How Marketing Strategy Impacts Healthcare Branding
What does marketing strategy have to do with healthcare branding?
Everything.
In a market full of competitors and noise, healthcare organizations need to find ways to stand out.
Science is a field that is ever-evolving, never standing still. The same could be said for marketing.
Healthcare organizations must keep up with trends and outpace competitors to stay afloat in uncertain times.
Growing your healthcare brand takes strategy of increasing brand awareness, establishing presence in a new market, introducing new programs and creating and nurturing leads.
Marketing strategies for healthcare brands need four things: they must convey warmth and compassion, connect on social media, develop an organic presence, and allow for story sharing.
But before we get into all of that, we need to set the stage for where we are today.
Healthcare Marketing Statistics
An affective Healthcare strategy is built on accurate data. Here are some medical marketing statistics that are changing healthcare marketing right now.
Consumer Behavior:
- 77% of patients use Google before scheduling an appointment:
- Google receives more than 1 billion health questions every day.
- 71% of people check online reviews of doctors.
Healthcare Brands Today:
- 52% of US online adults prefer buying from companies that show how they protect their customers against COVID-19.
- 71% of people lose trust in a brand if the company puts profits before people.
- Telehealth is one of the most sought after, and utilized, healthcare options.
Effective Marketing Strategies in Healthcare:
- 95% of a message is retained through video, compared to 10% when reading the same information in text.
- 300% increase in traffic to websites is contributed to video.
- 85% of consumers want to see more video content from brands.
What we learn from reviewing consumer behavior statistics is that the modern consumer is looking online first, social signals are important and people are looking for transparency in the care of people over profits.
To grow a healthcare brand, you must meet people where they are at by embracing digital marketing.
Colormatics knows how to harness the power of video to create highly memorable and engaging digital experiences.
The result is a patient-centered strategy that increases customer satisfaction, supports better patient care, and lowers overall marketing costs.
Growing your Healthcare Brand
Marketing strategy is going to change based on your Healthcare organization goals. Keep reading to find out how to successfully:
- Increase Brand Awareness
- Establish Presence in a New Market
- Introduce a New Program
- Create and Nurture Leads
Increase Brand Awareness
Maximize your branding in healthcare industry and reach more people with YouTube video advertising campaigns.
Colormatics is supporting leading healthcare organizations across the U.S, right now by creating long-form video content that can be cut into short-form video, like bumper ads, to boost brand awareness.
Bumper ad campaigns are known for driving an amazing lift in brand awareness. In 2017, Google conducted a study of 122 bumper ad campaigns, finding that 70% drove a significant lift in brand awareness, with an average lift of 9%.
When you need to increase healthcare brand awareness, contact Colormatics and ask about short-form video ad services.
Establish Presence in a New Market
Patient testimonial videos are a powerful way to build trust and credibility when appealing to a new market.
Allowing for potential patients to hear and see the story from a peer facing the same diagnosis or treatment recommendation builds trust.
Colormatics works with hospitals and physicians to design, film and distribute patient testimonial videos across social media and organic channels.
Gathering and sharing patient testimonials quickly establishes an emotional connection with your audience.
Colormatics helps healthcare organizations enter new markets by using region-specific filming locations, talent and content that is translated by a native speaker.
Introduce a New Program
How do you interweave patient education and patient engagement?
Educational video.
Video is the preferred method for education because it holds people’s attention, and it can be watched over and over again.
Watching a video is much more engaging than reading a clinical white paper or lobby brochure.
Educational video production presents relevant information to patients based on where they are at in their healthcare journey.
Video makes an impression, making it the most effective means of patient engagement.
That is not to say every healthcare video is effective.
There are plenty of healthcare educational videos online that are not impactful, leading patients to click out and move on to another provider.
Create and Nurture Leads
Healthcare social media video ads are highly targeted, making it a cost-effective strategy to create and nurture patient leads.
Facebook is the #1 social media platform - and often the first step on a patient’s journey. And helpful for targeting the healthcare provider.
Because Facebook allows for a highly targeted audience, such as specific demographics, custom lists and remarketing.
Facebook has a variety of campaigns and ad formats to fulfill your marketing goals and engage hospital prospects at any stage of awareness.
Video ads can be tailored to fit the needs of the patient's journey.
Creating awareness and nurturing the patient lead through the entire process: unaware, problem aware, solution seeking, product aware, decision making.
