Lack of budget. Lack of time. We’ve been asking healthcare marketers what their top barriers to success are for almost a decade through our digital trends survey. And every year they report lack of budget and time as your top hurdles. This year’s stats are no different, with more than 170 healthcare marketers reporting budget and time as their two overall barriers to digital success.

But, when you divide the survey respondents into the self-reported segments of leader, average, and laggard a different story emerges.

Beyond budget barriers.

Although everyone wants more budget, it’s certainly not the only impediment to success. The fact is, where you’re at on the digital marketing adoption curve is an indicator of what barriers you’re most likely to face.

• Leaders challenged to prove ROI. Since leading organizations are trying to break new ground, it’s not surprising that they report the inability to measure ROI and inadequate reporting as their number one barriers. Leaders can typically report on digital, but when they try to take that a step further and bring in operational metrics it becomes much harder.
• Average organizations are pressed for time. When it comes to lack of time, the average group feels their small staff capacity more noticeably than the others. In fact, average organizations reported limited time as a barrier more than twice as often than their leader and laggard counterparts.
• Laggards lack skills and training. Laggard groups report inadequate skills or training as one of their biggest obstacles. Which aligns with the fact laggards tend to have smaller teams (they report 3.12 full-time equivalents to be exact) and tend to not have a lot of budget, which makes it hard for them to partner externally or invest in learning the needs skills.

Finding success in alternative ways.

As you can see, even if you took budget woes off the table chances are you’d still run into issues. But there are solutions. Leaders, average and laggard organizations across the board are poised to find success by changing their digital marketing mix to focus on different tactics, outsourcing with expert partners and hiring for must-have roles. To learn more about overcoming today’s biggest barriers to digital success and what organizations just like yours are planning for 2017, join us for our Digital Marketing Survey webinar.