Key Takeaways
- Elevate marketing from a peripheral function to a strategic executive priority by dedicating sufficient budget and talent to avoid 'starvation marketing'.
The healthcare marketing industry is evolving rapidly. Technological advances, changing patient expectations, and competitive pressures are all driving hospitals and health systems to differentiate themselves. Yet, in many organizations, marketing remains undervalued—often regarded as peripheral to clinical operations or relegated to "random acts of marketing." However, as experts like Christine Slocumb, Chief Growth Officer at Supreme Group and former founder of Clarity Quest Marketing, emphasizes that understanding "what healthcare marketing is" and implementing "effective healthcare marketing techniques" is essential to thriving in today's healthcare ecosystem.
Below are key takeaways on how a thoughtful, well-structured healthcare marketing strategy can help healthcare providers stand out, connect with their target audience, and deliver measurable ROI in the ever-changing landscape of marketing in the healthcare industry.
One of the biggest misunderstandings in healthcare advertising is that marketing doesn't make a real impact on growth. Stakeholders sometimes suggest hiring more salespeople or running more ads, believing that investing in a healthcare marketing strategy is optional. Christine Slocumb—an engineer-turned-marketer—has encountered this mindset frequently in hospital marketing.
She explains the danger of "starvation marketing," where organizations invest only leftover resources in their marketing efforts. This approach almost always leads to plateauing growth and missed opportunities. According to Slocumb, if a hospital or health system wants to scale, it must give marketing a seat at the executive table, allocating proper budget and talent to the function. This underscores why healthcare marketing is important in today's competitive landscape.
A core principle that Slocumb details in her book, Stop Starvation Marketing, is building a solid foundation—what she calls the "Tower of Power." Too often, healthcare organizations jump directly to tactics (e.g., launching random campaigns, attending tradeshows) without a strategic marketing approach. To avoid this, it's crucial to develop healthcare marketing ideas that align with your overall business objectives.
The Tower of Power begins with:
Implementing this strategic foundation can take as little as three to four months when managed by experienced healthcare marketers. Once complete, your team is primed to launch marketing campaigns that deliver significantly higher returns—often in the range of 6x to 15x compared to "random acts of marketing."
"Content is king," but according to Slocumb, it may be better described as "the entire back row of the chessboard," given how essential content marketing is to every healthcare marketing move. Healthcare systems are uniquely positioned with an abundance of clinical experts, researchers, and administrators who have valuable knowledge to share. Yet, tapping into their expertise often proves challenging because:
By creating a streamlined process—whether internally or with the help of an agency—healthcare organizations can transform existing thought leadership into multiple bite-sized pieces that resonate across different channels. These content marketing efforts not only educate patients and staff but also build credibility and brand awareness in the broader market. Smaller health systems, in particular, can differentiate themselves by consistently showcasing their unique clinical strengths and community impact.
When developing medical marketing strategies, it's crucial to focus on creating valuable content that addresses patient needs and concerns. This approach not only helps in marketing medical services but also establishes your organization as a trusted source of healthcare information.
Healthcare marketing is notorious for regulatory hurdles, from HIPAA compliance restrictions to internal compliance reviews. Extended feedback loops and conservative messaging can stifle creativity. Slocumb advises marketing teams to:
To effectively market healthcare services, it's essential to strike a balance between creative marketing approaches and regulatory compliance. This balance can be achieved through thorough healthcare marketing research and collaboration between marketing and legal teams.
With so many specialties—from paid media and SEO to podcasting and data analytics—healthcare marketing often requires cross-functional teams. As Slocumb notes, external agencies with deep experience in life sciences and healthcare can provide specialized support that internal teams may struggle to offer on their own.
Strategic marketing for healthcare organizations often involves collaboration between internal teams and external experts. This collaborative approach ensures that marketing efforts are aligned with the organization's goals and the latest trends in marketing healthcare today.
