Get 'more from 2024' by briefing your healthcare PR agency for outcomes

New Year’s Resolutions are part of what academics call “The Fresh Start Effect” - namely the beginning of a new time period that enables individuals to reflect on past imperfections, take a big picture view and set targets for aspirational behaviours for the year ahead.

Last year, we published our MERTO Report, which included a section on how many healthcare PR professionals and marketers are:

“Working extremely hard but, because their effort is focused on what has been characterised as SOS… Sending Out Stuff’, rather than directly on an organisation goal, they and their chief executives are often left with a nagging feeling that they aren’t seeing the impact that their hard work deserves.”

I also wrote a piece about this for the Chartered Institute of Public Relations’ ‘Influence Magazine’, which you can read here.

If the description sounds a little like you and your organisation, then you are far from alone. It’s a common response among communications professionals and marketers reacting to organisational demands for more output across more channels. However, increasingly, it is having the unintended consequence of distracting people from the organisation’s core goal.

The good news though, is that it can be changed and, in this fresh start period (known as a ‘temporal landmark’ among academics), your brain is likely to be more open than at most times of the year to taking a step back and reevaluating your approach.

If there is one thing you can change in 2024, then introducing an outcomes-first approach will be the one that delivers you and your organisation the greatest value. Here’s how to do it.

Think about the outcome first, not the activity

In our MERTO Report, we describe the experience faced by Jonathan, a Marketing and Communications Director for a private healthcare company that provides services for health insurers and large employers.

After a drop in revenue, Jonathan was tasked with increasing the number of leads for their sales team, but the CEO also flagged that they had seen one of their competitors on a national news website, discussing their latest survey results and so recommended following a similar tactic.

Jonathan worked with his PR agency to deliver a media-friendly story that got widely picked up but, when he proudly showed off his coverage book at the next Senior Leadership Team meeting, his CEO was unimpressed - because the activity didn’t generate any leads. Like any CEO, she wanted to see an outcome and, if it isn’t going to lead to tangible business impact, then the reach of press coverage is really just a red herring metric, no matter how big the number.

The biggest factor in transforming your communications operation is being clear on what you are trying to achieve i.e. what you want to actually happen as a result of the activity you undertake, and being led by that. If Jonathan had started with the outcome in mind, then he may then have taken a far more strategic audience-focused approach to generating the required leads, rather than jumping straight to a tactic.

Make sure that your healthcare PR agency knows exactly what business and health outcomes you are hoping to achieve in 2024 and encourage them to use data, insights and expertise to diagnose the optimum route. If most of your business comes through the NHS, you should now be preparing for the start of the next financial year in April.

Identify WHO can impact on the outcome and HOW to activate them

As we outline in our report:

For any outcome to be achieved, you need to persuade specific audiences to take specific actions

Too many PR, communications and marketing professionals make the mistake of being channel-focused rather than audience-focused. They celebrate press coverage or social media engagement as the end goal rather than simply the route to achieving the much bigger business objective and health mission of the organisation.

If we think audience-first rather than channel-first, we approach things differently. We ask ourselves:

• Who are all of the audience groups that can have an impact on the organisation’s priority outcome?

• What are their relative levels of power and interest over the outcome?

• What behaviour/s do we need from them in order to achieve the outcome?

• What are they doing at the moment?

• What are the barriers to those audiences adopting the behaviour?

• What are the broader priorities of those audiences that might persuade them to adopt the behaviour?

It is only at this point, when we have this much deeper understanding of who we are targeting, why and what we are saying to them, that we should finally ask:

• What would be the best channel or channels to reach them through?

Our MERTO Framework encourages this exact approach as it directs users to define the goal and then prioritise audiences, barriers/drivers, messages and THEN channels/activities. A good agency brief can speed up this process by providing the intelligence you already possess to help us identify the priority audiences faster - so can achieve your goal even more rapidly.

