When a company is small, its marketing may consist only of a logo and delivering what is asked and required on initial personal relationships. As the company grows, the more it needs focused expertise and marketing initiatives to reach customers, manage message, programs and costs and deliver performance — but that usually doesn't happen.
Some companies get so large that their marketing becomes more corporately professional, disassociated from sales and the customer, and they need those initial personal relationships to remember how it all works.
Marketing is all about finding, engaging and satisfying the customer, profitably. Over and over and over again.
So if we are going to discuss an HME makeover in marketing, let's make sure we're talking the same language. Marketing is the process and battle plan of why, how, when and what you do to interest, engage and profitably satisfy your target markets' wants and needs. The result must have value for both your targets and you.
Marketing strategies and tactics build your distinctive brand among stakeholders (consumers, referral sources, patients, payers, employees, local government, bankers, strategic alliances, etc.). The strategies and tactics are the unique combination of your offering decisions in products and services, pricing, sales, promotion, distribution and communications. They must be different and/or better than that of your competition.
Remember that there really is no “typical” HME. Every company is different. Each has different strengths, weaknesses, service and product offerings, customers, patient and referral mix, pricing strategy, human capital, ingenuity and financial strength. Each company faces different challenges in geography, competition and media.
Some companies have grown inch-by-inch over years to establish their market position. Others started with a master plan and grew their business in stages through outside funding or personal financing. Yet others acquired existing HMEs and went on to refine the company with their imprint. Many firms have two and three generations of family driving the community, region or statewide business.
But in working with all types of companies, I find there are some common issues that arise in HME marketing and execution. Frequently the issues are ignored, sometimes for years. Growth is good, profits are good. But then roadblocks start showing up, a competitor makes swift inroads, a piece of business is lost and the profit winds and momentum seem to shift overnight.
All too often, the attention to a firm's marketing strategy and brand value comes too late.
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What's Wrong with Current Marketing
What's the direction, and what are the critical priorities? Most HME businesses that have grown organically, adding new facets to old, have done so without modifying the old. Critical to any marketing investment is the detailed understanding of where the business and profits come from by product, category, payer, diagnosis and referral source.
Equally important is an assessment of the growth potential and potential of likely aligning products, services and businesses. No product/service or referral source should be capturing a portion of the business that if lost, will jeopardize the business solvency. The critical priorities drive the marketing strategy and investment.
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Who's driving the marketing momentum? Typically in HME firms, bits and pieces of marketing, strategy development and execution are handled by lots of hands. It has had to be that way to get the job done. No one person really knows marketing but learns along the road.
One person leads sales call planning, lead development and account maintenance. The CEO handles contracts and cable advertising. Another does newspaper advertising and promotions work with manufacturers. And another handles brochures, showroom maintenance and maybe the Web site. Still another puts together in-services, health fairs and newsletter mailings as inside customer service/sales. Sometimes the result works.
But no one is the driver and communicator of marketing strategy and the pieces that will be rolled out. In most cases, employees don't know the critical initiatives, the plans and how they fit into company efforts to achieve the goals. Frequently each employee is telling a different story. Each salesperson creates their own story.
When a competitor enters the market with a laser-like marketing program attacking a specific piece of business, valuable time is lost as a company scrambles to understand how to defend its turf. A unifying driver of the marketing strategy and the company's plans knows the power of brand and messaging and recommends components of an integrated counter-attack.
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Sporadic marketing. Usually because marketing strategy and implementation are handled by many hands, or results of short-term efforts are difficult to measure, HME firms fall into the trap of pulling back for long periods of time in investing in marketing and follow-through on their initiatives.
Referral calls by sales staff continue to be made, but new products or program launches become as ho-hum as a manufacturer brochure or announcement on colored copy paper. Showroom changes, educational programs and merchandising promotions come to a dusty six-month stand still. What other business can afford these lapses and expect strong growth?
Just dealing with the challenges of government regulation and reimbursement are all-consuming. But companies need specific programs in place that describe and reinforce their professional image and services in the community-at-large in tough, budget-slashing times. Not just yellow pages advertising, professional truck signs, logos on company shirts or a couple of discount tables in the showroom, but modest, ongoing guerrilla tactics that maintain your presence, provide a return on investment and keep your name and services in front of target audiences.