Healthcare marketing, when executed with strategic intent, robust content marketing, and collaborative energy, can profoundly influence patient experience, brand reputation, and growth outcomes. As Christine Slocumb's journey illustrates, a disciplined approach—rooted in engineering-style processes but balanced with creative flair—can yield a sustainable competitive advantage.c
By embracing foundational planning, consistent thought leadership, and compliance-savvy creativity, healthcare organizations of all sizes can transform their marketing from "starvation" to a source of strategic power. This strategic marketing approach is crucial for healthcare providers looking to enhance patient engagement and satisfaction.
In an environment where patient expectations continue to rise and competition is fierce, there's never been a more crucial time to harness the full potential of healthcare marketing—and to do so in a way that resonates with both clinicians and the communities they serve. By focusing on patient personas, leveraging multichannel marketing, and utilizing healthcare CRM systems, organizations can create a more personalized and effective marketing strategy that drives patient engagement and improves overall healthcare services.
Understanding how the healthcare industry uses marketing is key to developing effective strategies. By incorporating patient feedback and leveraging conversation intelligence tools, healthcare providers can gain valuable insights into patient needs and preferences. This data-driven approach to healthcare marketing not only improves patient satisfaction but also helps organizations stay competitive in the ever-evolving healthcare industry.
<p>I think there's a misconception that marketing doesn't really make a difference you know I've heard it before just go hire more salese you know just go run some more ads over here right marketing strategy and Foundation makes a [Music] difference hello everyone this is is Cole from the American Journal of healthc care strategy joined by a special guest today with many years of experience in the industry uh and and also a variety of different experiences which is I think will make this conversation really valuable um Chris can you please introduce yourself your current role uh and kind of what you're up to right now yeah Cole great to be here um Chris lcam I am the currently the chief growth officer at Supreme group um we are a hold Co of agencies that are focused uh exclusively on the life sciences and Healthcare uh sectors um and I'm formerly the founder of clarity Quest marketing um one of the top digital Health marketing uh agencies um in the country and uh do a lot of work helping companies Market their Solutions technology and services into Health Systems thank you so much for coming on I know your time's really valuable the resume is interesting because you have this kind of Bachelor's in engineering Master's in electrical engineering um from of course Villanova grade school nearby me here and then uh of course you get your MBA about it looks like about uh three four years later you start that it looks like and then you kind of go into this marketing area and you're very successful right I mean you're clearly very successful at product management as well from what it looks like for electrical engineering but then you're equally successful in marketing why why did you get into marketing and more specifically why healthc care marketing and how did you find yourself so successful at it it was quite a journey and you know I have a lot of folks who are just getting out of college saying you know like which direction I should go and I'm just like just be learning all the time because your career path is probably going to change like six times minded um and and you'll find it eventually you'll find what calls you um I started as a semiconductor engineer so totally out of Health Care um and when I was at Motorola um at that time um I often had to pitch to the sea level they'd come into our research labs and I'd pitch and I said I need to understand financial statements and that's why I went to go get my MBA was really to understand a p&l um in there and um yeah so that like led to though my love of marketing I had a professor who was a casino marketer and if anyone has studied the the marketing of casinos they are like the top pop marketers in the entire world um you are unfortunately manipulated from the time you enter the casino until you leave from the colors the shading the food everything um but it was fascinating to me and I was like wow if you could bring that level of marketing prowess that casinos have into Tech um or innovation or healthc care for example um wouldn't that be a wonderful thing to be able to bring these life-saving you know applications to the world versus getting people to gamble um so um that's how I kind of got interested um in marketing and then I made my way working for several startups that had both technology and a health care application one was the first Google Glass that had head mounted displays for surgery which was really fun um and then I eventually started an agency and I really started that agent at first to be Tech um and the com boom and happened um and uh at the same time healthc care really took off I was at Seattle and uh Fred Hutch Cancer Center um was really booming and starting um in Seattle my husband at the same time started medical school so I had all these factors kind of hitting me out once that were like you should do healthare you should do Healthcare and then I really liked the altruistic aspect of it so that's kind of the long story of how I got into uh Healthcare marketing what a an impressive Journey a really impressive Journey and I I think it's it's an important thing that we're still trying to solve right because with tech we have implemented a lot of