4 Keys to Optimizing Your Community Hospital’s Digital Marketing
October 22, 2010
Is it time for you to evaluate your hospital’s digital marketing for the highest return on your investment.
The recession has provided even more momentum to the ongoing shift to digital. As advertising and marketing professionals, we often find ourselves with the difficult task of capturing consumers’ attention with a limited budget. Sound familiar?
Hospitals have to find new channels of marketing to reach consumers that our friendlier to their lean budgets.
In a recent post at The Point, Howard Sewell shares some insights on how to get more value from your digital spend: “Many of the opportunities for greatest return are not in new campaigns, but rather in improving the efficiency and effectiveness of existing programs and processes.”
4 suggestions for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of your hospital’s existing digital marketing:
1. Improve your blog.
The centerpiece of your healthcare social media strategy, a blog should generate patient leads, improve SEO rankings and showcase your thought leadership (not your latest sales campaign). Make your blog at least as sharp as your hospital’s website.
Beyond your core offering, your blog – through your content, insights, solving of problems – offers your organization a great opportunity to make a meaningful difference in the daily lives of your communities and patients.
2. Make SEM work harder.
Typically, cost per lead ranges from $50 to $100 for B2B marketers. If you’re outside that range, your landing pages may need work. Make sure they are optimized for search and customized for different campaigns.
3. Spend more on content and less on media.
A compelling piece of content, such as educational YouTube video, has real long-term value, especially if you leverage it over multiple marketing campaigns.
4. Make the most of the leads you have.
Do everything you can to follow-up with new leads, promptly and systematically. Start with inbound lead follow-up. Instead of a one-size-fits-all nurturing strategy in which everyone receives the same message, use multiple tracks – targeted by age, demographic and sex.
This information is imperative to knowing how to customize your message depending on services and needs.
Turn community members into patients, and patients into your hospital’s fans by engaging them on their terms. Build trust through open and honest conversations, and timely responses.
The hard costs are minimal and the returns are substantial.
Read the full Howard Sewell’s full article Q4 Marketing Budget: 4 Key Areas to Consider
Healthcare is an industry unlike any other, and there is a true value in working with an ad agency that specializes in and understands healthcare marketing and its operations – their healthcare knowledge gives your marketing the power to deliver results.
Look at it like this, you wouldn’t call an orthopaedic surgeon to repair an aortic aneurysm, right? It’s all about specialization, and the same is true with choosing to work with an advertising agency. All ad agencies are in the marketing and communications business, but working with an agency that has a broad knowledge of hospital and physician marketing and its operations will give your hospital a competitive advantage.
Here are 6 Key Advantages to Working With a Healthcare Ad Agency:
- Save you time, which saves you money. You don’t have to waste valuable time explaining the difference between an M.D. and a D.O. or why your wound care center’s marketing budget isn’t as large your orthopaedic center’s — they should already know.
- Understand Stark laws. Good healthcare marketing firms know the rules when it comes to marketing independent physicians vs. employed physicians, which helps keep everyone out of trouble.
- Know that physicians are also your customers. Physician referrals keep your hospital in business, and your agency should know the importance of your hospital’s relationship with its physicians and that you must effectively market your services to them.
- Know your target audience and key decision makers. Insured mothers…bingo!
- Understand for-profit hospitals vs. non-profit hospitals. Even small things, like considering your postage rates when designing a direct mail is important.
- Understand clinical and medical terms. It’s important to be able to trust your agency when interviewing your medial staff and leadership, and to know they can take that information and translate it into both physician and consumer marketing pieces.
You can look to your ad agency as an extension of your marketing department because they thoroughly understand the healthcare industry with trust and confidence which leads to a great client-agency relationship.
Community Hospitals Can Market in Today’s Economy With a Limited Budget
September 22, 2010
Spurred on by the great recession, the marketing landscape has dramatically changed, providing hospital marketers with a greater ability to be even more strategic with their marketing, communicating faster and at a much lower cost.
According to a recent Advertising Age article, companies that spent more on advertising enjoyed “double the success rate of those whose spending rate declined.” These gains in sales help reinforce the idea that advertising delivers.