No matter what type of HME company or product/service/payer emphasis, regular, consistent marketing efforts are essential to build brand, prestige, additional business, future contacts and referrals.
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Providers are unsure how to communicate their customer/client experience. In most cases, providers don't understand the experience they are delivering (or should be delivering). This is not a satisfaction survey.
This requires investigative research — asking customers, referral sources, other professionals — about the respondents' situation, what they seek from a provider, what they see as the firm's positives/strengths, what they understand about the company, its failings, their use and knowledge of other firms and what new services/product/features they need/have used.
Then, armed with information to refine and communicate the experience in language used by respondents, a company can define specific tactics to impact a referral or sale: service changes, new products, expanded locations, testimonials, statistical data/performance, interviews through radio and cable, published educational articles, Web site enhancement, etc.
Second to this point, providers frequently do not fully understand their competitive position, unique strengths and superior attributes that may be hidden gems in their offerings and performance. These offerings are either misunderstood, unknown or under-marketed by management, due to busy-ness, distraction, “moved on to something new” or “forgot about it.”
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Under-marketing. I regularly find HME companies have under-marketed their position or have not identified contributions only they have made in a community.
Firms get caught in a bog. They work hard to care for, serve, bill and satisfy their customers. Often, there is a mismatch in the marketing effort or they under-market because they completely missed, or neglected to view, their performance from a marketing standpoint.
They didn't realize they have helped over 30,000 patients, or worked with over 5,000 professionals in helping seniors improve their daily life, or are the largest provider of a specialized service or clinical program, or are the experts in specialized seating in a tri-state region or are the only independently owned multi-branch company in the region, etc.
They didn't take the time to get professional and consumer testimonials on their exceptional attributes, do a press release, write an article, build it into advertising, Web site or newsletter or present it in a sales campaign. If you don't tell them, who will?
If this sounds like your company, then let's hope your competitors are caught in a bog, too.
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Lack of staffing, time or priority to maintain a modern, uncluttered showroom and office space. If you have a location where any consumer, professional caregiver or referral source will walk through your door to see your location with displayed products and services, put yourself in their shoes. There better be an extremely compelling reason for the location not to be comparable and competitive to the top company in our industry.
Too many showrooms serve as a warehouse or loading area with the opportunity to stack boxes on the floor or line mattresses against the wall, along with a back wall bank of dual-purpose billing stations and customer service.
You may believe that everyone who goes to the desk is referral-based. But all too often, no employee gets up from his or her desk, even though they might look up anticipating the customer to make the first move to say why they are in the store.
But if portions of the showroom are set up to show cash sale products, consider yourself a retailer. A firm and its customers can live with clutter, dust, limited merchandising skill and no showroom staging when it has other outstanding attributes that may override these, such as exemplary personal help, clinical expertise only you provide, staffing and innovative customer service.
However, as soon as a competitor can carve into your superior attributes with equivalent or new care services and offer an appealing showroom shopping experience, you lose opportunities.
The private pay market continues to expand. With a showroom that demonstrates products and sells cash items to complement the equipment or cash categories only, basic merchandising principles must be implemented.
And remember, if you don't use them, your competitor will. (See the accompanying box.)
Increasing Marketing Performance
An HME firm is an organic organization with history, needs, faults, feelings, skills and challenges. Marketing strategy and a plan should provide the roadmap built from defined business goals and critical market initiatives. There is no time to waste. Careful assessment of a firm's position, successes, customers, opportunities, challenges, current performance and growth hypotheses provide the foundation for the roadmap.
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Assessment of environment and performance. The most successful marketing plan is driven or facilitated by a key manager or designated team. The mere identification that marketing, i.e., building/retaining market position, requires a manager or team to specify objectives and strategies with specific battle tactics changes a company's focus on its role in the marketplace.
The manager or team, as a marketing appointee and sales manager, becomes the driver to move the analysis to a practical plan. If you think your company needs outside help in this area, then get it. A marketing professional can be the stimuli to frame the process, listen, provide creative suggestions and analysis, strategic guidance and directions to format an actionable, flexible plan.