these um customer Obsession you know um Extreme customer focus and it's worked well right I mean you look at Apple Stores is a great example um and then in healthcare we still really are very behind in a lot of these areas where you know people are still having bad experiences and I mean one of the things that I always find is funny is is like Google reviews right something that is simple to manage for a lot of business businesses but Healthcare seems to like really struggle with maintaining their Google istics um which I know is kind unrelated to the discussion but it kind of shows that we're still behind the curve um and that you you kind of took this challenge headon which I think is impressive You released a book that's pretty popular I've been I've been looking at the reviews here uh it seems like it's it's pretty impactful uh stop starvation marketing and what is starvation marketing what is this book about uh can you kind of you know inform us a little bit I've never heard this term before absolutely so I was inspired to write stop starvation marketing because so many sea level folks would come to me and say like why am I plateauing in my growth why am I not seeing the growth I want to see um within the healthcare and Life Sciences sector um and I'd say okay where's your marketing how much have you spent on it how much have you prioritize that and often it would be crickets answer to that or we would get six months before I want to release a product I have to have all my marketing done new website campaigns I'm like whoa you've been developing maybe this software platform for how many years five years and then you left marketing to the last moment so stops starvation marketing as a term um means deprioritization of marketing budget of talent um like what place does it hold in your company do you have a chief marketing officer or not for example um so I see so many companies leave marketing table scraps in terms of budget people priority um campaign uh prioritization um or they strap marketing with so much regulatory which I know you want to touch on later um that you can't get anything creative across the Finish Line um so that's where starvation marketing came from um and because I see it all the time in healthcare and Life Sciences innovation yeah and I I've seen this as well right and it's like you said it's not just fiscal conservativism it's it's also in terms of content extremely conservative and not every institution is like this but we have seen right extreme you knowly conservative messaging where it's it's very stiff right it's very stiff marketing and when you're competing against other organizations which have very vibrant messages or who have a large marketing budget there's there's concerns um I think there's a lot of questions on this too that a lot of the the SE Suite is going to have I mean mainly too like how do you how do you implement something like this right how do you I guess how do you justify the ROI I think that's kind of the first question I have is have you seen instances where implementing a lot of money into to marketing does of course result in the positive Roa and then I guess probably the more important question is how do you prevent things from going wrong right how do you prevent a marketing project from failing are there any steps or general methods you use for that absolutely and in my book stop starvation marketing there's actually a methodology called the Tower of Power um and that Tower of marketing power starts with Foundation a lot of companies skip the step of figuring out how are we going to message ourselves effectively position ourselves versus the competition and actually develop a marketing plan that has attribution and measurement in it they just go right to what I call random acts of marketing right we're going to go to this trade show we're gonna put out a campaign I'm spending money here and there but there's no strategic thought behind it and you would never develop software that way right you would end up with a mess um so you know how do you bring kind of that agile and strategic mentality to marketing and using that Tower power is one of the ways we have found that companies succeed if you take and it's one quarter Cole it's one quarter three to four months of foundation development messaging positioning the best website you can afford um so folks see the value in your product and can understand it clearly um and then having a marketing plan the companies that do that I've given a case study in every chapter or move in my book um to show those companies that did that succeed and had 6X 10x going public growth um and that because they started from a place of strategy first and then moved to execution how does this quarter system work because it's a short period of time right I mean usually especially with the pace of mergers and Acquisitions we see that there's Grand strategy that goes on five or 10 years right where oh we're gonna have a huge marketing campaign that we gradually ramp up over the years um but oftentimes that that doesn't always work it doesn't always adjust to two conditions and instead you're saying that it should be on a shorter time scale how how does that does that work are we adapting you know quicker is that is that kind of what the the the rationale for that is yeah at our Healthcare marketing agency Clarity Quest we took the past 20 years to develop um this program where we can get it done in a quarter because try to convince sea levels to spend more than that is very very difficult when they're coming from a place of starvation right yeah um so we're big Believers in get the message defined test it AB tests the heck out of it right um continue to refine it over time but start putting some like gorilla smaller campaigns out first to test your value props um and then see where the Market's