This kind of information can help you convince your hospital’s CEO the value of advertising even in the midst of a recession. Advertising can provide a return on investment, giving a marketer ammunition to prove the return on investment to hospital CEOs. Companies from retail Wal-Mart, fast food McDonald’s and pharmaceutical Pfizer had the gumption to stick their neck out and increase ad spending last year.
Here are some recessionary marketing tips that I would recommend:
- Don’t stop – Increased ad spending during a recession contributes to increased financial performance for up to three years after the recession
- Nurture the brand – Perceived quality, leadership, uniqueness and growth needs to stay at the top of your marketing efforts
- Develop new strategies to increase low-cost advertising – Social media, screenings and classes
- Maintain media presence – Expand the use of PR
- Take advantage of media deflation – Greater negotiating leverage with media sellers and communicate with free online social media channels
- Rethink your budget - Allocate spending from services that aren’t hurt by economic factors (cosmetic) to (heart health)
- Strengthen the relationship of current customers
- Promote community benefit – Create opportunities for positive PR by communicating your local community commitment
- Skip costly focus group spending – Use consumer feedback to understand how to target more effectively
To provide quicker results on a limited budget, I would encourage you to increase spending in these three online marketing channels:
- Social media – Use free online social media channels for marketing and turn information into insights, campaigns and finding brand ambassadors.
- Targeted web advertising – The Internet consists of billions of pages. If you have a clearly identified target, purchase advertising space on web pages particularly visited by these users. Create customized, meaningful call-to-action and these campaigns can drive results.
- Community hospital website - A well optimized website that reflects your desired perception can have the ability to close the loop on the marketing plan. Make sure you have the content that allows people to get the answer to whatever interested them, such as the ability to receive information, complete a questionnaire or request a follow-up contact.
Media deflation and the use of social media - Consumer media habits have changed, making room for other options besides expensive, traditional, outbound advertising. Community hospital marketers can do more for less, taking advantage of inexpensive alternative advertising and social media.
- YouTube videos vs. 30 second TV commercials
- Blog vs. print newsletter
- LinkedIn account vs. traditional business networking group
- Facebook updates vs. updating your hospital website
The low-cost, wide reach, ease-of-use and speed of implementation of these social media platforms levels the playing field for community hospitals to reach huge numbers of community members effectively, something that usually would be prohibitively costly using traditional media.
It is not uncommon to spend thousands for newspaper advertisement, only to get less than 20 enquiries. Above $10,000 per month on billboard and over a hundred thousand on TV advertisement all to achieve what we can now do with engaging our community using alternative advertising.
Knowing even temporary reductions in media presence can impact brand awareness, I would suggest you reconsider your media strategy first. Then leverage the use of new media to minimize the negative impact of decreased spending.
I believe by being more strategic your community hospital can strengthen and grow your marketing even in a recession.
I would LOVE to hear your inexpensive alternative advertising success stories. Do you have cost savings and increased patient numbers to back up your success?
Read more about the ways to market Top 100 Outlays Plunge 10% but Defying Spend Trend Can Pay Off
Hire an advertising agency not from what it has produced in the past, but what they will bring to your hospital in the future.
More than half of agency relationships don’t work out. Client agency relationships, on average, last only three years or less. The process of continually forming relationships with new agencies is harmful for your hospital’s brand. Selecting the wrong agency will waste your time and never let your brand reach its marketing maturity built by years of strong client/agency relationships.
Today, community hospital marketers are advertising with new media and communicating with technologically savvy patients. Choose an agency that understands and can adapt to your patients’ and employees’ communication needs.
Creating a “built to last” partnership between hospital marketers and agencies involves:
- Understanding the agency’s culture.
- Knowing what their key differentiators are.
- Asking where they are headed in the future.
Asking the right questions of a potential agency is crucial for discovering if your marketing goals align.
I have seen many questions that perspective CMO’s could ask perspective agencies. Avi Dan‘s article “What Matters Most When Selecting an Agency” has some great questions that seem to cover all the basics. My favorite suggestion is, “Don’t hire an agency. Hire a culture.”
Edward Boches, Chief Creative Officer for the Mullen agency, a catalyst for moving his firm into social media, wrote an up-to-date set of questions titled “Five questions every CMO should ask a prospective ad agency.”
Personally, I seem to prefer his fresh ideas on hiring an agency for what they will bring to your brand in the future. Edward states,
“You’re not hiring an agency’s past, you’re hiring its future. And that future, while somewhat informed by previous accomplishments, is more likely to be a reflection of an agency’s vision, the newest people it’s hiring and its willingness to embrace what’s coming rather than preserve what’s been.
