Hospitals are the epicenter of the rapidly growing healthcare system. They exert a huge amount of purchasing power, with dozens of decision makers with independent budgets at each location. While there are relatively few hospitals in America, they account for billions of dollars of economic activity each year.

How do you market effectively to hospitals? Whether your company relies on a sales force, email, or direct mail to drive sales, you can refine your efforts with these concepts:

• Target based on job function. The role a person fills in a hospital is the single biggest indicator of their impact on a decision to buy your product or service. The nursing director, laboratory director, and chief information officer clearly have greatly different areas of influence. Pick the job roles that best fit your offer. 
• The more the merrier. At MCH, we often help our clients by narrowing their targets, but that’s not the case for hospitals. If there is more than one potential decision maker for your offering, include them all in your campaign. For telemarketing or personal selling, this can give your sales representatives more opportunity to contact the right person. In direct mail, the modest increase in costs to add coverage often pays off in increased orders. Just be sure to keep the number of contacts within reason when sending email offers, though; unusually large number of messages to the same email domain can reduce deliverability. 
• Know the decision maker’s name. Hospitals are large, complex organizations with networks of physicians and satellite facilities. It’s important for direct mail pieces to be addressed by name or they may not make it past the mailroom. Likewise, a sales representative is more likely to successfully set an appointment without the need to play detective first. 
• Don’t worry about excluding hospitals from your campaign. With only a few exceptions, there are so few hospitals that you should target your campaign to all of them. Of course there are a few exceptions. If you do business only in a particular region, you’ll want limit your effort to the hospitals in your area. If you provide a product for a particular medical service, you may want to limit your effort to hospitals with a particular department or specialty. 
• Large purchases are collaborative. Medical products or services that require a substantial investment are likely to be reviewed by a committee of professionals and possibly a governing board. Direct mail for lead generation should be targeted at multiple influencers, and the on-site presence of a sales representative is almost always required. 
• Don’t forget the other institutions. Consider extending your campaign beyond the hospital. There is a wide variety of healthcare organizations that use similar products and services: alcohol and drug treatment centers, ambulatory surgery centers, cancer centers, community health centers, diagnostic imaging centers, home health and hospice agencies, medical practices, nursing homes, pain care facilities, public health departments, Red Cross chapters, school nurses, and urgent care centers.

About the MCH Hospital File
Our customers say the MCH hospital file is “bulletproof.” Our compilation team calls every hospital in America at least twice a year, verifying the names and job functions of more than 300,000 administrators, chiefs, and department managers. Fortune 500 companies, medical device manufacturers, uniform providers, pharmaceutical marketers, and many others rely on the MCH hospital database. Plus, federal and state government agencies incorporate the MCH hospital file into their emergency preparedness databases.

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