reacting to it um the marketing plan that's easy actually once you've done it for 20 years of develop in six to eight weeks um getting everyone's buyin sometime on where the budget should be takes a little bit more time um but we've really really hon this process that companies can do it in three to four months nice that's impressive yeah and so just and this is not of course a paid you know episode for for clarity um you know but I I'm interested what's the kind of lift needed to establish something like this within an organization right because you what I'm I guess what I'm asking is what expertise is the team bringing to make sure that gets done because a lot of Institutions are probably thinking I have no idea how we would be able to accomplish that ourselves within that time frame so how are you guys able to do that yeah we're we're like Gant chart Masters i' like to say our project managers are awesome to keep everyone first you have to get the SE level Buy in right before we'll even enter this room we say anyone with a red pen should be at the stakeholder meeting should be at the brainstorm meeting because where Cycles come in that delay this process is when particular stakeholders whether they're board members investors the CEO are not at the initial brainstorm meetings and come in and start to redline later that can add a lot of time if we we we insist like anyone with a red pen is in that first meeting right and we your phones are off we have your attention for four hours um and because this is really important to you and if they buy into that philosophy then that helps things go a lot smoother um and gets us over the roadblocks um the expertise that our folks have too is like just really knowing the health system space um we have folks who um were ahead of marketing at hl7 they know Tech they know chime they know um they know many of the different areas they know Clinical Services revenue cycle management um so as um experts that you need coming in need to have some type of Baseline of understanding because the health system space as you know as you mentioned it's so different it's so acronym based um and it's different than any other industry that's why like Google Apple others are like pouring all this money and they're like we can't figure this out it is so complicated and so I think behaviorally motivated in terms of how people buy and engage with Services um that that expertise really needs to be there at first in order for foundation projects to succeed so it seems like your experience as an engineer has been kind of fundamental to this because you know I've taken uh um the scrum courses um and for for programming and for technology project management it seems like I'm hearing a lot of the same language with with this yeah that's really interesting you bring that up Paul I mean I was indoctrinated in my 20s at Motorola right it was all Six Sigma and scram and like so um I mean you had design of experiments ground into your head from the time you were you know starting there so I think I brought that mentality um to marketing and said you have to have the left brain and right brain the creative and the tech um and expertise together so that meld of left brain and right brain is I think our superpower um in terms of of success in this industry because it's it is unique right I mean it's it's the same way when we you know we've spoken with press gainy regarding customer experiences taking it to a scientific level right you're kind of taking marketing to this scientific level u in and also the cycle you know implementing it in Cycles is impressive and so that that comes down to the next question which is you know you have this three or four month window and then you run into these compliance issues where you know I mean it eight months before usually compliance gets back to to somebody else so how how are we how are we dealing with this this this is a real challenge that I've experienced myself actually so so how are we navigating negotiating with the compliance team yeah so first asking the compliance and Regulatory teams um what is what are no-go areas right there there are those ones like we'll never let you cross those right and then others are like I we like to try and like push the boundaries a little to see what gets thrown back right I I think some marketers um fail by getting a red line from regulatory and then never going back with something super creative again um and so I would encourage you know your listeners to like keep trying like creative because you'll see where where the boundaries lie where the gates lie on something like that um you know we had a campaign go out for you know our Hospital's the next Blockbuster Video and that was like really like oo you know like we're in the face of people saying hey you're gonna go bankrupt and stuff that was one of the best conform performing ads for one of our clients ever because it was something shocking and different and the CEO like just approved it you know he like I don't care like if compliance doesn't like like I'm saying this can go um right so I I think um trying to push those boundaries understand legally what you can and cannot say as a marketing department is really important but then you know it's even call things like color that marketers don't play with a lot you know we find in like LinkedIn ads like if you throw yellow in there as opposed to the standard blue and green that every Healthcare organization has in there you get much better click-through rates um and Performing campaigns interesting wow that's very important uh I'm like making a mental note of this myself from our own uh our own purposes I I think this emphasizes though right it's it's important and not not that you know hospitals cannot have a great marketing department internally but it emphasizes we're consultants and an external