How can marketers create campaigns that break the “healthcare mold” but still resonate with consumers?

Most health care marketers follow one or more of the following themes:

• Attractive doctor telling the story of how he or she is “just like you;”
• Lineup of “star” doctors with a voiceover paraphrasing, “you deserve the best and we have the best doctors around;”
• Patient giving a testimonial stating that they had given up hope until they found XYZ hospital and their capable doctors;
• Artistic shots of high tech equipment or research prowess; or
• In the case of children’s hospitals, photo shots of kids with obvious aliments, smiling and happy as they receive treatment in the hospital or resuming their normal lives.

All can be effective. 

While many campaigns are good, very few health care campaigns are great.  They fade quickly — leaving us to scramble for the next creative concept designed to capture three seconds of attention we are often allotted by the consumer.

Where are the health care campaign equivalents of “gecko” ads or Mac vs. PC ads? Can hope and healing become so captivating that it goes viral and becomes a YouTube phenom? Possibly.

So how can we breakout and create effective and memorable campaigns?  Currently, we spend a significant amount of our advertising funds on concepts, designs and production. 

1. Consider engaging with an out-of-market research group with no ties to your system or your agency to conduct consumer preview testing.  Do not get too concerned with local participation.  Local audiences come to the research table with their own biases. Health care consumers often align with community demographics – rural, inner city, or suburbs, etc.
2. Use advertising to build your brand and increase awareness.  Advertising is rarely the influential factor in health care decision-making.  Effective marketing to health care consumers requires a complex combination of traditional advertising, public relations, community participation, physician support, new media and patient advocacy.
3. Your breakthrough, experimental “playground” is new media.  Try applying formulas that are successful in other industry verticals and test it with consumers through new media.
4. Bring in fresh ideas by engaging with local college marketing, communication or advertising students in campaign development or formal brainstorming.  Let them have creative license to think about creative messaging.  It is a fertile ground for new perspectives.

Break the mold and perhaps you’ll be the one to take hospital marketing to the next level.

Elizabeth L. Scott
escott@ravennewmedia.com
Raven New Media & Marketing

Which elements should you include in a new integrated campaign?

Determining the appropriate elements of an integrated campaign can be a challenge. Often health care marketers are expected to:

1. Use all of the media outlets available (effective or not);
2. Scramble to secure the media buys or placements (outside of existing contracted media); and
3. Replicate the campaign’s general information and visual style quite literally taken from the core advertising message (whether it is appropriate for the media or not).

This execution style can result in wasted money and time; not to mention untrackable results. The campaign launches with great internal fanfare and fizzles out quietly without mention or reporting of ROI.

Marketers can make the most from an integrated campaign launch, by building a customized media matrix that can be used by your extended team (marketing, communications, PR, web and social media teams, etc) during your planning stage. Your matrix can become a reusable and evergreen tool for your team. It gives you a quick glance of criteria that help to determine what will best serve your objectives given time, resources, upkeep, objectives, audience match, etc. I have created one for health care new media selections, but this can, and should, be extended to placement on web sites and traditional tools.

Tips:

1. Select only the media options you and your team can support. New media will require constant ‘care and feeding.’
2. Spend 2/3 of your time planning and 1/3 executing any integrated campaign. This includes media matrices.
3. Track all elements of an integrated campaign (traditional and new media)

– Elizabeth L. Scott

New media makes the world go round

Let’s chat and challenge each other as we discuss health care, new media, web innovations, social media, technologies, usability, mobile evolution and sim world opportunties.