Date: December 15, 2012
“Strategy is choosing to run a different race because it’s the one you’ve set yourself up to win.”
- Michael Porter, Harvard Business School
Healthcare reform, the patient-directed focus and a financial crisis – the shifts reverberating through the healthcare industry are big enough to register on the Richter Scale.
For many companies, the strategies that helped them become successful are ineffective in today’s healthcare environment.
To stay successful, companies have to figure out the new realities of their target market:
• What are your customers’ new priorities?
• How are your customers making decisions now?
• How does your product or service position realistically fit within your customers’ new list of priorities?
Many products and services that ranked as a high priority 2-3 years ago no longer make the top of the list today, creating a disconnect between what you offer and what your customers need.
So how do you make sure your offerings are properly aligned with your customers’ priorities?
You have to go out and talk to people – your current customers, former customers and prospective customers.
Ask them about their business goals, challenges, opportunities, industry trends and new ideas that excite them.
Then, ask the question that will give the most telling answer, “What keeps you up at night?”
Once you know your customers’ priorities and/or “pain points”, you can correctly re-align your offerings. That’s the key to a successful marketing strategy.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like there will soon be any definitive fixes to the industry challenges mentioned above. Consequently, your target market’s priorities won’t be definitive either. So it’s important to continue this dialog on a regular basis.
That way you can make sure you’re meeting the current needs of your customers. Or, in other words, you’re setting your company up to win.