Listening and considering the thoughts and ideas of all employees, customers and other stakeholders will keep the efforts grounded in change and improvement. It is the employees who put their heart, ideas and time into making the plan a feasible reality. They take ownership, they believe in its purpose and they execute the components to achieve the desired performance long after any consultant is gone.
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Conducting the hard analysis and surviving. Evaluating your company's marketing or defining your marketing priorities means conducting a complete audit of the information, markets, products, services, margins, programs, payers, competition and current expenditures and efforts in sales, the media and related investments, such as in technology, customer service and systems.
Marketers need the whole picture. They can't launch a new program if the technology, customer service or sales can't support it. Analysis of revenue will examine to the best detail product category revenue according to payer, referral and branch.
Usually HME companies have budgets that do not stipulate marketing expenditures. Instead, these expenditures are commonly included within other departments such as sales, customer service, Web site, postage or IT, or there may be singular line items designated as “printing” or some other catch-all category. That makes it difficult to track a past marketing investment and the performance of that investment.
If summary positions are developed, analysis enables management to define critical priorities, which marketing then uses to set strategies and create a plan.
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Archeological “digs” identify gems, force repositioning and prioritize marketing initiatives based on the company's business goals. When a company goes through the archeological dig of its data with an assessment of opportunities and costs, frequently gems about the business are uncovered. This can lead to repositioning the firm on who it is, what it offers and its value for the customer.
It also may lead the company to revitalize its brand and look, carried through to a tag line, company materials, sale presentations, the Web site and other visual and oral documents for press, videos, radio or television.
Another result from a dig is finding mismatched marketing, such as spending too much on a program that has a small market and is not growing; expanding cash sales with good results but not knowing what products are selling the best; overpromising and underdelivering; or not recognizing the strength of a clinical program that can be expanded with increased marketing support.
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Hard critiques and trade-offs. Eliminating a business segment, expanding another. Launching a new service. Being the winning bidder in a CBA. Committing to a new showroom with a retail orientation. Training staff on retail behavior, merchandise selection and in-store housekeeping. Planning a showroom grand opening, reopening or new product launch. All require hard critiques and trade-offs of time, resources, money, staff and return.
When management and employees conduct their own assessment, survey customers and shop competitors, they will usually come to their survival trade-offs. Sometimes it just takes getting out of the office. In other cases they need a little prod to see how trade-offs or inaction will affect the company's market position and growth.
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Short plan, regular marketing, creative approaches. The best marketing plans are short, have a calendar, timeline and budget and specify strategies with regular, specific marketing activities, all tied to the company's critical priorities and who is responsible for execution.
Larger companies that contract outside help such as an advertising agency, public relations firm, Web site designer, search engine marketing firm, graphic designer or direct marketing agency need a plan to control direction, timing, investment and performance just as a smaller company that may be using its inside talent and resources.
Regardless of the complexity of the plan or its components and expenditures, the best marketing plans are those that are shared, communicated and regularly reported on to the entire staff. Everyone knows the company's position, critical priorities, expertise and programs and how they are being marketed to achieve community visibility — and customers that come back, again and again and again.
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Colette Weil, MBA, is managing director of Mill Valley, Calif.-based Summit Marketing, a firm specializing in strategic marketing, branding and program development for manufacturers, wholesale distributors and retailers She may be reached at 415/388-5303 or by e-mail at cweil@summitmktg.com.
Marketing Plan Checklist
- Business goals
- Your business, market and competitive analysis
- Marketing objectives
- Marketing strategies
- Mission
- Target audiences
- Positioning
- Key strategies
- Tactics
- Products and services
- Pricing
- Sales/distribution (locations, showrooms, truck/UPS, catalog, Internet)
- Advertising and promotion
- Communications
- Milestones, measurements
- Budget, revenue forecast
Basic Marketing Priciples
- Planned store layout and shopping flow
- Lifestyle signs and modern displays
- Room settings or modular departments
- Outdoor monument lighted signs
- Merchandised, clean store window displays that are changed regularly (monthly or bimonthly)
- Front feature displays
- Readily available educational material, neatly and clearly displayed
- Dusted, clean products on shelves, displayed on floor, with hang tags and prices
- Posted mission statement, store hours and policies, professional signs
- Specifically trained retail sales personnel
- Educational presentations, seminars and promotions
- Regular advertising, traditional and online methods and media
