Survey Results: Healthcare Marketing Budgets
Comparing marketing spend and tactics for hospitals and physician practices
In this issue of Protocol, we’ll review the results of our 2013 Healthcare Marketing Survey. We’ll look at marketing spend and budget trends. These results will help you to see how your organization stacks up against the competition.
Our marketing survey methodology
Our 2013 Healthcare Marketing survey was comprised of eight questions about hospital marketing budgets and tactics geared toward hospital CEOs and CMOs. It was distributed through our email subscriber list and social media accounts, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+. We had a total of 122 respondents, mostly from the United States.
Here’s a recap of the individual questions and responses, accompanied by some insights and observations.
Approximately how much do you spend per year on marketing?
When asked how much they spend on marketing each year, 53% of our survey respondents reported a budget of $249,000 or less. Recent Gartner research on hospital marketing budgets suggests this is a sufficient budget for smaller physician practices, but an underinvestment for larger organizations
About a third of our survey participants, roughly 30%, spend between a quarter million and a million dollars each year, a figure that Gartner’s research suggests might be appropriate for single location hospitals.
About 14% spend between one and five million on marketing, with the remaining 3% allocating more than $5 million on marketing each. These are both good-sized budgets for larger, multiple hospital networks.
How will your 2013 budget compare to 2012?
The question about marketing budget comparisons over the previous year reflected a generally positive trend in marketing spending. One half of all respondents said their budget would remain unchanged between 2012 and 2013. More than one third expected an increase in marketing spend. Only 12% of respondents saw a decrease in their marketing budget from 2012 to 2013.
