Marketing to the Mature Marketplace: 6 Pathways to Success in Challenging Times

No matter how you read the statistics, the bottom line remains the same: These are challenging times. Even if the daily economic news wasn’t so grim, so often, there’s ample evidence to suggest it’s time to look outside the usual comfort zones when it comes to marketing healthcare services.

Newspaper ads have long been a staple for healthcare marketers. Now newspapers themselves are fast becoming a dying breed, as evidenced by a Pew Report™ ¹ that showed readership down more than 26% - in the last two years alone.

Yellow Page Ads are costly, with the results often difficult to track. And raise your hand if the response rate from your last direct mail campaign even came close to the former gold standard of a 2% return.

In an era when decreasing resources are more often than not matched up against increasing competition, nowhere is that challenge more complex than when your Target Audience is the Mature Marketplace.

We are approaching a unique moment in our nation’s history, when one in three Americans will be over the age of 50, with an estimated 75 million Americans between the age of 50 and 65 and another 40 million 65 and older.

As a result, the ability to understand and communicate with this vast Target Audience will be a pathway to long-term success for healthcare marketers, in times of economic challenge and beyond.

Five key concepts are considered universal truths in defining what motivates the Mature Marketplace. The more these concepts can be incorporated into not only marketing materials but also conversations with patients and family members, the more success will come by way of enhancing the patient experience and ensuring business growth.

Autonomy or Self-Sufficiency - Regaining the ability to pursue the interests and activities that age or illness may have taken away is a recurring theme in the Mature Marketplace. From a marketing perspective, offering choices as opposed to only one solution, whether in the way of medical treatment or even financing options, is a way to help older patients use their need for autonomy and self-sufficiency as part of the decision-making process.

Connectedness – This is an audience that have reached a station in life when “Trigger Events” begin to affect their everyday lives – children growing up, selling the family home, retiring from a long-enjoyed career, perhaps even losing a spouse. Because contact with patients is typically infrequent, handwritten notes, phone calls, newsletters and other means of B/C communication answer their need to stay connected to your staff, services and place of business.

Altruism - Fund-raising experts will tell you that people 50 and older traditionally make up the largest segment of any donor population. Engaging your health system, hospital or practice in community-based outreach programs or charitable activities, while at the same time encouraging patients to participate, will allow them to engage in this concept, defined as a concern for others.

Personal growth - The growth of organizations like Elder Hostels™ is a prime example of how important this concept is to the Mature Marketplace. It may also be the most easily understood, simply by drawing the connection between better health and the ability to enjoy new, enriching experiences. The moral here is that no matter how old we become, we never, ever, leave behind the need for personal growth.

Revitalization - One of the recommendations I offer clients when reviewing their marketing materials is to use models who appear to be 10 - 12 years younger than the Target Audience. This is a practical application of the fact that the older we are, the younger we still like to think of ourselves as being. Use this concept to reinforce the notion that better health leads to feeling younger and more alive again.

Vision - Declining vision is often accompanied by an increased sensitivity to glare. Glare sensitivity impacts not only office design – bright white walls and harsh overhead lighting being the chief culprits in many of the offices I’ve visited as a marketing consultant- but marketing materials as well. Instead of gloss or enamel stocks, print them on matte or dull finishes that reflect less glare.

Because of the yellowing of the retina that occurs with the aging process, the ability to distinguish cool colors – blues, greens and violets – decreases over time. Use warm colors as accents, to create the visual and psychological impact you’re looking for. Using a minimum of 12 pt. type, indenting each paragraph and limiting paragraphs to two sentences or three lines will also help older eyes and minds retain the information being imparted.

Hearing - For many hearing-impaired people, the range of sounds heard over the telephone narrows to 600 cycles, as compared to a range of several thousand cycles for people without hearing problems. For men, the loss is often found in the higher frequencies, making women’s voices more difficult to understand. Speaking slowly, using shorter words, rephrasing often, and stopping to get feedback at regular intervals should be part of any “telephone-side” manner.

Visual Memory vs. Verbal Memory - With aging, visual memory stays strong, while verbal memory, whether of the spoken or written word, declines. Long copy blocks in marketing materials or complex thoughts in conversations will be remembered less than short, descriptive word pictures that communicate a simple message. We are also visual creatures and become increasingly so as we age. As a result, the impact of lifestyle photographs showing people enjoying the benefits of better health – in office décor as well as marketing materials - will be much greater than any combination of the spoken and written word.

Left-brain vs. Right-Brain Thinking - Humans are born with significant, if unequal, capacities for both left-brain thinking, where logic resides, and right-brain thinking, where instinct resides. But as we grow older, there is an inexorable shift from left-brain to right-brain thinking.

