On our new website, we promise to help clients connect the dots through careful research and informed strategic planning. But then what? Even after a marketing plan is signed, sealed and delivered, the work is far from over, and execution is only part of what remains. Revisiting your marketing imperatives to monitor, measure and sometimes modify is a critical success factor.
In other words, as you execute your strategic plan over time, make it a priority to assess the current landscape against your long-term marketing goals. What’s at stake if you don’t? Shelving your strategic plan means missing out on regular opportunities to:
- Conduct a historical review. Compare marketing imperatives against new data, and pay keen attention to key benchmarks that align with your plan. For example, hospital marketers should look at measurements like outmigration trends, physician referral patterns, clinical quality measures, patient satisfaction scores and so on.
- Uncover new opportunities. Looking at fresh market data through the lens of your long-term strategic plan enables timelier decisions that help you meet market demand and gain competitive advantages.
- Forecast what lies ahead. Being forward-thinking and adaptable to an evolving landscape is important for marketing plans to be both efficient and effective.
- Identify emerging challenges or limitations early on. It’s important to pinpoint where operations are poorly aligned with strategic priorities and to respond swiftly when local, regional and national healthcare developments affect your organization. Regular strategic plan reviews help with that.
- Inform key players of progress and lessons learned. Marketing departments lead marketing plans, but when patient-facing and decision-making personnel are not engaged and aware of the objectives, success will be out of reach.
At Dobies Health Marketing, we encourage and often lead quarterly strategic plan reviews with clients. There’s no better way to make sure actions continuously align with the objectives that inspired them in the first place. Give yourself the insight you need to make better decisions and revitalize your marketing strategy today.