marketing strategy

Enhancing Patient Engagement: Balancing Information and Inspiration in Healthcare
Text overlay says "enhancing patient engagement: balancing information and inspiration." Image of a doctor speaking with elderly female patient.

Patients often seek both inspiration and information from hospitals, but their primary needs can vary depending on their situation and mindset. When they are sick, experiencing troubling symptoms, or reacting to a trending health topic, they want information. In cases of a diagnosis or a desire to be healthier, they often seek inspiration from healthcare providers. So, how do you know which to prioritize from a marketing perspective? Know your patients and give them what they want.

Building an Information Highway

At its most basic, healthcare is about helping people. Hospitals provide services and experts to treat them when they are sick, to diagnose their illnesses, and to help them manage their health and well-being.

Clinical Information

Marketers should present relevant information at each stage of the patient journey. Patients want clear and accurate information about their medical condition, treatment options, procedures, and outcomes. This helps them make informed decisions about their healthcare.

The stages of a healthcare journey include experiencing symptoms, doing online research, receiving a diagnosis, undergoing treatment, and ongoing management. Reaching the patient at each stage by educating them on your services, providers, and technology helps strengthen trust and patient engagement.

By leveraging internal patient data and monitoring digital analytics, you can identify your audiences and track their needs. When sharing information, remember:

  1. Be authentic. Audiences are savvy, particularly Millennials and Gen Z’ers. If you have to think about being authentic, then you’re probably not being real or connecting to the audience. Authentic content is key to patient engagement and building community.
  2. Humanize the message. By its nature, healthcare can be elitist and complicated. Your messages should not be. Meet the human needs of your patients with content that informs their decisions. They aren’t impressed with pretentiousness and medical jargon; they just want the facts.
  3. Counter false information. With election season underway, false information is rampant. The pandemic demonstrated the deadly outcomes of health misinformation that conflicted with scientific evidence and disinformation—the deliberate spread of misinformation for money, power, or reputation. Monitor what’s trending, especially on social media, and counter falsehoods with information from your healthcare experts.

Logistical Information

Along their journey, patients may also need practical information such as hospital policies, visiting hours, discharge procedures, and insurance coverage details. Here, the role of the marketing department merges with customer service.

  • Post FAQs prominently on the website, on social media, and other public-facing channels.
  • Use Reels and other short videos to respond to general questions. Utilize social media channels as customer service forums.

Every marketing strategy and tactic should be patient-focused. The abundance of patient insights that you have makes that task easier than ever before. If website analytics indicate high traffic searches for providers and online appointments, that’s all you need to know. Position those modules front and center on your homepage for optimum user experience and patient engagement.

Inspiring the Patient’s Healthcare Journey

Whether a patient receives an unsettling diagnosis or wants to improve their overall health, they often seek inspiration along their journey.

Provide Hope and Support

Patients and their families often look to hospitals for inspiration in terms of hope, encouragement, and emotional support. This could be through success stories, testimonials, or compassionate care from hospital staff. Patient testimonials provide relatability and emotional connections, which may influence decision-making or bolster recoveries. A 2022 study shows that patient satisfaction can be improved by relationship marketing tactics such as storytelling, enhancing patient engagement.

Encourage Wellness and Motivation

Inspiration for patients to improve their general well-being can also come from wellness programs, patient empowerment initiatives, and educational resources that promote a healthier lifestyle and recovery.

Consistently monitor what’s trending on social media to tap into health and wellness topics that may interest your audiences. Collaborate with your providers to craft content for the website, social media, blogs, and podcasts that position your hospital as a credible source of information.

While patients primarily require accurate information to manage their health effectively, they also benefit from inspiration that enhances their emotional well-being and motivation during their healthcare journey. Hospitals that balance both aspects effectively can provide a more holistic and supportive patient experience, leading to higher patient engagement.

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.

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Market Your Hospital to Stand Out

Market Your Healthcare Facility to Standout from the Rest

Are you taking advantage of new opportunities for generating exposure?

When potential patients do not have a recommendation from family or friends on what healthcare professional or facility to use, they typically turn to conducting their own research online. This could entail using anything from search engines to social media – as long as the information they find is trustworthy and extensive.