To ensure your community hospital’s next agency on record is one that will last, I advise using Edward’s 5 questions:
- What is the future of advertising?
- What are you doing to assure your survival?
- What are your criteria for hiring people?
- What is your definition of a creative team?
- What are five recent creative ideas that aren’t ads?
Top 30 Resource Blogs for the Community Hospital Marketer
August 20, 2010
These 30 blogs will provide insights from CEO’s, physicians, overall hospital communication, patients and marketers. Even though all of the blogs speak on healthcare issues, it is important to study how each group’s unique views help as you communicate to your diverse patient audience.
As a marketer, your goal is to communicate for your hospital its new and value-added services to your diverse patient audience. Blogs are a great way to stay on top of new communication practices and resource from a wide audience base. Blogs allow you to read information from a targeted audience which makes your research as a marketer more relevant.
The Top 30 Community Hospital Resource Blogs
- Mayo Clinic: One of the top two hospital blogs in the country.
- Johns Hopkins: One of the top two hospital blogs in the country.
- Lexington Medical Center: This is the official hospital blog for the Lexington Medical Center, located in Lexington, South Carolina.
- Science Life: A guide to the changing world of biomedicine, as seen from the perspective of writers at the University of Chicago Medical Center.
Pediatric Hospital Blogs
- Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin: This blog belongs to Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, which serves Wisconsin, Northern Illinois and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and beyond with information about the health system and news about children’s health.
- Riley Children’s Hospital
- Thrive: Children’s Hospital Boston blog is devoted to all things pediatric, healthcare and scientific research. They help consumers and reporters touch base with some of the world’s foremost experts on topics from sleep problems to autism genetics.
Physician Blogs
- KevinMD: Kevin Pho, a primary care doctor board-certified in Internal Medicine, writes a blog that Wall St. Journal states is “punchy, prolific…that chronicles America’s often dysfunctional health care system…”
- Roper on Health: This blog is offered by William L. Roper, MD, MPH CEO, University of North Carolina Health Care System. He focuses on health policy, science and news.
- Notes of an Anesthesioboist: This doctor focuses on the literary aspects of medicine and hospital care and has won an award for her efforts.
Hospital CEO Blogs
- Social Hospital: Social Hospital was founded by a hospital CFO who sees tremendous value in the usage of social media tools to build relationships with the communities that hospitals serve.
- More Than Medicine: Tom Quin, President & CEO of Community General Hospital in Syracuse, New York, provides his insights into hospital progress, philosophies and news.
- Running a Hospital: Possibly one of the most popular and candid hospital CEO blogs. Mr. Levy, President and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, is forthright in his outlook and covers many issues that could pertain to any hospital.
- St. Joseph Medical Center: Scott Kashman is ex-officio CEO for St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson, Maryland. He talks about hospital news, and takes an upbeat philosophy to encourage personnel as well as other readers.
- Nick Jacobs: Formerly “Ask a Hospital President,” Jacobs has stepped down, written the book, Taking the Hell Out of Healthcare, and re-focused his blog to look at health policies.
Patient Blogs
- Patient Power: Andrew Schorr, leukemia survivor and patient advocate, keeps a focus on patient care with his blog.
- Dr. David’s Blog: Focus is on childhood cancer, written by a pediatric oncologist.
- My Overweight Child: Looks at childhood obesity and what you can do to help your child get healthier.
- Kids Health Pediatrics: This site provides child-friendly information on health and wellness.
Professional Networking for Hospital Marketing Blogs
- Healthcare Marketing: Articles and examples of passionate healthcare marketing by Don Dunlop.
- Hospital Marketing Education: A great blog if you like to watch videos as you research hospital marketing tips.
- Health Care and Hospital Communicators on myragan.com: The Health Care and Hospital Communicators section allows members to interact through bulletin boards and other features. They also provide communication-related publications and seminar information.
Hospital Marketing Blogs and Podcasts
- Marketshare: A marketing blog from HealthLeaders Media.
- Unsolicited Marketing Advice: A wide range of tools and tips of interest to the marketing or public relations manager. It has a special, but not exclusive, emphasis on healthcare.
