Jimmy Warren

Healthcare Marketing: Let’s HEAR it for the Brand!

rbsb2_07Just like brand visuals, audio can help recognize, identify, position and enhance a brand.

Imagine a swoosh.  What do you think of?  Nike, of course.  When you see the NBC peacock, does a sound come to mind?  It’s the three distinctive chimes that have been associated with NBC since the 1920s.   It’s almost impossible for anyone who has a television to hear those three notes without conjuring up the brand.  Which proves audio branding can be just as strong as a great visual.

Just like a strong established visual, sounds can also reach beyond the rational mind and tap into memories and emotions.  Audio branding uses sounds to create memories or positive memory triggers that help recall a specific brand in the mind of consumers.  As LeeBeth Cranmer, writing for SecondWind states,  “It’s not merely background music but a sound that represent the identity and values of a brand in a distinctive manner.

 McDonalds is another brand that effectively uses audio branding.  As soon as you hear that “I’m l Lovin It” audio you probably think about the golden arches.  United Airlines has used an adaptation of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” for generations.  And who can hear the four Intel tones and not think of “Intel Inside?

The power of audio branding has been evident since the early days of radio when jingles were so prevalent.  As Cranmer continues,  “ in our modern age of advertising and marketing, audio branding is more important than ever due to the increased number of touch points available to promote your brand through sound.”

Because we live in an age of sound, there is a great opportunity to tap into a medium that can create strong memories and emotional connections with your brand.  Healthcare marketers should consider audio branding as a component of their marketing strategy.

And audio branding is not limited to music or musical tones.  It could be a distinctive voice, a sound effect or a particular way of saying a tagline.  We spend great amount of effort and money working on the visual identity of our healthcare brand.  Strong consideration should be given to creating that audio identity as well.  To make sure your brand is not just seen but also heard.

 

 

Healthcare Marketing: What Marketers Can Learn from the Presidential Election

What a brand promises and how a brand acts must be consistent.  Otherwise the brand suffers….. and presidential candidates lose elections.

99925228This blog is a little longer than most but I think it’s worth the read.  Jim Signorelli, CEO of ESW Partners, wrote an article for Adrants that addresses why he thinks Romney lost the presidential election.  His premise is that voters perceived too much of a gap between what Romney said and how he acted.  While Obama’s words and actions were very consistent.  The “story logic”, as Signorelli termed it, was not consistent for Romney.

The reason the article is compelling for healthcare marketers is because it makes the case that perceptions and reality must be consistent with each other.  In marketing terms, a brand promise and brand image (inner layer) must be consistent with what’s actually delivered (outer layer).  If the gap is too wide, the brand loses favor in the minds of the consumer.  It’s a lesson we all know as healthcare marketers and the truth of it can even be confirmed in the world of politics.

How ‘Story Logic’ Influenced Obama, Romney Campaign

From the early beginnings of the race for the White House, the news media seemed deeply concerned about who would have the biggest war chest. Certainly, dollars have historically contributed a great deal to winning Presidential campaigns. But given that Obama scored a 62% Electoral College advantage with only 4% more spending than Romney, the power of money has been seriously called into question.

Money buys audience reach, message frequency and media placement. Money also pays for the creation and production of messages as well as the necessary wherewithal to administer those messages. We cannot discount the importance of these financial realities.

But there is one variable that has recently gained enormous power. Unlike the other variables, it doesn’t depend on spending. It costs nothing more than respect for its existence and adherence to its demands. In part, it is driven by the new order of social media and its ability to make brands more transparent. It’s called story logic.

Story logic runs deep in every brand, including those of Presidential candidates. As consumers, we don’t see it, but we do sense how strong story logic is or isn’t. To apply story logic to any brand, one must first see the brand as lead character in the story that it sets out to tell its audience. Specifically, a brand is very much like a story’s protagonist confronting certain obstacles to achieve certain goals.

Both story protagonists and brands are multi layered. Their surface, or outer layers, contains visible behaviors. In the example of brand Romney vs. brand Obama, each candidate’s outer layer consisted of things said, done, and promised prior to and during their campaigns.

Going deeper, the brand’s inner layer is like the engine under its hood. It consists of beliefs and values that fuel the brand’s outer layer and helps audiences discern what the real beliefs are behind the brand’s behavior. As marketers, we can voice what a brand’s outer layer consists of. But the truth of their inner layers is completely dependent upon the voices inside the heads of their audience.

Story logic is simply the linkage between a brand’s inner and outer layer. When what we see or what we are told about a brand’s promise runs contrary to the value or belief we ascribe to that brand, the logic chain is broken and the story becomes something that doesn’t make sense.