The right side is the creative side of the brain. It deals with images, colors, and sensory inputs like music, art, and emotion. It’s the side where major influences like pictures, sounds, and smells are linked with positive, or sometimes negative, “cognitive association”.

As a result of this shifting, it is more fatiguing for older patients to make decisions affecting their lives by using the left, or logical, side of their brains to process facts and figures, words, and numbers. Instead, they become more reliant on making those decisions based on what their instincts allow them to “feel” rather than what their intellect suggests they should “know.”

Of the five human senses, the sense of smell is the one tied closest to memory. Some of the most successful offices I’ve visited have taken advantage of that little-known fact by strategically placing baked goods, beverages, scented candles, or other olfactoral stimuli as a means of eliciting positive, memory-conditioned responses to circumstances that can otherwise create an atmosphere of uncertainty, doubt, or fear.

One of the most enjoyable, and I hope educational, moments during my presentation on “Marketing to the Mature Marketplace” often occurs during an interactive “Features and Benefits” exercise. In this exercise, I ask the audience to take a blank piece of paper and draw a vertical line down the middle. I then ask audience members to write “features” across the top left margin and “benefits” across the top right margin.

After explaining that, in the language of marketing, “features” are defined as the physical characteristics of a product or service, whereas “benefits” are defined as how those characteristics improve performance, I ask them to think of a specific product or service their business offers.

I then ask them to write three features of that product or service and three benefits opposite those features. Those answers usually list whatever qualities represent the USP of that product or service.

When that part of the exercise is over, I ask them to forget everything they just learned and imagine they are 18 years old once again and about to leave for college. Their next assignment is to write a letter to Mom and Dad, asking to borrow $10,000 for their first year’s college tuition.

The letters will almost never talk about the “features” of a college education – for example, majoring in Science, trying out for the baseball team or preparing for a career in healthcare. Neither will they describe the “benefits” of a college education – for example, becoming the head of a large corporation, earning a high salary or retiring in style.

What the letters always detail are the “values” of a college education - the writers in essence creating a universally understandable vision using words like “hopes,” “dreams,” and “futures.”

The lesson here is this: If features are the physical characteristics of a product or service and benefits are how those characteristics improve performance, then values are the emotional translation of how those products or services impact people’s lives.

And in no other segment of our society is it more important to address values—the core concepts by which all of us strive to live our lives while passing them on to future generations—than in the Mature Marketplace.

Motivational experts will tell you there are three ways to influence human behavior: The least powerful is by addressing human needs. Addressing human wants is more powerful. But the most powerful way, by far, is by addressing human values. Again, nowhere is that process more important than in the Mature Marketplace.

Values-based communication is key to getting mature consumers emotionally and instinctively involved in the decision-making process. By doing so, the marketer creates an atmosphere of trust, which results in creating relationships that endure.

Be aware, though, that values are like fingerprints – all are similar, but no two are identical. Let everyone on staff who is in contact with patients know how important it is to create an atmosphere in which older patients feel comfortable talking about their values and how that leads to understanding them on a more personal level. Perhaps most important, it leads to a greater understanding of the qualities and ambitions that make them unique.

It’s an exercise that, at its core, becomes synergistic. Just as this empowers patients to feel comfortable with their own decisions, it also empowers those who interact with them to do a much better job at helping them make those decisions and ultimately improving their lives, because everyone involved now has an emotional investment in that extraordinary process.

Now, here are six proven, but often overlooked, methods of marketing to the Mature Marketplace, especially in challenging times:

One of the universal truths of marketing is that it costs 2-3x the $$$ to acquire a new customer than it costs to have that customer return. As a result, an ongoing Retention Marketing program is almost always at the core of any consulting services I provide clients with whom I work.

Back in the ‘70s, non-profit organizations, in search of new ways to identify high potential donors while reducing their marketing costs, created a program known as RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) Modeling. In RFM Modeling, an entire database is divided into fifths, also known as quintiles, based on these three criteria. The result was an ability to create more targeted appeals that made best use of time and budgets.

For healthcare marketing professionals, that goal can also be reached by defining “Purchase Bias” - not just the “When” of a patient’s purchase history, but the “Why”. No matter which method you choose, by developing a variety of targeted sales letters, rather than working off the assumption that all customers are created equal, you’ll be creating a program that ensures consistent growth at a fraction of the cost.

Most healthcare marketers are familiar with the concept of the “Consumer Seminar” as a means of informing a target audience and motivating them to take action. The Focus Group programs I’ve helped create were developed as a twist on the Consumer Seminar, the difference being they are targeted to current patients and not the community at large.

