Embrace the virtue of diligence: Know what you’re trying to change
Confession
Some of the vaguest marketing objectives can produce an enormous amount of work.
“Make two videos” is a real example I’ve encountered. Two videos require briefs, scripts, creative development, production, approvals, editing, distribution, and probably more meetings than anyone wants to count. So, how can so much work be an example of Sloth, which we define as profound apathy and willful negligence?
Nobody said what problem the videos were supposed to solve. There’s no direction to the creative team as to what the business objectives for the videos are, who the audience is, or what they should be doing once they’ve seen the videos.
Healthcare marketing plans are full of objectives that aren’t quite objectives:
- Increase awareness
- Drive engagement
- Generate leads
- Launch a campaign
- Produce content
Each may describe something useful, but without more definition, none tells a team enough to make good strategic choices.
Take awareness. Whose awareness are we trying to increase? Awareness of the health system, a service, a capability, or something else? What do we hope changes once people become aware of it? An awareness objective may lead us toward broad reach and repeated exposure. A lead-generation objective may require us to reach a much smaller group of people who have a reason to act now.
Those are different jobs, and we’d make different choices to accomplish them.
Sloth can show up when we skip the strategic work and just start making things. A creative team can produce excellent work against a poorly defined problem. Media can efficiently reach an audience we never had a good reason to target. Analytics can meticulously report results against measures nobody established as meaningful.
A lack of strategy at the beginning meanders perilously close to a failure of Stewardship, consuming resources that might be directed more effectively somewhere else.
Virtue
The corresponding virtue is Diligence, intentional effort guided by clear objectives and accountability.
A useful marketing objective gives the team something specific to change. It identifies the people whose behavior or perception matters, the change we’re trying to create, and enough context to begin deciding how marketing might create it.
I’ve long used a simple framework for getting there: Get / To / By.
Get this audience
To think, feel, or do this
By giving them this compelling reason
Suppose an organization wants to grow orthopedic volume. “Increase orthopedic awareness” doesn’t give us much strategic direction. Neither does “launch an orthopedic campaign.” A stronger objective might ask us to get people with persistent joint pain who are delaying treatment to consider an orthopedic consultation by helping them understand that treatment could allow them to return to activities they’ve given up.
Now we have something to work with. We can learn about the audience, understand what keeps them from acting, decide what evidence might change their minds, develop creative around that insight, choose appropriate channels, and determine what success should look like.
The objective starts doing some work of its own.
Repentance
Before the brief goes to the creative team, interrogate the objective.
Ask whether it describes an outcome or merely an activity. Identify exactly who you’re trying to influence and what you need to change. Then make sure the strategy explains why that audience might make the change you’re asking of them.
A clear objective also gives us something specific to measure. If we can’t say what we intended to change, measurement becomes an exercise in reporting whatever numbers happen to be available. We count impressions because we have impressions. We report clicks because the platform gives us clicks. The dashboard fills up without necessarily answering whether the marketing accomplished its job.
If we’re trying to change preference, measure preference. If we’re trying to generate qualified demand, follow that demand toward appointments and downstream results. If we’re trying to change a behavior, decide what evidence would show that the behavior changed.
Not every outcome will be perfectly attributable to marketing, and the measures will differ with the objective. Diligence asks us to establish the connection before the work begins rather than inventing a definition of success after the results arrive. That’s the responsibility hidden inside the objective. It commits us to something.
One small act
Pull out your last five marketing briefs and look only at the objectives.
Can you tell who you’re trying to influence, what you want them to think, feel, or do differently, and why they might make that change?
Give yourself a point for each brief that passes the test.
Take a deeper look at how Sloth shows up in healthcare marketing and how to embrace Diligence.