Ensuring your healthcare facility is listed everywhere that potential patients are searching online is key to driving more traffic to your hospital website and therefore, more foot traffic.

Create content that educates

 Creating content that educates is beneficial for SEO, driving long-term traffic from search engines to your website. More importantly, quality content in the form of blog posts, articles and social media helps give value to readers and build trust between your patients and your facility.

Put yourself in the patient’s shoes when you write your material and then ask the following questions:

  • Can I easily interpret the information?
  • Are these health terms and definitions understandable, even if I was only 12 years old?
  • Is the content accurate and informative without being overwhelming?
  • Is the explanation sufficient?
  • Are all my questions answered?

Fun with Facts

Consumers like facts, especially in healthcare. Weave facts and statistics into appropriate content to complement the information.

The true beauty, however, is the simplicity. Health facts are short and to the point. They are easy to digest, easy to generate, easy to verify.

Video Marketing is Important

 Last, but certainly not least, spend time on video marketing to really stand out. Offer testimonials from your patients. Ensure they are genuinely interested in speaking on your behalf for more authenticity and effectiveness.  Create videos to introduce doctors and put a human touch to the faces patients will be seeing.

Utilize YouTube as a hub for your video marketing efforts online. Embed those videos throughout your website. YouTube is a search engine owned by Google, making your uploaded video content discoverable in search results and wherever the video is embedded (like your website.)

Again, just like the written content being produced for your web properties, your video content must educate your audience on your expertise in the healthcare industry.

Marketing for the healthcare industry doesn’t have to be difficult. We just need to think about who the target audience is, understand what information they want and of course how best to reach them. Let us do the thinking for you. Contact TotalCom today to learn more about our healthcare marketing options.

ABOUT JIMMY WARREN
Early to bed, early to rise, work like crazy and advertise! Jimmy Warren is president of TotalCom Marketing Communications with over 30 years experience helping many kinds of businesses build a strong brand. A large portion of that experience is in the healthcare industry.  He loves the ‘weird’, interesting and extremely talented people he gets to work with every day – that includes co-workers and clients. Outside of work he enjoys his grand kids, traveling and any kind of good ole fashion Alabama sports. Roll Tide!

Healthcare Marketing: Strategy, Creative or Media Most Important?

Strategy and creative are usually more important than the media buy.

There is so much emphasis on media these days.  With all the traditional and non-traditional media options and a growing array of new alternatives, so much scrutiny is given to media effectiveness.  Do you continue to rely on traditional media?  How much of the media budget do you shift to non-traditional media?  How do you effectively utilize online advertising, social media, mobile and digital?  And how do you evaluate and analyze all the analytics that’s available to you?  So much of the critical analysis for an advertising campaign is about the media buy.  If the campaign is not effective, the media plan most often takes the blame.  Jack Neff made this point in an article in Ad Age.

But more important are strategy and creative. Even with the perfect media buy, if there was one, if the strategy is off target or the creative mediocre, the campaign will not be effective. True, media is very important.  And great emphasis should be given to the myriad of critical media decisions.  Media planning has become more complex and complicated and requires much attention.  But in the diligence to maximize media decisions, the real keys to advertising effectiveness takes a back seat. Strategy and creative are in the front seats.

Strategy is the essential foundation to every effective ad campaign. Nothing is more important than strategy.  Nothing trumps strategy.   It requires hard work, research, analysis, consumer understanding and smarts.  It is the basis of every successful advertising campaign.  Without a sound strategy, no media plan can be truly effective.  Strategy drives everything.  Strategy is the prerequisite to every other element of the campaign. It is the chief factor in determining how effective the advertising can be.

And the next most important component is strong creative.  Creative that communicates, that resonates, that grabs attention.  It’s the big idea. The concept that builds a brand and drives sales.  Creative that is rooted in the right strategy that communicates with the right tone and style.  The combination of thought and visuals that stand out.  That captures heart and mind and speaks to the soul.  Very little is as powerful as a great idea!

Advertising and marketing seem to be dominated today with discussions and debates about the media landscape.  What’s new and what works.  But more time, more energy, more emphasis should be spent on strategy and creative.  With proper attention to these two, the odds of the media plan being effective increases tremendously.

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