Healthcare Marketing Ad Agency

Healthcare Marketing: A Picture Really is Worth a Thousand Words

Hospital Digital ImageToday’s culture is extremely visually oriented.  So hospital brands should have a visual story.

Today people are stimulated by visuals.  This is not to discredit or minimize great copywriting but our world has become visually oriented.  Practically everyone has a camera phone and most people are using them.  And sharing their photos.  It can certainly be seen in the rapid rise of photo-centric social platforms.  To prove the point, Facebook reached 100 million users in 4 years but it took Instagram only 10 days to attract 10 million users.

And science supports this premise.  Humans actually process visuals 60,000 times faster than text.  Our visual sensory abilities are powerful.

And we know visuals can affect us emotionally.  How many photographs have you seen that immediately elicits a strong emotional reaction?  Immediately.

So what is your hospital doing to tap into this image-obsessed culture?  Does you hospital have a visual story?  It would be advantageous for your hospital to communicate with your audience through imagery.  Consumers not only want to hear what your brand stands for but they also want to see it.

Social media provides the perfect medium to create and maintain a visual brand story for your hospital.  Writing for The Agency Post,  Megan O’Malley, an account planner at VMI states, “… it’s the thoughtful, sincere and consistent visual story dispersed socially that builds a relationship.”

There are three important factors to consider when creating a visual brand story for your hospital.

1.    Understand your brand

What makes your hospital unique?  And as O’Malley suggests, don’t ask: What does your hospital do?  But go deeper and ask: Why do you exist?  Why should the consumer care?  What is your higher purpose?  From this information you should be on tract to begin create the visual story of your hospital.

2.     Be consistent

Your hospital’s story is ever evolving and never-ending.  So should be your visual story.  You must be consistent in continually telling your story.  Gaps, holes and interruptions cause the consumer to lose interest and the continuity of the story.

3.     Do it well

You are writing a visual story about your hospital.  And just like a written story it should be done well.  You wouldn’t tolerate bad grammar poor sentence structure and sloppy writing if it were a written story.  Neither should you accept poor quality for your visual story.  It’s your hospital’s brand that you are portraying.  It should be done well.

Consumers are becoming more and more visually oriented.  Your hospital’s brand cannot reach it’s full potential without the use of visuals.  It’s not easy.  But there are huge payoffs for those hospitals that do it well.

Healthcare Marketing: Should “We Try Harder”, Keep Tagline Longer?

Another tagline bites the dust!

Avis drops it’s branding line “We Try Harder” …after 50 years.

Avis Car Rental has recently announced they are dropping their iconic brand positioning line, “We Try Harder,” and replacing it with “It’s Your Space.”  Whether that’s a smart move will be determined but from an outsider looking in, I might have to question the move.

“We Try Harder” was introduced in 1962 by Avis with the help of DDB and became the brand’s promise about the quality of its service and as a way to position itself against the category leader Hertz. It was a huge success for Avis. In a matter of a single year, that campaign reversed the company’s fortunes, helping it to go from losing $3.2 million to turning a profit of $1.2 million for the first time in 13 years. It worked!  And it identified a brand.

Now it is being replaced with “It’s Your Space.”  One has to ask, what promise does that line really deliver?  The firm is repositioning itself to appeal to business travelers who spend a lot time in rental cars and trying to communicate that time inside a rental car is where business travelers can recharge or be the most productive time while traveling.  Maybe it will work but it seems a stretch to me.

Maybe it was time to abandon the old line since Avis had fallen from the number two car rental company to number three behind Enterprise Holdings (Alamo, Enterprise, National) and Hertz.  Maybe the company had stopped trying harder.  Or maybe they indeed do need to reposition itself for business rather than leisure travelers and this was to way to do it.  But you sure hate to see a classic, effective and company-defining line disappear.

For hospital marketers, branding lines come and go.  And I would be one of the first to say they need to be periodically updated and changed as the brand and the market landscape changes.  But it should be a strategic move based on sound research and not just on a whim.  Internally we may get tired of a branding line but it is often long before it becomes ineffective with the consumer.  And with a line like the one used by Avis to brand, position and define the company and which is firmly implanted in consumers’ minds, marketers need to be very cautious before making a change.

There are some very solid reasons a branding line should be changed from time to time but we must be sure it’s a strategic reason and not just because we are tired of the old one.  If the one we are currently using was strategically developed and implemented and it was effective, about the only reason to change is because the brand, the market or the competitive landscape has changed.  We must be very sure there are strong reasons to give up the brand equity that has been developed with the current line to start over with a new one.

Again, I’m not against changing lines but only after research and deliberate consideration.  And as hospital marketers, we must be sure the new brand positioning line is better and stronger and connects better with our audiences.  For Avis, I’m not sure “It’s Your Space” does that.  I just wished they had tried harder.

 

Healthcare Marketing: When Creating Mobile Marketing Strategy, It’s Important to Consider the Heavy Users

African-Americans, Hispanics, women, southerners and teens talk and text on their cellphones more than others.

African-Americans average 1300 minutes per month on their cell phones, the most of any demographic.  Hispanics are second averaging 826 minutes per month.  This is compared to Caucasians who average only 647 minutes per month.

Nielsen conducted a yearlong study to determine who used their mobile phones the most.  In their report, Mobile Usage Data, they determined that African- Americans and Hispanics also text the most.  African-Americans average 780 messages a month with Hispanics averaging 767 per month.  Caucasians average 566 texts per month.

The survey analyzed the cellphone bills of 60,000 mobile subscribers each month in the United States.  The analysis indicated women talk more than men with 856 minutes per month and 666 for men. They also text more than men averaging 661 text messages per month compared to 447 for men.

To no one’s surprise, teen’s text the most, averaging 2,779 texts per month.  The average each month for age 18-24 decreases to 1299 texts per month and 25-34 decreases even  more to an average of 592 messages.  Voice usage is more uniform with 18-24 year-olds using 981 minutes per month while 25-34 age group averages 952 minutes per month.

Additionally, southerners use more mobile minutes than those of other regions, averaging over 800 minutes per month.

As mobile marketing becomes more viable and more adopted by marketers, it’s important to identify the heavy users of their mobile devices.  The use by calls or texts varies significantly among different demographics.  Practically everyone is relying on their mobile phones to communicate and the numbers continue to increase. Mobile marketing has indeed become a mass medium. And as health care marketers discover and implement mobile marketing tactics we can know whom we are most likely to effectively reach.

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