In the contest between Romney and Obama, it was relatively easy to infer that each brand had polar opposite inner layers. One was driven by the belief in strong government; the other put greater stock in the private sector. From a social perspective, one candidate held more liberal beliefs and values and his opponent’s were more conservative. We were able to infer the difference in values and beliefs from each candidate’s outer layer promises and plans to support specific policies.

However, when one looks at the many surveys taken prior to Election Day, a few stand out. They are those that reflect the relative consistency between each candidate’s outer and inner layer.

In a poll taken by Time Magazine, one month prior to the election, readers were asked, “Which candidate is more truthful, Obama or Romney?” Obama outpaced Romney 72% vs. 28%. In a similar poll conducted by Newhouse in October, Obama’s ads were seen as more truthful than Romney’s, 42% vs. 30%. Whether you give credence to these polls or others that asked similar questions, we all know that Romney was often described by pundits as a “flip-flopper.” “Flip-flopping” occurs when a brand’s outer layer is perceived as a moving target. The biggest blow to Romney’s story logic came from his secretly filmed 47% comment that was picked up and repeatedly viewed on YouTube and other media outlets. Despite Romney’s admission that this statement didn’t reflect his true feelings, it created a great deal of dissonance. Dissonance is the enemy of story logic.

Some have argued that Romney’s ever-changing outer layer resulted from efforts to be all things to his highly fractionalized party. But in Presidential elections as with brands, the perceived consistency between beliefs, values, and actions has a great deal to do with winning votes or customers. Lack of layer consistency, perceived or real, can only result in confusion, dislike, and distrust — or all of the above. It is hard to know if Romney would have won had there been a stronger link between what he stood for and what he was promising to deliver. Arguably, stronger story logic would have turned off certain factions at the expense of others.

On the other hand, Obama had the story logic advantage. Whether you agreed or disagreed with his actions and promises, his consistency was rarely called into question. Clearly, he had obstacles to overcome given the worse economy since the Great Depression and social policies that were labeled by many as socialistic. But unlike Romney, the link between his outer and inner layer was unwavering.

I’m often asked what is more important, a brand’s inner layer or its outer layer. Rather than address that question head on, I often defer to brand success stories like Apple, The Ritz Hotel, North Face, Nike, and others that show how important it is to make certain that both layers are well defined and appeal to audiences large enough to foster growth. But what I believe is more important than either layer itself is the logical integrity between the values and beliefs a brand stands for and it’s actual or implied behavior. As with stories, brands depend on audiences concluding for themselves that what is portrayed is believable and authentic

Jim Signorelli is CEO of ESW Partners, a marketing communications agency based in Chicago specializing in branding. He recently published a book, StoryBranding Creating Standout Brands through the Power of Story.

Healthcare Marketing: 10 Time Savers for Social Media

Social media is a time suck!  But there are ways to be more efficient and minimize the distraction.

One of the major issues about social media for healthcare marketers is the time it requires.  Social media may be comparatively inexpensive but it requires a major investment of time to do it well.  And what healthcare marketer has time?

But Corey Eridon posted on HubSpot ways to make social media more efficient.  Things to do to keep the demands of social media from paralyzing you.  Here’s a summary of some of the suggestions he posted.

1) Compose your updates in advance. It’s time to update your social media posts…Facebook and Twitter.  Do you click around trying to find content to power those updates?  If you do, you will spend an inordinate amount of time researching and posting.  It’s better to bookmark information as you stumble across it.  Or if you need to do research, do it in advance and bookmark the information.

Use a social media publishing schedule– an Excel template (or something similar) that lets you input all of your social media status updates for each social network, organized by the date and time you’d like to publish them.

You can set aside an hour and input all of your social media updates for the following work week. That way you’re not left scrambling to find enough compelling content for all of the social networks you need to manage.

2) Maintain a content repository. To craft a week’s worth of social media updates you should use a content repository. Here’s what it looks like:

Basically, this is the place that you can keep all the content you’d like to promote and resurface in social media — because the more content you create, the harder it will be for you to keep track of all of it. So put in your ebooks, your blog posts, your infographics, everything you will want to re-promote at a later date in social media. Then you’ll be able to jump over to this tab and quickly find content to promote! Just be sure to include an expiration date so you don’t accidentally promote something that has already taken place.  And you will be less likely to let things fall between the cracks.

No more pulling content out of thin air, marketers!

3) Use a collaborative tool to share your schedule. Social media content can come from more than just you! Take the burden off of yourself and make your social media presence richer by including other people in crafting social updates. You can share the days and times when you’ll be publishing updates and it makes it easy for everyone to see what slots are available for promotion. You can even block off certain slots as “Reserved” for your own updates to ensure the content you need to promote doesn’t get swallowed up by other people’s updates.