Creating a Healthcare Marketing Techniques
Healthcare branding must engage both sides of the brain.
Branding must engage the left hemisphere responsible for preprocessing social emotions like happiness, and the right hemisphere responsible for processing primary emotions such as fear.
Theres an immense importance for marketing in healthcare industry, especially creating optimized videos for healthcare, meets both needs.
Visual storytelling marries science with emotions. It makes audiences feel connected to a brand.
For a healthcare brand or healthcare branding strategy, creating that connection is the key to success.
But how do you make a story of the healthcare industry come to life in video?
By finding stories that stick. And telling them in inventive ways.
A good healthcare marketing plan will do four things:
- Convey Warmth and Compassion
- Connect Socially
- Develop an Organic Presence
- Share Stories
Convey Warmth and Compassion
Science in itself is rational and emotionless. It alone doesn’t move markets.
Successful healthcare brands are able to break down the science for their patients using engaging images, simple language and compassion.
For healthcare brands, this is done by identifying stories that are warm, humanizing, and compassionate, while also exhibiting innovation.
Whether it’s a provider sharing the first day they knew they wanted to practice, or a patient sharing their story of survival on film, stories of real people, from real people, create community.
Most healthcare stories, especially patient testimonials, are steeped in emotion. Fear, anxiety, happiness, gratitude.
Stories in healthcare marketing build trust. The process of curating that content is just as important as the stories themselves.
Building relationships with clients, deep market research to get into the minds of patients (current and prospective), selecting a unique blend of stories to share, and putting people at ease as they tell their stories.
Connect on Social
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. What do they all have in common?
They have a ton of people in one place. Today, more than 3.5 billion people use social media worldwide.
That’s billion with a b.
Healthcare marketing techniques today can create campaigns that are responsive and encourage their audiences to act. To help amplify there brand identity and brand strategy.
The archaic model of creating push campaigns has evolved into two-way conversations where we can feed prospective patients and customers exactly what they want, when they want it.
Predicting and controlling recall and recognition of your healthcare brand is marketing gold.
Just by numbers alone, the development and distribution of social-optimized video ads is a sure-fire way to cast your net not just far, but into the right ocean.
Healthcare is one of the most competitive industries. Brands need the opportunity to enable engagement, promote content, and encourage sharing.
By producing social video ads that are savvy and play nicely across each platform’s playground, brands can bust their way out from the pack, making for a successful medical educational campaign.
So what kinds of content in social ads increase brand awareness the most? Visual images and videos are the top 2 most commonly accessed types of content.
Learn more about How to Create Engaging Instagram Videos: Tips & Tricks for Marketers
Develop an Organic Presence
Video content optimized for the web has been known to make a website be 53 times more likely to show up on the first page of a search. Optimized video content fundamentally boosts an organization’s website visibility.
The volume at which people are searching organically hasn’t changed. But what they’re searching for has.
Creating optimized campaigns provided spending that targets the right people in the right ways.
Educational video content and patient testimonial videos are two ways to grow your healthcare brand’s organic presence.
Educational Video Content
When you have a question about a complicated topic, where do you go for an answer?
Healthcare has some of the most complex topics around. Unless you majored in biochem (which we did not, btw), video content for healthcare must be educational to be actionable.
Video is the preferred method for education because it holds people’s attention, and it can be watched over and over again.
Interweaving patient education with patient engagement positions your brand as a leader.
The key is to develop educational video content that is engaging, interesting and makes complex information simple without making viewers feel uneducated.
Being sensitive, not sappy, explanatory, not egomaniacal.
Patient Testimonial Videos
Patient testimonial videos increase brand awareness without overstepping the lines of what is acceptable and honest messaging.
Building credibility and trust, patient testimonial videos create healthcare video content that shares the stories of patients, in good times and in bad, making a brand come to life.
Patients share narratives that are incredibly personal. Stories of remission and fight that make your heart soar, and those of loss and pain that punch you in the gut.
They are trusting you with their story – and that is a huge responsibility to honor.
Patient testimonial videos create a better emotional connection for current and prospective customers.
But most importantly, videos make a brand feel more human.
And in healthcare, feeling human and respected is at the heart of an experience that you will remember forever.
Share Stories
Brand messaging delivered as a story is up to 22 times more memorable than facts alone.
Perhaps more important than retention of information is the ability to create stronger connections with people.
Storytelling makes healthcare brands more human, more relatable.
