by Gary Brazzell

Focus

When I was business administrator for Southwest Virginia Home Health, developing our physician newsletters was one of my favorite things to do. Not only was it creative and fun, after my referral source newsletters doubled referrals from doctors and discharge planners, the marketing campaign was one of my greatest professional successes at the time. Nevertheless, even though my goal was to produce referral-doubling newsletters monthly, I periodically did not meet the deadline. I knew that referals would drop 33% to 50% in the month following a missed newsletter, but I still missed enough newsletters to keep measuring that loss.

What was the problem? As business administrator, there were constantly things more important than newsletters demanding my attention. Maybe it was adapting to a new regulation, looking after an inspector, buying a personal care program going out of business, dealing with some patient issue, etc. In healthcare administration, it’s easy for marketing projects to get bumped by more important tasks. That is exactly why many executives should be supervising this work, not performing it.

At Brazzell Marketing Agency, we live and die by your marketing strategies. Our number one and only priority is implementing your marketing campaigns effectively and on time. Doesn’t that sound better than assigning your marketing to someone doing it as a sideline, even if that someone is you? Consider these tasks that require regular supervision and maintenance:

If your business is internally not monitoring or implementing these programs on schedule, outsource to a vendor who’s primary objective is your marketing.