Living inside Healthcare Marketing - Bridging the Gap

One of my favorite books for healthcare and marketing is Chris Bevolo's book, Joe Public Doesn't Care about Your Hospital.  Although I love, love, love his book, what I have found since working in Healthcare Marketing is it doesn't matter what I believe because if other people are not on the same boat I will continue to climb an up hill battle.  But I have hope....Chris spoke at a conference that one of the employees was at and she brought back his message to our team!  I gave my Joe Public book to another person and I am hoping to keep spreading the word!

I like to say that my role is building the bridge between the old and the new way of Marketing.  But building a bridge takes time....a lot of time.

Facebook Fans: how to engage and increase likes for healthcare pages

Facebook for healthcare can be easy or hard depending on the type of department you work in.  But no matter what type of department, practice, or program your fan page is for, you have to have the fans in order to engage them.  The question is how do you get fans to your Facebook so you can engage them.  In this post I will start you off with two easy and simple things.

5 Tips for How to use Inbound Marketing in Hospitals and Healthcare

 image from ChiroPractice

In my previous post, I asked the question, how are you or would you use inbound marketing in healthcare.  To answer this question you really have to ask yourself, "how do I build relationships online?"

For healthcare marketing, we tend to use outbound marketing, pushing our ads out to the consumers with no real message that "connects" to the consumer.  No matter what area you work in healthcare, there is a way you can connect to your current and potential patients.  Ask yourself this: What information are your patients looking for that you could provide the answers to?

How Can We Use Inbound Marketing for Hospitals and Healthcare?

Last December I stumbled on a podcast that introduced me to inbound marketing on the blog Six Pixels of Separation .  The podcast was how Marcus Sheridan aka The Sales Lion, used inbound marketing to increase business for a small pool company.  It is such a simple idea, but brilliant.  The concept is basically having a two way flow of communication with people online by providing useful information that people are seeking.  By doing this, you are able to build trust and loyalty.

So as I was getting ready to start my new job in the marketing department for the hospital I worked at, I started to wonder....how could we use this for hospital marketing?

Finding my strengths in ideation

Last week I decided to take this StrengthsFinder 2.0 test as part of a mentoring program I am doing.  It was interesting because it focuses on your natural abilities which they call your strengths.  Typically what you will see is people focusing on how to improve their weaknesses, but not this book.

So here are my top 5 results:
1. Ideation: People who are especially talented in the Ideation theme are fascinated by ideas. They are able to find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena.
2. Positivity: People who are especially talented in the Positivity theme have an enthusiasm that is contagious. They are upbeat and can get others excited about what they are going to do.

Markets Always Outperform Companies

This title is a quote from Dick Foster that goes like this "Markets outperform companies--they always have, with only a few exceptions, and you want to be on of the exceptions"  .

What does that statement mean to you?  For me as a person who works in healthcare is that we WANT to be the exceptions.  Unfortunately, I think if we are working in healthcare, we do not think this rule applies to us.  But we will find out soon that it does.  I sure that at some point Kodak thought it was too big to fail and so did other fortune 500 companies that are no longer on that list. Hospital's I hate to say are falling down the same path and we need to start thinking five steps ahead like in  a game of chess.

How to assess new ideas / disruptive innovation

In the industry of healthcare we all know that we have to either change or fail.  There is no in between.

Creating a culture to survive requires being able to break the mold a little and allow some disruptive innovation to change some of the products/services that are offered in healthcare organizations.  Hospitals are a good example of organizations that really need to do this.  Eventually inpatient admissions (their bread and butter now) will start to decline and reimbursement rates will continue to drop.

In order to survive, organizations must look at new and emerging trends. Then they have to assess how they could disrupt what they are currently doing in such a way that leaves them ahead of the game (see Creating Solutions through Open & Closed Innovation for suggestions on how to do this).
Once they have the ideas flowing in, how do they effectively assess them though?
1. Define your Innovation Process.

Creating Solutions through Open & Closed Innovation

Hospital's and health care in general are a prime industry for using open and closed innovation models when they are looking at becoming ACOs, implementing medical home models, and increasing patient activation.  With the flood of the online health care communities that are saturated with different ACO/medical home models, hospitals are left figuring out a model on their own which cost a lot of money and takes a lot of man hours.  If a hospital does decide to use what is out there already, it becomes hard to distinguish between the good and bad or just what would work for your particular organization.  The hospitals that will struggle the most will be the ones that are not integrated and do not have the man power to build and test a model.  When the race becomes close as your competitors are all racing toward the finish line; open/closed innovation can be the key.

Where Do I Start When Creating a Social Media Plan?

In a healthcare environment, it is hard to engage your patients with a blog post about eating healthy...why?  Because everyone is writing about eating healthy.  So if your patients are searching the web for healthy eating tips, chances are your blog post will not come up (well unless that is your focus and are a big hospital with a lot of key words etc. put into your blog).  So where do you start?

First you have to answer a few questions:
What are our goals?
What is our message?

      Who is our audience?
How do we reach them? 

How do we establish our digital presence — and how does this change the way we communicate and engage our patients, potential patients, caregivers and colleagues?

After you have answered those questions, you will need to create a social media plan that is aligned with your existing marketing and communication plans, define the roles of social media tools you will use, and most important...BE RELEVANT.

What ever you decide to write about, remember you need to have two way communication with your patients.  Don't talk at them, talk with them.


--The Catalyst