Smart marketers use competitive advertising intelligence to get what they want. Want bigger marketing budgets? Need to measure your marketing return? Want to be the first to know about your competitor’s service lines, offers, ads, new facility openings? Then welcome to wealth of knowledge you will gain from competitive advertising intelligence.

Smart marketers know the value of competitive intelligence, and, more importantly, how to use it. After over a decade of working with hospitals across the country on their competitive advertising intelligence – monitoring and measuring all Direct Marketing Areas (from the biggest DMA’s, to even the smallest that no one else monitors!) – here’s our guide to smart marketing practices from Strategic Intellavance:

Smart Marketing Practice #1: Increase Your Marketing Budget

• Use Competitive Advertising Intelligence to Get More Marketing Money: You know better than anyone, the more marketing money you have in your budget, the greater the impact you can make in your marketplace. What better way to show your CEO that you need more money than with an objective analysis of your hospital marketing budget compared to your key competitors? A lot of hospitals have used our data this way – to increase their marketing budgets.
• Delve deep by Service Line: Even if you are the biggest player with the biggest overall budget, you might not have the most funds at the service line level. With our data, you can even drill down by service line and make a service line case for more money. Hard to argue with measurable benchmarks showing you are being outspent!

Smart Marketing Practice #2: Track Key Measures for Marketing ROI

• Track Marketing Benchmarks: More and more, providing measurable benchmarks for marketing is becoming critical. Competitive advertising intelligence can provide your hospital or healthcare system with key measurable benchmarks so you can create a marketing scorecard. Some key measures include:
• Advertising Share of Voice: What is your share of the advertising dollars relative to the total advertising dollars being spent in your marketplace by your competitors. You need to make sure the tracking is customized to all your competitors, your media, your market – like we do at Strategic Intellavance. The higher your share of ad voice relative to your key competitors, theoretically speaking, the greater the impact you should be having on community awareness and utilization for your hospital.
• ROI Index: Another key measure is to track the return on your marketing dollars. At Strategic Intellavance the way we calculate this to take the ratio of your share of ad voice relative to your share of patient utilization. The goal is to have a higher share of patient utilization and a lower share of ad voice – spend less in marketing and have higher patient utilization. We have a custom grid analysis that shows where your hospital is positioned relative to your competitors – and who has a higher rate of return on their marketing.

Smart Marketing Practice #3: Know about NEW competitor service lines, ads, offers, activities

• Be the first to know about your competitors activity: Whether your competitors have a new service line that infringes on your core competency, a new advertising campaign that you want to know what media channels it is being placed in, or a stealth campaign on just the Web, competitive advertising intelligence tracking can provide actionable insights.
• Monitor & Measure All Media including Deep Print: despite the fact that the web is capturing more and more advertising activity, the core of most hospitals and healthcare systems ad budgets are still being spent in traditional media – TV, print, radio, billboards. And within print, for most hospitals, ad activity needs to be monitored in not only the major dailies, but also the weeklies, monthlies and trade pubs. It is important that all media be monitored and measured – like we do at Strategic Intellavance – and accessible in an All-in-1 portal that can allow you to share, view, email, create reports & graphs.
• Service Line Intell for TV, Web, Print Creatives – and since service line advertising and new offers are so critical, it is key to be able to view ads, ad spending and placement by service line, as well as, by hospital competitor – so you know how to formulate your strategy!

Healthcare Intellavance Recommendation:

The more you know about your competitors, the better you will be able to formulate strategies and execute marketing plans to keep you on the forefront. Smart marketers know competitive advertising intelligence can help them formulate measurable benchmarks, evaluate their marketing ROI, get the latest intell on new competitive activity, and in some cases, even add money to their own marketing budgets! LEARN MORE

To request a complimentary sample report that details localized competitive intelligence CLICK HERE.

You can call me directly at 866.508.9508 or email at Cheryl@StrategicIV.com.