Marketing Credential Electives


Registrants of the series will have access to watch all existing elective webinars as well as the new electives created this year.

In order to receive the digital credential at the end of the series participants must:

  • Watch a minimum of three elective recordings based on their interests
  • Complete/pass an accompanying quiz for each 

Participants have the entire time frame of the series to watch and complete three electives from the following:

New! How Much is that Health Care in the Window? Price as a Marketing Strategy
New! Mind the Gap: Aligning HR and MarComm in Your Health System
New! Post-Pandemic Leadership: How to become an Organizational Transformer!
Physician Relations as a Marketing Strategy: Best Practices for Success
Demystifying CRM: Real World Basics for Starting Your CRM Journey
The 60-Day Content Marketing Makeover
“Remodeling” Your Existing Internal Communications Infrastructure!
Markitecture—MarComm Technology & Structure
Recognizing Digital Media Fraud and Tracking Your Online Investments


How Much is that Health Care in the Window? Price as a Marketing Strategy

Among the traditional 4 “P”s of marketing, Price (except perhaps at the wholesale level between provider systems and insurers) has been largely ignored. In recent years there has been a growing demand for price transparency and a growing interest in and usage of price information by consumers as a decision factor. Yet despite these changes, the pro-active usage of price as a deliberate marketing and business development strategy is still very much in its early stages. And there is a lot more to “price” as a strategy than just posting charge master rates on a public web site! This session will look at the role of pricing in the marketing mix, the current state of consumer interest in price information, a dozen plus existing price strategies among health care providers (at the retail and wholesale level) and where marketers can and should play a role going forward. Price as a marketing strategy is routine in other industries but we have very little experience with it in health care. That’s rapidly changing and health care marketers need to understand the parameters and impact in order to play a significant role.


Mind the Gap: Aligning HR and MarComm in Your Health System

Engaged and motivated employees lead to highly satisfied patients.  Studies have proven it. Your LinkedIn connections post about it. Yet most health systems fall short of it. Oftentimes, human resources and marketing/communications departments are separated by responsibility gaps.  While marketers instinctively look outward, human resources professionals inherently reflect inward.  However, according to the latest edition of Futurescan, over 83% of health system leaders believe their organizations will invest in additional resources in managing system-wide culture change. To bring about such change, leaders will need to “mind the gap” and adopt flexible strategies to bridge the creative strengths of both human resources and marcomm team members.


Post-Pandemic Leadership: How to become an Organizational Transformer!

Many high performing senior managers find themselves at some point in their careers faced with the challenge of leading a strategically critical, highly visible transformation program. These initiatives born from strategic calls to action will always change the status quo, and sometimes they’ll transform the organization in very significant ways. 

Natural instincts and leadership talent alone, won’t get the big wins necessary. Learn how post-pandemic, you can energize and transform your team to meet and exceed strategic and organizational goals and the success strategies/tools needed to execute your own strategic change or transformation efforts.


Physician Relations as a Marketing Strategy: Best Practices for Success
Presenters: Kriss Barlow, RN, MBA, Principal, Barlow/McCarthy and Ruth Padilla Portacci, Principal, Healthcare Strategy Partners

Marketers have a wide variety of audiences and no shortage of masters! As consumerism grows in importance, the physician role and our ability to position what they provide becomes critical. Physician marketing plays a key role in supporting consumers in finding the right doctors and then facilitating referrals to specialists when that level of care is needed. But, what works? The course will address two core functions.

  • The importance of strategy and planning, as well as the tactics, that support tactical marketing approach and plan for employed primary care practices
  • The marketers’ role in understanding and supporting a physician relations effort. We’ll include processes, best practice measurement, and reporting for each of the two components.

Learning Objectives:

  • Understand how physician practice growth benefits from amarketing aligns with a comprehensive marketing approach.
  • Detail best practices for successful practice growth within the employed practice and for in-network referrals.
  • Gain knowledge of best practices for physician relations and the marketers’ role in supporting field staff.
  • Determine if your current methods are meeting the needs of internal stakeholders, external referral sources, or both. Learn techniques to ensure everyone wins.

Demystifying CRM: Real World Basics for Starting Your CRM Journey
Presenter: Dan Lavelle, Marketing Manager/CRM Lead, Lehigh Valley Health Network

CRM. Vendors sell it, thought leaders talk about, and it monopolizes the agenda at most conferences. But what is it, exactly? Do I actually need it? What are my first steps? In this one hour webinar we will deconstruct the very basics of CRM. We will learn from Lehigh Valley Health Network’s CRM Lead, Dan Lavelle under the theme of, in his words, “everything I wish someone would’ve told me before we started our CRM journey.”