Elevating healthcare brands beyond traditional advertising.
Visual storytelling brings something forward that’s authentic, visually beautiful through a cinematic lens.
Video advertising brings healthcare back to the heart of medicine, by showing you care.
Who we Serve
Leading healthcare organizations grow with patient-centered marketing strategies by Colormatics.
Hospitals
Navigating massive hospital systems is no easy task.
But the Colormatics team understands the inner workings of the hospital systems and why hospital marketing is so crucial for today’s healthcare brands.
Providence HealthCare
Working with Providence Southern California’s in-house creative team, eight patient testimonial videos stories were created for the #finishcancer campaign. Capturing these stories of survival through video can be difficult as you want to balance a serious but warm production set full of laughter, creativity, and skillful execution while still paying due respect to the topic at hand. That challenge was coupled with less than 6 days to source talent, find locations in the greater LA area and build a schedule that would maximize content for both the video and photo campaign. Post-production work created eight patient survivor stories for broadcast and digital marketing campaigns across Southern California.
Schools of Medicine
Some people know from a very young age that they want to go into a career in medicine.
From the time they step foot on campus to the time that they receive their white coat, sharing stories is crucial to the future of Schools of Medicine staying strong during difficult economic times.
Jersey College
Small schools and training operations have a difficult time standing out in a market dominated by large institutions, nation-wide chains, and influential regional players. Jersey College of nursing reached out to Colormatics to help them establish themselves as they expanded from one local school in northern New Jersey to five schools in multiple regions. Colormatics focused on a multipronged approach to creating brand awareness and converting potential students.
How HCP's Influence the Marketing Plan
The implementation of a well-executed marketing strategy in a healthcare facility plays a pivotal role in defining the facility's brand, especially when healthcare professionals (HCPs) are part of the mix. Here's how:
1. Enhancing Brand Reputation
Through marketing, healthcare facilities can showcase their HCPs' skills, expertise, and accomplishments. By highlighting their credentials and sharing success stories, it creates an image of trustworthiness and reliability. This effectively elevates the facility's reputation and positions it as a leading provider of healthcare services.
2. Differentiating the Brand
A well-crafted marketing strategy allows a healthcare facility to distinguish its brand from competitors. This can be achieved by focusing on unique selling points, such as specialized services, advanced technologies, or highly trained HCPs. By clearly communicating these differentiators, potential patients can easily recognize why the facility stands out from others.
3. Increasing Brand Awareness
A marketing strategy that utilizes both traditional and digital channels helps raise awareness of the healthcare facility's brand. By maintaining an active online presence, engaging with the community, and leveraging online advertising, more people become aware of the brand, leading to an increase in potential patients.
4. Strengthening Brand Image
Involving HCPs in thought leadership opportunities, such as speaking engagements, blog contributions, or webinars, strengthens the brand image. This positions the healthcare facility as a thought leader in the industry and adds a layer of credibility to its brand.
5. Promoting Brand Values
A well-executed marketing strategy promotes the core values of the healthcare brand. Whether it's patient care, research, innovation, or community service, marketing campaigns can reflect these values, ensuring they resonate with potential patients and partners.
6. Cultivating Trust
Marketing strategies that encourage transparency, such as responding to patient reviews and sharing behind-the-scenes content, can foster trust. This is crucial in healthcare where patients need to trust their providers. When HCPs are seen as integral members of the brand, their interactions with patients can reinforce this trust.
7. Enhancing Patient Loyalty
Successful marketing can create a bond between patients and the healthcare brand. By emphasizing a patient-centered approach, offering superior service, and fostering a sense of community, patients are more likely to remain loyal to the brand and recommend it to others.
Learn more about How to Create a Successful HCP Marketing Strategy
Healthcare Marketing Strategy Key Notes
- Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to 10% when reading it in text.
- Meet patients where they are at: online.
- The top four ways to grow a healthcare brand are increase brand awareness, establish presence in a new market, introduce a new program, and create and nurture leads.
- Bumper ads increase healthcare brand awareness.
- Patient testimonial videos are a powerful way to build trust and credibility when entering a new market. They make a brand come to life.
- Video is the preferred method for education.
- On-demand video connects patients with healthcare providers.
- Social media video ads are highly targeted, making them a cost-effective strategy to create and nurture patient leads.
- Video ads should be tailored to fit the needs of the patient's journey
- Storytelling makes a healthcare brand come to life.