We used MERTO to uncover audience-first approaches that compelled 140,000 people to sign a petition for tinnitus research funding for Tinnitus UK, that drove a 645% increase in the number of GP practices signing up to get Veteran Friendly accredited for the Royal College of GPs (see campaign image on the right) and that attracted NHS Integrated Care Board customers from a standing start for health tech firm, Meddbase.

If you can persuade the right people to take action then you will achieve the desired outcome. That’s what a brief should focus on.

Use data and insight to guide prioritisation and evaluation

We have already covered just how busy PR, communications and marketing professionals are right now.

There is always so much to do and always so much more that could be done.

Strategy is about prioritisation. No organisation, agency or individual alive can do everything that could be done and, therefore, the focus should be on identifying what will drive the greatest impact and prioritising that.

In the MERTO Report, we talk at length about the ‘Pareto Principle’, which is a phenomena by which, in almost any case, 80% of an outcome is driven by just 20% of the input. The key to a high impact strategy is identifying what 20% of activities will have the greatest impact on the overarching goal.

This is where insight comes in. If you have taken the right steps to understand the outcome and prioritise the audiences, then you should be in possession of a great deal of data. In the Jonathan example used at the beginning of this article, this might include:

• ‘Average Sale Price’ (ASP) of the product

• Average number of sales per month

• Number of Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) and Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) to generate those sales

• Average conversion rate for SQLs and MQLs

• Identity of audiences that are most likely to purchase the product (targets)

• Identity of audiences that are most likely to influence our targets (enablers)

• Priority barriers and drivers of those target and enabler audience groups

• Existing relationships held by the organisation

• Government or NHS reports or strategies highlighting the scale of the problem

• Think Tanks or Charity reports identifying possible relevant solutions

• Emotive facts or figures that will capture the attention, hearts and minds of the target (and enabler) audiences

• Priority media outlets consumed by the target audience, and journalists at those outlets with an interest at the topic

• Priority social media channels used by the target audience and what content is typically effective

• Existing databases or communications methods used by the organisation

• Success of previous campaigns in driving the intended outcome - and the cost of these

• Metrics set/achieved for previous campaigns and how each element contributed to the outcome

Capture all of this and you will likely be in a very strong place to set evidence-informed strategic priorities that represent the ‘Most Effective Route To Outcomes’ (MERTO), targeting the right audiences, with the right messages on the right channels in order to drive the actions that will lead to tangible outcomes - prioritising to maximise effectiveness and efficiency.

You will also be in a position to build an Evaluation Framework of meaningful metrics at outputs, outtakes, outcomes and impact level (see our previous post for a practical guide on evaluating business and health outcomes for a full definition of these). Done correctly, it will be clear from looking at the framework how the achievement of every output will contribute to the delivery of final outcome, as the goals will have been expressly designed to trigger the audiences to take the actions that are needed for that to happen.

Healthcare organisations can support agencies to take an outcomes-focused approach by supporting outcomes-focused goal-setting. Avoid meaningless KPIs unless they will contribute to the overall goal, otherwise you are just creating a distraction (we call these ‘red herring metrics’).

It is expected that 2024 is going to be another year of uncertainty for the healthcare sector and the organisations within it. However, for those organisations that embrace ‘the fresh start effect’, invest in giving themselves clarity on the most effective route to outcomes and work with their agency partner/s on being truly outcomes-focused, it will also be a time of great opportunity. Those that take the optimum actions now will emerge as the future leaders of tomorrow.

If you are a healthcare organisation that is making a genuine difference to people’s health then we would welcome the opportunity to talk to you about your priority business objectives and how we can help you to achieve them - driving both initial returns and sustained advantage.

Would you like a fresh start in 2024! Do you need greater clarity on the most effective route to business and health outcomes and the help of expert communicators in delivering your strategy? Contact me (Leigh) on 0114 437 2487 or email leigh@evergreenpr.co.uk for a free consultation.

Leigh Greenwood Chart.PR is the founder and managing director of Evergreen PR, the healthcare PR agency that drives tangible outcomes.