Focus Groups are basically exercises in Relationship Marketing, in which patients and spouses are invited to share their opinions about new technologies or procedures and ending with appointments being set in the days immediately following the sessions.

But these types of marketing programs have not only a “Retail” benefit, but an “Advisory” benefit as well. This Focus Group agenda also involves an exchange of opinions about sample marketing materials – not only yours, but the competitions’ as well.

We’re all good at what we do, but it’s the marketplace that decides how successful we become.

Getting immediate feedback in programs like these are an ideal way to learn what the marketplace is thinking and how best to make the adjustments needed for long-term success.

According to a recent AARP survey, almost 60 million Americans over age 50 are now spending an average of 18 hour/week on the Internet. What began for many as an exercise in e-mailing is now a full-blown pursuit of products and services that can improve their lives – with an estimated 74% of those searches focusing on their own community.

But chances are your site not is the first place they’re going to look. “Power Pages” are one way to help solve that problem. These are 1-page “electronic sales letters” that drive people to your branding site.

For example, when people search for “(Your Town) healthcare”, they are transported to your Power Page that bears the name: (YourTown)Healthcare.com. Having read the information, they’re invited to offer their name and e-mail address. Two things happen afterward: They are transported to your main site and their contact information is forwarded to you for follow-up.

Because most web site visitors linger only a page or two before signing off, a good way to manage the flow of information is by making sure the “Landing Page”, the place they arrive at on your site, is the page with the key information – offers, value-addeds and the like - you want to impart. From that starting point, check to see what are the other most popular pages and place additional call-to-actions on those pages as well.

By now, most seasoned healthcare marketers are familiar with the various ways to market their sites: Pay-per-Click, SEO, Keyword searches, and Direct Referrals among the most popular. But for maximum results, it’s also important to monitor those results on a regular basis.

Conversion rates, meaning the percentage of leads that are generated from your site(s) as compared to the total leads, should begin with a goal of 5%. Bounce rates, or the percentage of visitors who “bounce” away to a different site should be on the order of 50%. And Opt-in rates, defined as the percentage of visitors who sign up for the offer posted on the site, should be targeted at a minimum of 3%.

Results that don’t match these targets suggest it’s time to take another look at your E-Marketing.

Back in the day, the axiom for smart direct marketers was “Test, test, test and modify”. E-Marketing is the new Direct Mail, so the same axiom applies.

One of the solutions to the problem of not having the time or not feeling comfortable asking for patient referrals is in developing a hand-out that can serve as a reminder, long after the request has been made. A template I’ve used over the years is a simple two-sided piece, the first side basically reaffirming the patient’s decision and asking they pass this on to someone they know, the second side listing a series of premiums being offered to the person being referred.

Boundaries, both legal and ethical, rightly exist to limit the rewards that can be offered. But a gift certificate to a restaurant or movie tickets – examples of the everyday life activities that become more enjoyable with better health – not only brightens someone’s day but also serves as a soft testimonial that will continue to pay dividends long afterward in the way of continued referrals.

Along with Free Media, which has the advantage of credibility over most forms of advertising, reaching out to the community is another way to market your healthcare system, hospital or practice in challenging times. When done correctly, the resulting goodwill simply cannot be measured in dollars.

Community Outreach programs can involve traditional options like health fairs, but more traction can be gained by working with local print and broadcast media on some kind of program that benefits the community, especially one that encourages patients to participate.

Understand that for the Mature Marketplace, the urge to give is usually “intergenerational”, meaning they are more likely to want to be involved in a charitable activity that supports either their own generation, or their grandchildren’s generation, rather than the generation in between.

The Mature Marketplace segment described in the accompanying chart as the “Matures” is, sadly, likely to be the last generation who cherish the printed word. The “Boomers”, however, have joined the generations that follow them in becoming fully versed in the various means of electronic communication where neither paper nor ink is required.

In addressing either segment, constantly reaching out, via printed and e-newsletters, personal notes, or even on occasion a surprise gift in commemoration of a birthday, anniversary or other significant personal event, keeps the 2-way flow of communication between you and your patients ongoing. It also answers dual needs – Connectedness for them and continued business growth for you.

Don Marsh is a San Diego-based marketing consultant with 35 years of experience. He is the author of one book, and more than 200 articles, published worldwide. As a marketing consultant and professional speaker, he has traveled to 42 states and eight foreign countries, providing customized marketing programs, along with lectures, workshops and seminars, to thousands of healthcare professionals.

The information in this article will be the focus of his presentation at the SHSMD Annual Conference in Orlando. Further information may be obtained by contacting him by e-mail at: marketingservices@sbcglobal.net, by telephone at 858-792-6553, or by visiting his Web site at: www.MatureMarketplace.com.

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