At the 2017 HIMSS Annual Conference held in Orlando in late February, Greystone.Net President and Co-Founder Kathy Divis and Klein & Partners Founder and CEO Rob Klein discussed the current state of healthcare digital marketing and where the industry is heading in 2017.

The basis for their talk was data from a survey of healthcare marketers taken in 2016. As reported in The State of Digital Marketing in Healthcare Moving Toward 2017 - Industry Perspective: Where We Are, What's Changed in a Year, some of the key takeaways from Kathy and Rob were:

• The healthcare industry remains behind other industries in digital marketing efforts.
• There is a lot of room for improvement in achieving the digital goals of healthcare organizations.
• As they were in 2015, the top three challenges/barriers in 2016 continue to be money, silos and change.
• In 2015, only 50% of the survey respondents reported using a CRM system, while 65% report using a CRM in 2016. Significantly more respondents said in 2016 that their CRM is integrated well with their website, compared to 2015.
• Use of a marketing automation tool doubled from 2015 to 2016 – from 23% to 48%.
• The transition of healthcare from a MarCom to a MarTech focus means that marketing is becoming more technology-based, which requires effective CRM and Marketing Automation systems. It is incumbent on marketers to fully understand the challenges, benefits and ROI of both as they choose and deploy these platforms.
• Survey respondents consider personalization/one-to-one marketing and ROI to be their top two most pressing concerns.
• Provider-side healthcare is below the Marketing Leadership index for online retailers and banking. However, it performs better than insurers when it comes to digital activities.

Kathy and Rob presented recommendations and opportunities for the audience, including;

• Since the top priorities in digital marketing for 2017 are the continued deployment of personalization/one-to-one marketing techniques and the documentation of ROI, marketers must really and quickly begin to transition to a MarTech focus.
• Provider-side healthcare is below the Marketing Leadership index for online retailers and banking. However, it performs better than insurers when it comes to digital activities.
• There is a need for marketing executives to continue to educate their C-suite colleagues on the value of digital marketing so the traditional barriers (money, silos and reluctance to change) can be broken down. This is particularly important as they fight for senior leadership support and the budget and staff to implement the technology-based marketing initiatives.
• The transition of healthcare from a MarCom to a MarTech focus means that marketing is becoming more technology-based, which requires effective CRM and Marketing Automation systems. It is incumbent on marketers to fully understand the challenges, benefits and ROI of both as they choose and deploy these platforms.

After the talk, which was well-attended by an audience of mostly IT professionals, many attendees stayed to ask questions and learn more. The majority of their questions were related to learning about MarTech and the merging of marketing and IT in the healthcare space—the “invasion” of marketing into IT—and how to provide IT support to marketing.