Nemours CMO Sarah Sanders: A Champion for Brand and Demand in Healthcare Marketing
In the precision-focused healthcare industry, CMO Sarah C. Sanders demonstrates how awareness spend can optimize lead generation.
“You're not going to optimize your engagement unless you have a strong brand driving it. I just kept telling everybody, ‘don't give up your brands.’”
Sarah C. Sanders believes in the continuum. We’d like to hope she means our publication, The Continuum, but in our recent conversation she did summarize its very stance: “There’s a relationship between brand and demand,” she said. “It's not like one versus the other. It's a continuum, a continuum of learning and experimentation.”
Practically our words exactly. But here are more of hers, on how she implements that philosophy as SVP and Chief Marketing Officer for the highly respected Nemours Children’s Health System.
What is the perspective about “brand and demand” in healthcare marketing?
Healthcare systems aren't for-profit organizations, and hospitals have small budgets, so around eight or nine years ago when some organizations started establishing data and analytics functionality and precision CRM, I think a lot of healthcare marketing leaders looked at precision marketing as a way to be much more targeted and efficient with their marketing dollars. When these tools were being introduced, a lot of conversation was about shifting away from mass media into digital almost exclusively.
But even as I was experimenting and building our infrastructure, I kept saying that there is a relationship between brand and demand ... it's not like one versus the other. It's a continuum, a continuum of learning and experimentation. They feed each other. You're not going to optimize your engagement unless you have a strong brand driving it. And actually, with that sort of experiment and learning environment, you get to really explore and learn about your brand voice through precision and this constant evolution and iteration between the parts of that integrated communications platform.
So, I just kept telling everybody, “don't give up your brands.”
How did you develop your “continuum” approach?
At Penn Medicine we had an extremely strong brand but there were also a lot of highly sub-specialized programs that we needed to market. We'd let the expertise of those service lines -- cancer, cardiac, orthopedics neurosciences -- build the brand for a long time. That was expensive because you're building it in multiple channels, for multiple programs. Then we started allowing our brand to tell a very emotional story and allowing our precision marketing to do a lot of that service line heavy lift.
Is there an example?
We built a program for our proton center, which was Penn’s single largest investment at the time. It was highly consumer-dependent because referring physicians in the early days of proton therapy were questioning the efficacy of that particular modality. And every Monday I would get a call: "What are our leads? We need this many new patients for this program."
At one point, we were not meeting our targets. We were advertising and we were doing precision marketing. But we didn't have enough mass media because we weren't investing enough in the brand. We had to introduce this as a product launch, which you don't often do in healthcare. We had to educate the community on the therapy, and then we had to convince them to engage with us. We had a nurse navigator monitoring and actually working on all the leads, so we were able to understand from her what messages worked and what people still had questions about, then connect all the dots through the CRM.
By having all of that insight it became like clockwork. Our projections in terms of spend and outcome were completely on target. One of the most fun things I've ever done in marketing was being able to say, "we know exactly what we need to do. You just need to give us this money and we'll have these leads..." and it really worked!
Nemours also provides everything from research to advocacy, and even creative arts therapy programs. So, you must have a multi-pronged focus in the marketing of all of those services?
Research, education, and clinical care are the tenets of any academic organization, but children’s healthcare is definitely a different environment especially when it comes to marketing. Parents have stronger relationships with their primary care providers for their kids, so the consumerism question there is whether they are making their own decisions about where to seek care or if they’re just going to go where their doctors tell them to.
But we operate across Pennsylvania and New Jersey, across Florida... so those regions and payer environments are very different., which makes a difference in how we track and administer campaigns. And then there are lots of different subspecialties. Nemours is particularly expert in orthopedics, for example. That's one of our most high-performance service lines. But even within that there are differences between, say, scoliosis and sports medicine. Those are distinct programmatic areas where people behave very differently, and we need precision campaigns. We had to figure out how and where consumers will engage versus where they won't and will just work with their physician.
And things like orthopedics and ENT are really still very consumer-driven, considered purchases, even in the pediatric space. We've found really great success at doing a lot of direct-to-consumer lead generation in those areas.
You use patient stories as heartstring, word-of-mouth awareness builders, but what are some of your preferred tools in DTC or performance-driven demand?
[To create] market relevance, drive a really emotional and differentiated brand story and then allow that to raise awareness so that when somebody is actively searching for a particular program or service we're in the consideration set. But SEM is really what drives a lot of the conversions. That's probably not specific to healthcare. I mean, when you have an active searcher, you're going to get that person to convert. Facebook has been really successful for us...and we're evolving more into some of the other social platforms. For our demographic, Instagram is becoming one of the higher lead generators of our mix. And so, between social targeting and SEM, I think that's where we have the most lead-generation.
But we still have a full media mix because when we do campaign attribution between direct mail or email campaigns, and all of the other, they might touch six or seven tactics before they actually come back and convert off of SEM.
So, we know the full media mix is working to ultimately convert somebody into becoming a patient or seeking that service.
Almost half of your tenure at Nemours has been during COVID. How have you pivoted?
Early on in the pandemic we paused all of our campaigns for a couple of months. But we were able to use all our infrastructure, something not a lot of healthcare organizations have, to communicate with our patients and families. We could rapidly communicate to our primary care audiences, our chronic care populations, and specific regions -- and do very segmented messaging with information they needed. We were able to roll out tele-health, so we used all of that to enhance our relationship overall with our existing patient and family base in a very personalized way.
We're about to do a rebrand this summer which we've been working for the past two years. So, as we were coming out of the first wave, we took the opportunity to do a “bridge campaign.” With COVID you can’t just talk about butterflies and rainbows; you have to be relevant. So, we launched a campaign called “Contagious” that was pretty bold, but we did some consumer testing before we launched. It was really geared toward highlighting what I would call the silver linings of COVID—the things that brought out the best in humanity during that period of time. And then, it had a very reassuring message about us being there and being accessible and still providing and encouraging people to seek care.
That mass media campaign got a lot of attention and 95% of the feedback we received was incredibly positive. And we combined that with a lot of our access campaigns about urgent care, telehealth, how you get to us, and how we make that easy for you. And so that combination of, again, brand and actionable steps for people to take, were really successful.
What aspects of marketing are you eager to embrace now?
I have a personal passion for pediatrics because I have a special needs child, but I also felt like there is more of a possibility here of building a full continuum: we can successfully do lead gen in pediatrics, but [it’s about] the entire patient journey. We are an organization in this transition from fee-for-service to value. Our overall strategic plan is based on the fact that 80% of keeping a child healthy occurs outside of a hospital or healthcare setting. So, I’m excited about the ability to start using some of our tools to change behaviors – to build experiences and build pathways -- and not just say, "when you need the surgery, come on in.” It’s a more comprehensive experience from a consumer or a patient perspective.
And that really is where our brand is going as well; talking about the healthiest generation of children, moving beyond our walls to try to influence the health and the environment in which every child lives—those are some of our positioning statements. It’s really about getting out there, getting in the community, and impacting the health of children in the way that best serves their needs.
February 1, 2021