Just make sure you communicate three notes about this collaborative approach to social media content creation: Establish a deadline for  content for the following week; communicate that the spreadsheet is first come, first serve; and make it clear that the social media manager has authority to veto updates that aren’t appropriate or not consisitent with the brand.

4) Schedule your updates to auto-publish. With content ready, use automation to make your life easier.

Now, not every social network makes it easy to auto-publish, so you’ll have to do some manual updating (on LinkedIn, for example). But you can still automate a good chunk of your publishing using a tool like HootSuite.

5) Set up social media monitoring. While creating your content in advance is a serious boon to productivity, healthcare marketers should still be leaving room for timely updates, too. What if a news story breaks? Or someone covers your company in their publication? Or someone publishes an excellent blog post you’d like to share with your network? That real-time content is critical, and you can set up monitoring to ensure you see it coming through. Use Google Alerts to keep up to date on information you can use.

6) Establish your company’s social media policy. If you know exactly what you should and should not do on social media, it becomes much more natural to create content and respond to fans and followers. If your company has a social media policy that details exactly what you should and should not say in social media and the tone you want your company to convey, it’s way easier to quickly create content and interact with your fans … because that kind of detail and forethought gives your company an actual personality. It’s much easier to be social when you have a personality.

7) Leverage networks’ admin features. Sometimes, more hands are better than one… Sometimes.

It can get a little scary for marketing managers, though, when too many people are involved in social media marketing. Specifically, if they all have administrative access to the accounts. Because while you know the nooks and crannies of each network, not everyone is as knowledgeable as you. So how do you leverage the help of your fellow co-workers without having them have a free-for-all?

Make use of the admin features on social networks. On Facebook, for example, you can now assign specific roles for users that limit their ability to do things like create posts, respond as the brand in comments, or create ads:

LinkedIn and Google+ let you assign admin roles, too, but you’re out of luck with Twitter. So either keep your brand’s Twitter login credentials under wraps, or give some serious training to anyone you give those credentials to!

8) Pre-schedule your checkins throughout the day. Even with a monitoring tool set up, you’ll have to check in to each of your social networks throughout the day to respond to comments and interact with fans and followers. Some marketers feel like they need to respond to everyone on social media immediately. While immediacy is great, your network also understands that you aren’t glued to your computer screen at all times. It’s alright (and important for your productivity if you don’t have an employee dedicated only to social media monitoring) to set aside specific times during the day for social media monitoring.

10) Use tools to create visual content. You know you should be creating visual content to share on social media, but you’re not a graphic designer. What do you do? Leverage some of the visual content creation tools that make the task easy. If you have a Smartphone, you should have no trouble finding apps that make you look like a visual content creation genius. There is, of course, the much-loved Instagram to take your photos from blah to beautiful. And there’s a new favorite of many marketers, Over , that lets you overlay text over photos for that kind of content that will get you seriously high engagement.

10) Eliminate the clutter in your analytics. Social media is one of those channels that marketers have simultaneously too much data to analyze, and not enough. Don’t get bogged down in the abundance of data! Spend less time looking at the fluffy metrics that really mean nothing to your overall marketing success, and just focus on a few core metrics.

Utilize these time saving techniques to relieve the burden of social media and to improve efficiency.  It will make social media more effective, less of a time suck and it will give you more control over the process.  Don’t let social media control you.  Instead, you control it.

 

Healthcare Marketing: Smaller Hospitals Effective Using Social Media

Study shows smaller hospitals use Facebook more effectively than larger ones.

Hospitals are getting into the social media game.  Although late adopters, hospitals are increasing their use of social media.   Some larger institutions, like the Mayo Clinic, have large social media departments and have extensive activity among social media networks.  But it’s much more challenging for smaller hospitals.  The resources, the time requirements and support from upper management are definite limitations.  But even with those liabilities, a recent study indicated smaller hospitals can be effective utilizing social media.

In two studies at the University of Missouri, the findings indicated that smaller hospitals use Facebook more effectively than larger ones.  One study was conducted by Dr Ricky C. Leung, assistant professor of health management and one by Dr. Kalyan S. Pasupathy, assistant professor of health management and informatics.  The research findings were reported by Brian Horowitz in eWeek .  The research indicated that smaller hospitals are more committed to Facebook once they decide to use it.

Despite larger hospitals having more resources to build stronger Facebook page, they have more channels to develop and populate.   Smaller hospitals who are limited in what they can do, concentrate their efforts more narrowly and are therefore more effective with the tools they use.

