversight into the execution of a campaign as it flows downstream can be a huge challenge. Are there 15 vendors in the mix when there should only have three? Uniforms are another example. We see hospitals with multiple uniform vendors, which means they’re missing out on volume pricing.”
The overall idea is to generate an awareness of all the things that can be managed more efficiently. Once identified, they can then be itemized in a way that can actioned all at once or picked off piece by piece over time.
Improving marketing processes
In addition to uncovering cost savings, an assessment and roadmap offers key insights on how to improve processes to free up resources. By ‘looking under the hood,’ we identify recommendations through a discovery phase involving workshops and interviews with internal stakeholders. These activities can help identify and produce recommendations to address challenges presented by outdated brand management technology, the quality and consistency of marketing assets (forms, brochures, and other pieces of collateral), or a lack of workflow technology, to name a few.
Armed with these insights, a CMO can then make adjustments that can streamline operations. Whether the goal is updating technology to speed time to market or consolidating suppliers, data collected through the road mapping process can help them pick and choose which line items to cross off, and when.
How do your company’s marketing and brand operations measure up
Now more than ever, marketers are expected to do more with less. Efficient brand and marketing operations are essential to achieving this mandate. Download a cheat sheet of the five characteristics of an effective brand and marketing operations function.
Streamlining healthcare M&As
Another area where a Marketing and Brand Operations roadmap can generate real results is in the realm of healthcare mergers and acquisitions. Here too, a partner like BrandActive can use Marketing and Brand Operations principles and techniques to build out a playbook from a marketer’s perspective. Such a playbook can offer solutions for the cost-effective, efficient, and timely brand integration of an acquisition—insights most healthcare marketing departments simply don’t currently have access to.
Here, Guiliano points out that while larger healthcare enterprises might view the initial cost-savings as insignificant, when synergies are found between two merging organizations, the net result can be substantial.
“Let’s say two major health systems come together. Through a Marketing and Brand Operations exercise, we can figure out how to save them $40 million on the branded asset side of things, recognizing that this is a drop in the bucket when the CMO is looking for $2 billion in synergies.
“What’s more, since we’re talking healthcare, that initial $40 million in savings can be used for things like additional scans, MRI machines and other pieces of medical equipment.”
Results
With a Marketing and Brand Operations roadmap in place, the results can be substantial. Thanks to roadmaps constructed by BrandActive:
- A major pharmaceutical enterprise implemented new brand governance program that increased productivity by 20%, saved $1.6 Million per year and projected a 23% jump in revenue
- Another saved more than 50% of their allotted signage budget (over $7,000,000) through vendor management and process redesign
- A major life sciences brand rationalized and standardized marketing collateral by 20%, saving of over 30% while doing so
- A major hospital network reduced their forms by 50%, vastly improving the patient and employee experience
If you’d like to chat about how optimizing your Marketing and Brand Operations could help steer your organization to savings in time and money, we’d love to hear from you.