- Weekly Probe: This blog is completely different. Deep, humorous insights into healthcare marketing.
- Healthy Conversations: A healthcare branding blog.
- Interval: Chris Bevolo.
- ND&P: Neathawk Dubuque & Packett.
- The Marketing Edge Blog & Podcast Albert Maruggi of Provident Partners. Covers healthcare, social media and other general new media topics.
- Hospital Impact: This blog is dedicated to providing information for current and emerging hospital leaders, thinkers and enablers. The blog’s mission is to answer the question, “What will it take for hospitals to be the best run organizations on the face of the planet?”
Blogs inspire, feed conversation and give valuable insights – QUICKLY. When the ever-evolving world of multi-channel marketing and the Web changes daily, these blogs provide up-to-date technology advancements, newly released advertising campaigns and valuable insight on your target audiences.
Do you have a blog that inspires you?
Before you create your next advertisement, make sure a well deserved message is properly executed so it is heard.
I see more and more print advertisements that lack stopping power, visual connection and a message on benefits. The end result is the ad never does what is was truly designed to do – generate a meaningful action.
We are a society that lacks time and concentration, so make it easy on your target audience before they abandon your hospital’s message, by using these 5 Principles to keep your readers hooked:
1. Design elements can draw your audience in.
Your first goal as a marketer is to bring readers to the page. Photographs are the primary attention-getting element in an ad. So stick to one compelling image with an alluring focal point for the most impact.
2. Write a headline promoting benefits and keep them reading.
Arousing an emotional response is important, but so is appealing to the intellect. Lead with the benefits of your hospital and answer the question for your viewer “why is this important to me?”. This will let the viewer know this ad is worth reading.
Now once you have them interested keep them there. Unfortunately so many advertisers undermine their advertising messages by designing the ad with various sized and shaped fonts in their headlines or by presenting the body copy over photographs with shaded backgrounds, making it impossible to read without work.
Your audience does not have the time to comprehend the pitch in an ad. If you provide them with a concise, easy-to-read headline, and if they are at all interested in your hospital’s services, they will read on to even lengthy body copy.
3. Create a visual journey that leads them to the pot of gold.
Every ad takes the reader on a kind of visual journey. Typically the flow begins (downward and to the right) with the photograph and then moves on to the headline, body copy and logo/call-to-action. However, the ways in which the elements are placed on the page can alter that natural flow.
If your body copy is placed at the top of the page and the photograph below it most readers will first go to the photograph and then proceed downward. You are likely going to miss the opportunity for the viewer to read the main argument for your services.
Beware that you don’t send the reader on a journey that leads them off the page without reading your message. Effective print ads employ creative devices that smoothly take the reader through all the critical points on the page.
4. Make a meaningful call to action.
Print advertising has increasingly become more response-driven. If your call to action is your telephone number and website addresses then make sure it can be seen. Many times I see the call-to-action placed at the end of the block of copy making them indistinguishable from the rest of the copy. Don’t make it hard for viewers to find.
5. Emphasize benefits and provide “reason to believe.” Copy should answer the patient’s most pressing question, “What’s in it for me?” This is a hard one to say, but most of your target audience is uninterested in what you are committed to or how devoted you are to innovation, your hospital’s proud history or your philosophy. What they want to know is how you are going to make them healthier, happier and stronger.
To attract and keep your reader’s attention, first design your ad to draw in the reader, then keep them reading your hospital’s benefits and finally build to the call-to-action.
If you are debating on navigating your community hospital down a path of the new marketing channels (i.e. social media), make sure your community hospital brand is strong first. Start with a strategic plan, stay the course and don’t forget your overall marketing channels. Branding takes dedication, commitment and a strong foundation to be effective.
Now I ask you, “are you like the millions of Americans who reach for the newest workout product on the shelf?” Is your community hospital brand also reaching for the next marketing fad?
With all the new marketing channels today: YouTube, Facebook, blogs, Twitter, Flip camera, Podcasts, are you struggling to find the right mix for your hospital? How much time are you spending researching, writing and managing these new marketing channels for your organization? Are you taking time away from your traditional marketing outlets and letting your community hospital brand suffer?
Take a lesson from Orlando Health:
- They needed to better deliver their vision and mission more effectively.
- Starting with a strategy, they implemented a new branding system, naming and visual identity.
