Measuring marketing effectiveness

The most frequent question about the marketing function in hospitals today is, What are we getting for our money? To answer this, marketing directors must convince the board first of the need for marketing, then of marketing's effectiveness. To measure marketing effectiveness, some basic needs are a staff, equipment, cooperation between departments, utilization data, and a research budget. Some steps to be followed include developing a marketing data base--consisting of demographic projections, demand projections, and market share--testing a marketing strategy through experimentation, documenting the expected results and measurement techniques, and calculating the expected return on investments. In dealing with those "impossible-to-measure" cases, such as a physician who is not advertising but finds that a competitor is, a decision tree can help determine whether to advertise and how much to spend by indicating what the return on investment might be.