Three Quick and High-Impact Research Tools for Smarter Strategic Planning

Labor Day marks the end of summer, the start of PSL season (pumpkin spice latte) and, for many, the final stages of planning and budgeting for the coming year. In fact, we’re just under 100 business days from 2022.

The plans we put into place over the next 100 days have an added layer of challenge as we navigate the fog of 18 months of change and upheaval. Consumer, staff and referrer sentiments have shifted and long-held assumptions need to be revisited.

Case in point, last spring Transcend started tracking how COVID was impacting consumer sentiments about facility-based care. No surprise, perceptions had taken a serious hit. Openness to care in a facility has rebounded slightly, particularly among the vaccinated, but it’s a long way from pre-COVID levels. Those perceptions have negatively impacted hospice GIP units, too.

Additionally, what employees want from their employers has changed. Flexibility, connection with their team and management responsiveness are more important than ever, yet recruitment marketing still features salesy signing bonuses over meaningful employee value propositions.

All this means that the way you message, market and sell your organization to each of your target audiences must be able to quickly adapt to changing, market-specific realities – especially for the next year.

Thankfully, it’s never been easier or more cost-effective to get powerful and actionable insights on your market. Transcend offers three market research packages that can inform your 2022 plans.

1. A Market Snapshot provides fresh audience insights, leveraging continually updated proprietary data to reveal details on the size of key audiences, their values, decision-making drivers, media consumption habits and socio-economic profile elements. These insights can inform new service offerings, referrer/payer strategies and employee recruitment strategies.
2. A custom Market Assessment that surveys consumers, referrers or prospective employees in your market(s) can help you identify your differentiators, inform your QAPI priorities or uncover barriers to admissions. Our market assessments also include benchmarking against key competitors as well as Transcend’s 20 years of data.
3. An ongoing Sentiment & Trend Analysis allows you to monitor how your audiences are influenced by changing market conditions over time. You will better understand the impact of consolidations, new payer situations, competitors’ activities and your own efforts. This analysis allows you to not only see how attitudes and behaviors change over time, but also to better understand the why behind these shifts.

With time and money coming off the table as barriers, the only serious reasons not to update your market intel are that you aren’t ready to have your assumptions challenged or you’re afraid of what you’ll find. Both of these reasons are rooted in fear. And, if we’ve learned anything over these past 18 months, it’s that we have to overcome fear with courage, data, insight and great people at our side.

For more on these research tools, email me at stephanie@transcend-strategy.com.