Alignment Between Marketing and Operations Is The Key To Success

Marketing has grown into a widely dependable department across many business sectors, including the healthcare industry. Having different teams—marketing, sales, operations, etc.—was once the common structure for organizations. However, cross-departmental communication is now seen as the key to a successful business.
Healthcare marketers are expressing their struggles to break out of the isolating structure hindering department collaboration. Strong cooperation between the marketing and operations teams is crucial for business growth and success.
Why Does the Marketing Team Need To Be Integrated?
Marketing relies heavily on access to continuous, reliable data to build strong campaigns that accurately work toward the organization’s goals. Without communication between different teams, marketers lack access to such data. Additionally, they risk creating uninformed campaigns that do not align with the organization’s brand or vision.
Specifically considering healthcare marketing, 90% of efforts have revolved around getting patients in the door. With the focus widening to also include building a relationship between marketing and operational teams, it is important to consider alignment strategies regarding capacity, service line, messaging, and technology.
Capacity Alignment
Capacity alignment focuses on the strategic approach to optimizing the use of resources across an organization. From a marketing perspective, understanding operation capacity is important to ensure campaigns align with the current needs of the organization.
Without strong alignment, marketers risk wasting ad budget funds, losing patients, or causing discontent among patients. For example, the ad budget is wasted if ads focus on getting patients to go to an already busy location rather than a location that lacks a steady flow of patients. Similarly, this misaligned marketing could result in frustrated patients when the patient is directed to a busy location and must wait weeks for the earliest appointment.
The operations team needs to consistently communicate the number of patients at a healthcare location and whether that location has the capacity to take on more patients. This can ensure that marketing campaigns are accurate, helpful, and beneficial to the entire team.
Service Line Alignment
Operation and marketing communication will enforce up-to-date knowledge shared across departments. When building a campaign, healthcare marketers need to understand the organization’s goals and how these goals benefit their offered services. Discussing such goals with multiple departments will result in more tailored and clear marketing campaigns.
Messaging Alignment
While it is a no-brainer that marketing needs to have effective messaging, it is less obvious the role that alignment plays in building these messages. Healthcare services work with patients who have unique backgrounds and conditions. Hence, marketing campaigns need to be considerate of both the consumer and organization’s perspectives. Collaboration with operations will help marketers validate that their campaigns align internally with the organization’s brand and strategy before launching to the public.
Technology Alignment
With increasing HIPAA standards and enforcement on the way data is collected, healthcare marketers face new obstacles in accessing data. Data is the backbone of creating a powerful campaign so new technologies are being created to assist marketers in their data collection process.
Adopting such new technology—such as data collection technology built into electronic health record systems—requires workflow changes and the support of the IT, operations, and compliance teams. Healthcare marketers will need to be able to respectfully and persuasively explain the importance of the new technology to get the necessary support to actually implement it. This makes technology alignment critical for the continued progress of healthcare marketing strategies.
What Can My Organization Do To Align Marketing and Operations?
Alignment across departments is crucial to maintaining a cohesive business. Identifying how the marketing and operations teams’ goals align is a great way to start building a sense of cooperation between them. These commonalities tend to be either financial or mission-driven goals.
It is important to be open-minded in order to build consistent, positive collaboration between marketing and operations at your organization. Each team comes from different work backgrounds and may not share the same perspective on workplace priorities. Discussing the different perspectives will help build relationships, increase empathy, and ensure respectful and trusted communication.
Fostering Collaboration for Success
In today’s healthcare landscape, the integration of marketing and operations is no longer optional; it is essential for success. By breaking down silos and fostering open communication between these departments, organizations can create campaigns that resonate with their goals while effectively addressing patient needs.
Taking these steps today will set the foundation for a more efficient, responsive, and successful future in healthcare marketing. Partner with MedShark Digital to learn more.