- A new brand culture was then established for physicians, staff, volunteers and partners.
- Offline and online branding education tools educated them on its new brand culture.
Results to date have exceeded expectations, driving increases in both internal engagement and external market measures (awareness, image, volume).
I think the results speak for themself. The new branding, launched in 2007, is vibrant, bold and spirited. Their strategy, implementation and commitment to the brand has kept it fresh in the minds of its patients and paved the way to their social media efforts today. Social media marketing is like all your branding efforts. It takes time and you can’t create it and hope that it will sell itself.
Are you committed to your brand?
Social media marketing can be used as major communication tool for your hospital.
Are you like most healthcare marketers who are quickly trying to get on board with a social media plan for your community hospital? Well, you are not alone. A study by Greystone.net found only one in three current hospitals or health systems has a formal social media plan in place.
I had the benefit to attending the “SCHA’s one-day social media workshop” where Ed Bennett, a social media guru spoke. Ed has been following social media data for years, and he shared some amazing statistics on social media users that had us all singing the praises of social media marketing. He said that in the past year the mega social website, Facebook, a relative newcomer to the scene has surpassed Google in website visits. At the same time there has been a 10% decrease in non-social media web traffic as people spend more time on social media sites.
Tony Chin, principal of Launch Your Movement, wrote a fantastic article on hospital success stories.
10 Hospital Social Media Success Stories
Proactive Outreach
1. Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center CEO Paul Levy blogs to run a better hospital.
2. Geisinger uses Twitter/Facebook to recruit gastroenterologists.
3. Lifespan reaches out to patients and family personally through Twitter.
4. Ob/gyn practice patient-to-patient interaction success using Twitter and Facebook. (PDF)
Concierge Services
5. Scripps uses Twitter to turn angry patients into loyal ones.
6. Norman Regional Health System spends 30 minutes a day on Twitter and Facebook.
Live Event Coverage
7. Children’s Medical Center in Dallas tweeted about a kidney transplant from a father to his son.
8. Twitter during live surgery.
- St. Luke’s in Cedar Rapids
- UNC Hospitals
- Henry Ford
- Sherman Hospital
- OSF St Joseph
- Sinai Hospital in Baltimore
- Methodist University Hospital in Memphis
9. South Coast Health System uses Twitter for real-time crisis communication.
10. St Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital
If you weren’t a believer in how social media can inspire, educate, recruit and create loyal ambassadors for your brand, you will soon be singing the social media jingle too! For more details, be sure to check out his article, “10 Hospital Social Media Success Stories”
Do you have a social media success story? If so, please share it in the comment section below.
Emotional Advertising for Community Hospitals
July 29, 2010
When it comes to marketing your community hospital, emotion can make a huge difference.
According to a Cincinnati marketing firm in the KemperConnect’s March “The Use of Emotions in Advertising” study, 88% of healthcare executives say it’s critically important to incorporate emotions into hospital marketing and advertising messaging, yet only 61% of marketers say they play off emotion regularly.
I would vote with your healthcare executives and deliver a message that allows you to show emotion.
Every one of us has a memory of a health experience that has forever changed us. It could have been when you were sick and received outstanding care by a nurse, or maybe an ailing parent who had a medical staff member that overextended their level of care for them. These memories and experiences forever changed your views on that hospital. For me it was the birth of my twins. I will always remember the doctors and nurses who cared for me and my children while they were in the NICU.
Emotional marketing has the power to resonate and be remembered. Individuals are more likely to identify with these emotions. That’s just human nature.
Patients want to know you understand and will be empathetic to their situation and strive to make them as comfortable as possible. Part of that comfort comes from an emotional bond. Most people don’t watch a hospital commercial and decide right that moment that it is the place they want to go for care. But when they do need care, they’re more likely to remember positive emotional sentiments than your new DaVinci machine.
Of course, once you’ve hooked consumers with your emotion-stimulating ad, you can detail the hospital’s offerings more depth with all its advanced technology.
Advertisements that highlight cutting-edge technology or top-notch physicians play an important role in the marketing world, too. Once a hospital has positioned itself as thoughtful and empathetic, you then could highlight some of its unique technology. But remember technological ads cannot stand alone. They need the emotional support to make your hospital message memorable.
What are your emotional advertising success stories?