Learning Objectives:

  • Firstly, be able to answer the question “What is CRM?” CRM can be an ambiguous acronym, and it often gets defined as both a strategy and a technology. So which is it? Attendees will be able to define the nomenclature that surrounds CRM, and learn what it is, and is not, to a healthcare marketing professional.
  • Be able to understand the vendors in the space. More specifically, how to identify the type of CRM vendor you need (yes, there are different types), and how you should approach vendor selection.
  • Know what to expect and plan for as you implement CRM in your organization. From gaining executive/physician level buy in, to organizing and restructuring staff, to gaining trust with your IT department, to learning how to make sense

The 60-Day Content Marketing Makeover
Presenters: Rebecca Stewart, Director, Hartford HealthCare News Service and Nick Dethlefsen, Video Production, Hartford HealthCare

Traditional publicity had a clear formula: ideas for stories came from grateful patients, experts, strategic service lines and even administration. They featured innovative technologies, cool studies, new facilities, partnerships and service lines. Media Relations teams would take those ideas—turn it into a relevant pitch, and sell the story to reporters.

It worked… until one day, it didn’t. The story you were sure would get covered… got no one.

The media landscape is changing rapidly. That’s a given. We needed to change our strategy to stay ahead of the curve. How could we ensure news coverage even as newsrooms continued to shrink?

The answer: We wouldn’t wait for coverage. We would create it.

Sure, reporters will always need medical experts— and we are always available on demand. But we realized there was so much more we could do if we were organized differently and more agile. This was our opportunity to showcase ourselves in a new and different way. We decided to launch a news service that produced quality content, ready for distribution. Content that was relevant, digestible, emotional and compelling.

Our team needed work to get there. We needed to reorganize ourselves, give up some of our old ways, assess our skill sets and be willing to change. We hosted visual storytelling workshops so we could all be content creators. We wanted to secure a distribution partner to ensure that the content we created would get before the right audiences. We wouldn’t stop there. That was just the beginning. We had so many distribution avenues internally that we had to standardize our own internal process ensuring our content was featured across the board— in waiting rooms, screens, internets and intranets, and social media platforms. We have come a long way in a very short period of time. We are constantly learning, constantly evolving… and we have only just begun.

Learning Objectives:

  • How to launch a new service
  • How quality content can elevate your brand and generate patient leads
  • How to better partner with news organizations in different ways
  • How to standardize and strategize content distribution

“Remodeling” Your Existing Internal Communications Infrastructure!
Presenter: Kathleen Larey Lewton, MHA, Principal, Lewton, Seekins & Trester, Mary Harvard, Associate Vice President, University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB Health), and Kerri Howell, Director of Communications and Media Relations, Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University

Data-Driven Design + Simplified Core Channels = ↑ Engagement, ↑ Satisfaction, ↓ Budget
Hospitals of all sizes and types – from 200-bed community hospital, to 11,000-employee academic medical centers to multi-hospital systems – have found that remodeling what they have rather than continuing to “add on” is the key to improving their internal communications efforts.

A core of three or four basic channels – all no or very low cost, all that can be executed without adding new staff – can deliver dramatic improvement in employee satisfaction with communications, forming the foundation for enhanced engagement.

We’ll discuss four key strategies and the how-to’s of implementation:

  • Use data to drive change and garners C-suite support.
  • Ignore conventional wisdom and do what’s right for your workforce.
  • Broaden ownership of the challenge – and the solution. It takes a team!
  • Flex, flex, flex – be nimble. Adapt, be creative, just find a way to do it.

You’ll learn how these and other principles can help any organization create a communications infrastructure that vastly enhances employee satisfaction, without big budgets!

Learning Objectives:

  • Design a research methodology that produces insights and data that can be used for benchmarking, program design and securing senior leadership support and commitment
  • Repurpose, downsize, adapt and add to existing channels to ensure consistent reach to all employees, whether they are online or not
  • Create a structure that not only delivers messages and information, but builds engagement through dialogue and personal involvement

Markitecture –Technology & It’s Structure for Success
Presenters: Bethany Maki, Vice President, Digital Strategy, Paradysz+PM Digital and Rebecca Higman, Marketing Director, Soyring Consulting

An organization’s technology stack has traditionally been defined by its operational and customers’ expressed needs. But with collecting big data, launching new digital channels, and trying to automate a customer’s hyper-relevant experience has come a realization that marketing needs to be a primary consideration in just about every decision organizations make. Markitecture is how structure and technology fit together in the context of marketing business goals. Join this webinar to learn the benefits of getting it right, the risks of getting it wrong, and how you can ensure that your organization and technology enable customer satisfaction and market share gains.

Learning Objectives:

  • What solutions live in the martech landscape?
  • How can you evaluate your current martech stack and data flow?
  • How can you continually evolve to where you need to be to ensure the best customer experience?

Recognizing Digital Media Fraud and Tracking Your Online Investments
Presenter: Tony Pearman, CEO, Access and DeShea Witcher, SEO Specialist, Access

Billions of dollars will be unwittingly wasted this year by health care organizations buying meaningless online impressions from click farms, bots and poorly geotargeted online ads. Access Advertising’s CEO has spent 20 years consulting with organizations like HCA, LifePoint Health and Bon Secours to maximize their marketing efforts. In today’s media market, you should be considering more online ads or paid social marketing in your marketing plan, but don’t wade into the digital deep end without these powerful insights into the ever-changing world of SEO and SEM.

Learning Objectives:

  • Learn how click farms, bots and poorly geotargeted online ads are wasting your budget.
  • Discover low-cost tools you can use to help recognize online fraud and optimize your digital ads.
  • Learn to create plans that measure conversions, not meaningless impressions.