agent gen's help because you can have people who are experts in you know in in these areas right um how did you how long did it take you this is also a personal question to develop the team that you have now oh where you really felt like you were performing at the top of of the level yeah well I started Clarity quest in 2001 um and we were pretty small um for a while um and that was like a 20-year Journey um and then last year we merged with a life sciences company called Supreme optimization who also had this scientific Tech background um to their value set um so I'd say you know I'm still learning every day and still building but it's really nice to be part of a 250 person marketing team now because you have to have a specialty in everything like the LinkedIn people have different skill sets than the Google ads people even than the SEO people in the early days we did everything and there's no way now that like that's so above my pay grade if you ask me to optimize a LinkedIn campaign I'd be in trouble without the experts um on our staff so you know that's where internal you know Health Care System teams can look to um different agency um Outsource for those particular Specialties yes you know your business the best you know your oric the best your patient Bas the best um but where can those um agencies or outside Consultants help you with campaign that are so specialized these days that is excellent and and this next kind of question follows into that where the two Mel and that's with thought leadership so you have expert marketers who you know like I said team of 250 built over 20 years that's impressive that's hard to replicate because Healthcare Systems provide Healthcare not marketing right so you have a specialized in marketing but then you have this great healthc care system with Incredible employees and professionals right and huge Repository information you've talked about thought leadership a lot you are a thought leader yourself how does that play into marketing how can hospitals and and Health Systems benefit from from utilizing their their you know potential thought leaders yeah I like to there's a saying content is king um I say content is the entire back row of the chessboard um if you do not have all those pieces in place especially as marketing is becoming more sophisticated more behaviorally motivated um more personalized um your campaigns are going to fail and sometimes clients come to us and they say this campaign failed you know that's never going to work on that channel and then we're like let's take a look at your content um and that's often where the problem lies um it's not um enough content 90% of the time in terms of large buying groups and Health Systems know this there's probably 20 people on their buying team for technology right um and there but like how are you addressing each one of those folks with different pieces of content um and um and then how are you getting your unique voice down if you have that messaging and positioning from the initial Foundation set then you know your tone you know your voice and your content comes easier um for that but if you can again T experts who can help interview you facilitate getting that voice out getting those stories out um and putting them on paper and putting them digitally then that's going to be far more effective as well why do we struggle with that and so I we I've seen kind of very similar things and so for example we do a lot of free free work for Health Systems so we almost like never charge a nonprofit health system for a single episode but part of the reason is because a single episode is you know it's pretty effective but if you really want to be effective you need to create a lot more content and you need to really capture the spirit and the culture that's going on the institution and so that's one of the other reasons why we don't charge for for single episodes um but but why do institutions struggle with that right why because they have such great people that's one of the things that I never understood you have all of these doctors all these administrators these nurses each with an incredible individual Story Each with you know they're all very educated as well right so they're you know they have this repertoire this repository but then they struggle to produce the content why is that well first thank you for doing the episodes for nonprofit Health Systems that's that's an excellent of course that's an excellent contribution to this ecosystem um I think it's it's time they're all very very busy people um I'm married to a doctor I know how busy they are what the demands are um on their time um so that's part of it you know even sitting down um for 20 minutes you know to write something it's really hard um to get a clinician to do that but if you can get him on the phone or say record something on your phone on your way home or you know like on your speaker um on that then um if you get content marketers who are expert at taking nuggets taking bullet points and being able to encapsulate that um I think that's where um your audience could get more content um out um and then also I think we often miss an opportunity to atomize certain pieces of content like if they record a webinar with you I'd love to see a transcript 10-second Clips on video um LinkedIn organic you know like all over the place and then that's all different skill sets though Cole right you know like does someone know how to edit a video does someone do that right and um there's but you know those folks are out there even if you have a lower budget to use Freelancers to get that information someone just has to coordinate that atomization of the content I mean that's what we we tell our clients is that you know the shorts that we produce like yes shorts and they get thousands of views and that's excellent but what's even more