An efficient and effective way to build a brand is by telling a good story. Authentic experiences, testimonials, and success stories help humanize your healthcare brand and connect emotionally with audiences.
How Storytelling Elevates Your Healthcare Brand
Storytelling plays a significant role in boosting your healthcare brand in several ways:
- Emotional Connection: Brand storytelling can evoke emotions and create connections with audiences. In healthcare marketing, this emotional connection helps patients feel cared for, understood, and supported.
- Engagement: Brand storytelling captivates attention and engages the audience more effectively than facts and figures alone. With compelling stories, you can capture the interest of the target audience and keep them engaged with the message.
- Education: Brand storytelling can educate patients about health conditions, treatment options, and preventive measures. Through storytelling, complex medical information can be simplified and made more relatable to the audience.
- Building Trust: Trust is essential in healthcare, and brand storytelling helps build trust between providers and patients. Sharing authentic narratives about patients’ experiences or the expertise of their providers can foster credibility and trust.
- Inspiration and Hope: Healthcare stories can inspire and provide hope to patients and their families. Stories of successful treatments, recovery journeys, or individuals overcoming health challenges instill optimism and motivate others.
- Differentiation: In a crowded healthcare market, brand storytelling helps brands differentiate themselves from competitors. With unique stories highlighting their values, mission, and commitment to patient care, healthcare providers can stand out from the crowd and attract patients who resonate with their narrative.
Overall, storytelling in healthcare marketing humanizes the brand, creates connections, and delivers important messages in memorable and impactful ways. From videos on websites and social platforms to ad campaigns featuring personal narratives, position unique and interesting storytelling at the heart of your healthcare brand strategy.
Every story starts with a hero, and that hero is the patient—not the brand. Consumers have long sought authenticity, with 88% of them using it as a measurement in deciding what brands they support. Real and authentic interactions are key to capturing an audience, building community and creating brand loyalty.
Whether storytellers are patients, physicians or even executives, they should share genuine narratives rather than brand platitudes. You want the viewer, reader or follower to connect emotionally with the story and storyteller.
Share stories across all digital channels, along with public relations tactics and owned outlets such as the brand website, blogs and podcasts. Here are ways to maximize the impact of storytelling for healthcare brands.
Share brand stories on social
Stories are best shared on social as videos, so know your audiences. With more than 1.6 billion users worldwide, Instagram remains popular across all age groups. Gen Zs visit TikTok more often, but they still rank Instagram among their favorite channels, as do Millennials. The platform also attracts 47% of Gen X-ers and about 25% of Baby Boomers using social media.
Facebook and YouTube are better options for targeting older audiences. With 3 billion monthly users, Facebook attracts more than any other social app. Boomers and Gen-X’ers make up the highest percentage of its audience.
YouTube reaches across generations—Gen Z, Millennials, Gen-X’ers and Baby Boomers, who rank it as their second favorite media app behind Facebook.
TikTok is the platform for Gen Zs. Despite actions from Congress, TikTok isn’t expected to disappear anytime soon. The 21st Century Act gives ByteDance nine months to close a deal with a new owner. That may be delayed by extensions and court cases.
Keep stories short
Even the best stories are best shared as micro-content—snackable, bite-size messages that can be consumed quickly. Generally, keep it under 30 seconds, whether video or text post. Save long content for websites, blogs and podcasts.
A fairly new marketing tactic is to leverage micro-moments. These help capture fleeting moments of consumer attention. In these touch points, consumer interest intersects with the digital realm.
Healthcare marketers can capitalize on micro-moments when trending topics such as Princess Katherine’s cancer and actress Christina Applegate’s multiple sclerosis dominate news cycles. If you have patient stories that touch on timely issues, push the content to satisfy consumer interest.
Leverage stories through earned media.
Don’t overlook media relations when you have an interesting story to tell. Journalists are basically storytellers. In today’s multi-media landscape, they have multiple platforms for sharing stories, as they’ve morphed into journo-influencers.
Despite criticism of the media, research shows that 90% of consumers have faith in earned media. Placing a story with a local print or broadcast journalist can increase brand credibility, reputation and audience engagement.
Keep in mind that newsrooms continue to shrink while journalists’ responsibilities increase. Marketing strategists who carefully craft a story, capture assets and build strong relationships with media contacts have more success placing stories.
Human stories and human connections help humanize your healthcare brand.
TotalCom is a full-service marketing agency helping brands like yours tell their story to the right audiences. Email Lori Moore or call TotalCom Marketing Communications at 205.345.7363 to learn more about how we can help you tell your story.