Of the sites studied, the average number of “likes” for the hospital’s Facebook page was 1321.

The take-away from this research is that smaller hospitals can have success using social media.  The key for smaller hospitals is to limit the number of social media channels used and concentrate on only as many channels as can be done well.  To spread the marketing department too thin by trying to do too much is counter productive.  It’s much more effective to do one or two things and do them well.

An effective social media effort is not limited to larger hospitals.  Smaller hospitals can also be effective by strategically choosing a limited number of social media tactics and doing them as well as possible.

Healthcare Marketing: How Often, What, When to Post on Social Media

Timing, frequency and content of social media impact its effectiveness.

Hubspot’s Dan Zarrella examined more than 100,000 social media accounts to determine what timing and frequency renders the most effectiveness for outcomes.  Of course effectiveness is different for each specific activity but Zarrella did discover some general guidelines.

Frequency: What is the right amount of frequency in social media?  Am I communicating too often?  Not enough?  The take-away from the finding was to not crowd the content.  Each site will be different depending on the activity of the site but the general recommendation is to have at least two hours on each side of shared links.

Timing: Which days and what time of day are best for generating activity and engagement?   The general guidelines are:

Twitter…late in the day and week are the most tweetable times.  Between 2 PM and 5 PM (EST).

Facebook…. Highest during the weekend.  This is due to restrictions some employees have for social media activity at work and more time for social media activity over the weekends.

Types of Content: The most important guideline about content is to mix it up.  Make sure you’re not sharing the same content and types of content. A variety of content optimizes attention and engagement.

Here are some suggestions for different types of content:

  • Links to new content
  • Links to other helpful content
  • Industry news
  • Surveys
  • Visual content (photos, charts, video, infographics)
  • Answers to common questions

Social media is a challenge for healthcare marketers.  It requires a considerable amount of time, which is hard to come by.  So playing the odds and learning from the research on how to maximize our efforts is essential.  We need to work social media but we need to work smart.

Healthcare Marketing: Social Media Lessons to be Learned from Target

Target has 5 million Facebook fans….. here are 5 social media lessons we can learn from their success.

Target, the third largest retailer in the nation, has 20 million fans and added over 2 million fans in one month.  But they have more than just a quantity of fans.  They also have very high engagement levels with their fans.  Morgan Arnold, reporting for Social Media Today reviewed Target’s social media success and offered 5 of their best practices, which can be very helpful to healthcare marketers.

1.    Keep messaging and delivery mechanisms simple and relevant to the customer.

Target is constantly attempting to craft tools and applications that not only facilitate interaction among online friends but also actually create new opportunities for transactions with the brand.  They create win-win situations that are useful and rewarding to their fans but also lead to transactions and engagement with the brand.

2.    Use Twitter as a tool to create conversations.

Many organizations use Twitter just to dispense information.  It is an outstanding medium for that but also to engage followers in conversations.  Additionally it’s a way to build buzz and launch new services.

3.    Whenever possible, say it with pictures.

Track Social’s recent white paper Optimizing Facebook Engagement showed that photos are the hands-down winner when it comes to boosting engagement scores.  Photos should be an integral component of the content brands post.

4.    Community Engagement = Social Engagement.

Involvement in the community will increase engagement on Facebook.  Any community involvement should be documented on Facebook as a means to create consumer involvement.

5.    Think Global, Post Local.

Always localize healthcare issues and news.  Use healthcare issues of the day but always explain what it means and how it impacts your local audience.

Healthcare marketers could learn from Target’s approach to social media.  Be relevant and engage the social space in ways that are meaningful, creative and mutually beneficial.

Healthcare Marketing: We Can’t Seem to Take Our Eyes Off TV

Despite many other options for our time, television viewing remains very strong.

Many pundits and experts have predicted the demise of television.  Consumers are spending time with laptops, tablets, smartphones, social media networks and video games.  With all the competition for our attention, for some time now, experts have been prophesying that television viewing will take a hit.  But that has definitely not happened.

Measuring consumer behavior in the first quarter of 2012, Nielsen revealed that Americans averaged watching television 4.38 hours per day.  That is only six minutes less than in 2008, before the exploding proliferation of new media options. And live TV viewing was a full 4 hours a day more than they spend watching DVD playback.

Adults 65+, of course, consume the most traditional media with nearly 48 hours per week in TV viewership.  They watch just less than 2 hours of time-shifted TV per week.  By comparison, adults 35-49 watch just over 35 hours of traditional TV per week and roughly 3 and a half hours per week of time shifted TV.

The study also shows that time shifted viewing is increasing.  It has grown from 12 minutes per day on average in 2008 to 24 minutes per day in 2012.