important is they drive you know 20 or 30 people to downloads every single short that we produce of the episode and you know if people are watching that for five minutes for 10 minutes I mean that's an incredible rate of return on just producing a quick short and so yeah it's it's not just like you said it's not just that it's so that it's searchable right I mean I wonder too in your opinion uh and you know we don't need to we don't need to do anything controversial but in your opinion you know you see all these these news and world ranking reports right um and I think everyone knows it's it's not necessarily based on on completely facts uh or completely statistics how much of these rankings in this Prestige perception is based in your mind on this thought leadership because you look at like Mass General and John's Hopkins and Mayo and they have extremely strong thought leaders they are putting out research and content and video after video after video is that why they're seen as prestigious do you think that's that's part of it I think some of it's absolutely reputation um some is true quality right um but then some is just you're there like you mentioned they're they're they're there in volume on thought leadership and they're putting out it on a consistent Cadence right if you're starving your communication just like starving your marketing you're going to see that dip in people being able to recognize you um but yes and those institutions have larger budgets and larger teams who just consistantly crank out information but smaller systems can do that with they just have to atomize um and and use that content in different ways because they're never going to be able to produce the volume of a mass gen right um on something like that so yeah I think I think that's where you have to go um in terms of looking at the content smart and then having different types of content don't put all your eggs in one basket not just a podcast or a webinar or this because some people are visual Learners some people are readers some people are experiential lead Learners so having different types of content along the buyer journey is really important as well uh I think one of the last questions I want to ask is because you've answered some given us some great tips and and uh I think some really important direction as well but what is one of the biggest kind of misconceptions that we see in the industry that might stop us from from really moving forward in a positive way just go hire more salespeople you know just go run some more ads over here right marketing strategy and Foundation makes a difference creating a tower of power for your organization like time and time and time again I point to so many um examples in the book of companies who had disbelief around it and then they're like we're going to try some things and succeeded and those were just like nope not going to do it and they're out of business today um so you know I think there's also this misconception that good Tech and Innovation conquers all it's certainly a good starting point or good Services good clinical care all those things are table stins they get you into the door and then good marketing Communications can bring you to the next level it's interesting that you you mentioned that too because I wonder how your your or your organization functions differently than traditional Consulting I think again because of those short time frames so a lot of times you know as a consultant you want to be with the company for as long as possible in a way right you want to get the the billing hours up you know that's kind of a thing that's goes on in the Consulting industry there's a lot of worry about that from institutions but yeah you're you're emphasizing the short turnaround time with a prioritization on strategy I think that's an impressive differentiating Factor right is that you're prioritizing strategic planning while having a shorter turnaround time what do you think the ROI difference is between a a campaign that's strategized and then a campaign that's just kind of thre threw out there is it tenfold 100 fold what would you have to guess yeah certainly to be clear Cole um we do have clients who work with us many many years because we find if we get in and do that strategic element with them first because of the specialization in marketing they just don't have the resources to do every type of campaign in house so um you know we do have this short term but then many of our clients um ends up with like three to seven years um with us um but what what Roi and return on marketing investment to folks see if they do it um 6 to 15x and there's examples in my book of like you're going to have Sixx to 15x times better result um if you start with the strategy and Foundation first um and then go to marketing execution versus random acts of marketing wow impressive well I think that's a a good uh reason to buy the book as well I'm going to I'm going to have to make a purchase and see if I'll get my my 15x on it uh but no I I think excellent and I really appreciate you coming on you know there's a bunch of other things I'd like to talk about hopefully we can have you on again uh your organization seems like an incredible organization that you've built over the 20 years I mean as an entrepreneur I admire that greatly uh and I think as uh you know an upcoming executive and I think a lot of our other upcoming executives are really going to appreciate this different take on marketing because it's beyond marketing right it seems like a lot of this is basic foundations of team building of strategy and of management I couldn't be more appreciative for you coming on and educating us on this absolutely cool I've been happy to be here and really enjoyed the conversation happy to come back anytime</p>
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