eHealth Articles & White Papers

What is Service Line Marketing?

Ben Dillon - Vice President & eHealth Evangelist

Service line marketing receives a lot of attention, yet there is no clear consensus on the definition of service line marketing, how to evaluate this approach for your marketing efforts, and how this fits together with your other marketing priorities.

Service lines are an approach, not a department

Service lines are not an exhaustive list of the internal departments at your organization (human resources, radiology, lab, etc.). Rather they are the health consumer-centric packaging of "things that we do" into "products" that your consumers need and want.

As such, service lines are typically cross functional and composed of pieces from various departments that are combined to fit the way the patients look for treatment. Often, the pieces are organized together so they also fit financially, logistically or operationally within the care continuum.

Until recently, most healthcare service decisions were guided by primary care physicians and were described in the way that physicians, not the patients, understood the system. In today's modern world - with consumer choice being more important - service lines are replacing this model.

How do you know if a service line is worth marketing?

When determining service lines that would make good candidates for a marketing plan, consider these key factors of success:

• Is the service line currently profitable?
• Does it have the capacity for growth?
• Does the service line need to defend current market share?
• Is there the potential for market growth?
• Will there be a Halo effect (i.e. If your cancer center's brand is improved in the marketplace, will your heart center also benefit)?
• Is there a potential for cross-selling (e.g., emergency departments as a tool to drive admissions)?
• Is the service distinctive and competitive?
• Does the service line have political importance to senior management, physician community, or the community in general?
• Does the service line have an independent business plan?

If you are answering "yes" to a majority of these questions, you have a good business case to develop a marketing plan for the service line.

Service line marketing versus branding campaigns

Annual branding campaigns and service line marketing campaigns are separate, distinct approaches with different goals. A branding campaign is intended to build awareness and brand preference for the organization typically characterized by messages that are more general and have broad appeal. Service line campaigns have the goal of driving service line volume and are therefore focused on differentiating the benefits of the specific service line.

The popularity of service line marketing as a strategy comes, in part, out of the broader trend to measure results and justify marketing's investments. It comes down to return on investment (ROI).

Promoting and differentiating an individual service line drives volume for that service line. Patient volume is both measurable (or, rather, the changes in patient volume are measurable) and relatively easy to translate into dollars for ROI calculations.

Combining service line marketing and branding campaigns

I can't afford to do a service line marketing campaign and an annual branding campaign. Can they be mutually exclusive? If you can't manage to conduct a service line marketing campaign and a branding campaign (and this is true of many organizations), there are ways to get some of the benefits of a brand campaign within the context of a series of service line promotion efforts:

• Establish a visual and thematic campaign framework into which each individual campaign will be created. Without a consistent look and feel, it may not be obvious that individual service line campaigns are from the same organization. An integrated approach allows for some level of brand awareness growth even across these smaller, more focused campaigns.
• Plan and schedule campaigns centrally. This keeps your efforts spread throughout the year. In addition to managing the workload of your department, this will keep an effective level of brand impressions over time.
• Look at all of the factors listed above when selecting which service lines should receive resources. While strict service line marketing focuses only on those services that have capacity and potential for strong growth, given the need to provide general brand support as well, you may choose to devote some resources to key service areas even when they dominate your marketplace or are at capacity due to other brand considerations (such as Halo effect).

Grow your service lines and deliver results

In an environment that prioritizes clearly measurable payback for your marketing, a service line marketing approach is a proven direction for delivering results. However, if you're not careful, this shift can cause you to lose overall marketplace brand momentum.

Taking an integrated branding approach and managing your efforts carefully can give you the benefits of a service line marketing campaign while leveraging many of the benefits of a traditional brand campaign approach.