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Jul 16, 2021

Now is the time to re-evaluate your marketing function

Now is the time to re-evaluate your marketing function Featuring Philip Guiliano of BrandActive

Featuring Philip Guiliano, Partner, BrandActive Takeaways Setting a clear path to operational success Marketing teams are increasingly playing a more prominent role in the operational success of organizations – including health systems.   It’s common to start operational improvement by refining your org chart, but this approach commonly fails to recognize how teams and individuals work…

Featuring Philip Guiliano, Partner, BrandActive

Takeaways

Setting a clear path to operational success

  • Marketing teams are increasingly playing a more prominent role in the operational success of organizations – including health systems.  
  • It’s common to start operational improvement by refining your org chart, but this approach commonly fails to recognize how teams and individuals work together. What’s missing is the connective tissue.  
  • It’s really easy to say “let’s cut costs” and do less, but it’s hard to look at how you can do more by streamlining the way you’re doing things – what you do, how you do it, who you do it with, how long it takes, and what it costs.  
  • According to Philip Guiliano, operational success starts with clearly defined roles and responsibilities which can be challenging for health systems because marketing is commonly decentralized across service lines, hospitals, etc.   

 Making your technology work for you – not against you

  • Decentralization across large organizations can result in duplicate contracts with technology vendors when these organizations only need one instance with custom environments for different needs.
  • Centralizing technology management reduces waste and helps teams utilize their technology to its full potential.    
  • Widen the scope of who can use the technology and how the technology is used. For example, a brand asset management tool or CMS could be helpful organization-wide.  
  • Business requirements and functional requirements should drive technology adoption. With this baseline, your team can build on what you have with new modules. 

Committing to vendors and partnerships that deliver business value  

  • Marketing can reclaim budget from operations centralizing vendor management. For example, your org may have 300 different kinds of signs created for various purposes across numerous independent stakeholders, but in reality, only need 15. 
  • When working with agencies, ask yourself: What are they doing for us? What could they do for us? How do they work together? Who’s performing and who’s not? Build matrix to reassign responsibilities according to strength while also consolidating. 
  • Help agencies understand how they should work together and which business goals they are working toward as a unit. This will remove the “juggling” and make for more efficient agency partnerships. 
  • Marketing is often introduced to partnership and consolidation conversations once a deal has been finalized, neglecting the weight of brand, messaging, and budgetary needs.
  • Embedding marketing in consolidation deals and growth conversations sooner also allows for a proper evaluation of business unit interaction – how they interact in both current and desired state. This precaution can prevent unnecessary competition between business units.