So for hospital marketers, television is still a very viable alternative.    Consumers are still watching and thus television is a way to reach them.  All the talk about people not watching TV anymore and TV advertising no longer being effective proves not to be true.  For television the sky is not falling.  In fact, it’s still filled with television signals.

Healthcare Marketing: 5 Tips from Big Business for Better Social Media

Healthcare marketers can learn from big business about how to approach social media

An article in Social Media Today  outlined lessons than can be learned from big business about how to effectively use social media.   Here are the 5 lessons outlined:

 1.    Begin with the End in Mind

Have a goal and work backwards to accomplish the goal.   Know why you are using social media.  Pick a goal and prioritize your tactics to accomplish it.

 2.    Be a publisher first

Content is indeed king.   You are a content creator.  You create content. Every time you publish a social media update, email a newsletter or post a blog post you create content.  So to succeed you must publish.

3.    Understands what motivates your audience

People do not care about your hospital or organization.  They care about themselves.  Don’t create content around your hospital, your services lines or your accomplishments.  Create content for you customer.  Your audience determines content.  Understand them and the benefits your services provide for them.

4.    Don’t overemphasize tactics

Social media s a new way to connect with people and talk with them.  The key is your objective.  Strategy is your plan to accomplish the objective.  Tactics are tools.  They help you accomplish your objectives.  And nothing more.

 5.    Enable others to share your story.

Create opportunities for others to tell your story.  Empower them to do so, and always express your appreciation for what they have done.  Take the risk to let them say what they want.

Healthcare marketers can learn valuable lessons from the way big businesses uses social media. Most of our hospitals are not considered large.  But it doesn’t mean we can’t learn valuable lessons from big businesses.  Especially in regard for social media.

Healthcare Marketing: Real Time Responses Can Lead to Bad Times

Rather than reacting in “real time” in social media, responses should be carefully and strategically planned.

There is a lot of talk these days about “real time” media.  With social media, brands have the ability to respond and react almost immediately.  In “real time” as it’s referred to.  And many pundits claim this as an advantage of social media.  But is that really the smartest thing for our healthcare brands?

Leigh Dow, founder and managing director of Dow Media Group writing for Smart Blog on Social Media questioned the wisdom of real time responses.  She gave two examples of real time responses that were not so good:

  • Micky Arison, owner of the Miami Heat, was fined $500,000 after using Twitter as a sounding board about what he thought about the NBA lockout.
  • Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce created a media firestorm when he implied victims of the Aurora, Colorado shooting held some blame by not being armed.

These are examples, and there are many others, why social media should not be used for random stream of consciousness.  This is true personally but it’s also true for our brands.  Brands invest a tremendous amount of time, effort and money in building brand reputation and equity.  But when discipline and planning is not used in social media, a brand can be decimated as quickly as you can press, “Send.” 

“If you are doing social media right, little of your communication is in real time,” states Dow.  “Your communication should be the culmination of careful strategy and planning.  If you are doing it right, you have completed an extensive exercise in developing a social media strategy, channel mapping, implementation plans, an editorial calendar, roles and responsibilities, policies and guidelines, and a scorecard for tracking results.  That doesn’t fell very real time to me.”

Some had lauded social media as a great tool when your brand has a crisis.  And yes it can be very useful but it shouldn’t negate the need for a very careful and measured response.  That means making sure you have all the facts and you understand the situation and then deliberately considering how your brand should respond.

Dow gives JetBlue as an example of a brand that did it well.   When one of its flight attendants had a mental breakdown and, as a result cursed a passenger and quit his job very dramatically, social media networks were a buzz.  Instead of feeling the need to respond in “real time”, JetBlue had a more measured and calculated response.  Shortly after the incident the airline updated Twitter and it’s blog by stating that it was aware of what had happened and was working to verify details and would report only what it knew was accurate.  The company continued frequent updates as they learned the facts and carefully planned a response.  As brand protectors our requirement is not to give an immediate responses but to be accurate and responsible.

She gives examples when it’s appropriate to use social media in real time:

  • Monitoring what people are saying about your brand
  • Racking what people are saying about your competition
  • Helping a customer with a customer service question

We have all written emails, letters, notes or memos as an immediate response to a situation but after letting it sit for a bit, returned to it and decided that was not the way we wanted to communicate.  After having a chance to reflect a bit, we decided the words or tone were not what we wanted.  Social media is the same.  Sometimes in an effort to be in “real time” we can create situations that are not so good for our brand.  Because every post, response, or tweet has legs and can never be retrieved.  Careful thought and preparation should go into every social media response.

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.