Top Five Tips to Maximize Your Marketing Efforts on a Shoestring Budget

1. Focus on digital versus traditional media. Hospitals love their newspaper advertising. However, it is an expensive medium with relatively low ROI. Refocus on nontraditional, trackable communications channels like search engine optimization and social media – essentially building "digital" word-of-mouth and opinion leadership.

2. Communicate your brand from the inside-out. Six degrees of separation is a good rule of thumb. Recruit brand ambassadors internally through your employees and volunteers to help promote your initiatives. Utilize internal communications channels to rally your stakeholders around the cause. Develop a contact strategy to organize your brand ambassadors and systematically get your message out to your audience. This is a great way to build word-of-mouth about your services at little or no cost.

3. Leverage your call center and website to cross-sell services. Recommend a bone density scan to a female patient scheduling a mammogram. Set pediatric appointments up for all of the family’s children at once. If a patient is calling about bariatric surgery, recommend a cardiac and orthopedic exam.

4. If your hospital freezes the hire of FTEs (full-time employees) or worse, lays them off, use an agency to extend your team. During an FTE freeze, use an agency as an extension to your team. If your team is missing a marketing VP or director, use the agency specifically for your marketing plan. If your team is missing public relations, internal communications, Web, media planning or publications support, an agency partner can supply multiple experts working as a team usually for less money than an FTE.

5. Reorganize your marketing department by function rather than service line. This will streamline workflow so each function head serves as the gatekeeper of messaging. You will realize efficiencies across the board, and different service lines might benefit from other’s successes.