The Proof Is in the Pudding: Educational Campaign Mixes Up a Winning Recipe to Promote New Pediatric Hospitalists

// By Lisa D. Ellis //

Sometimes simple messages can be the most effective. That’s what Signature Healthcare learned recently when it set out to promote a new relationship with The Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts Medical Center. This partnership brings highly respected Boston pediatric specialists to Signature Healthcare Brockton Hospital (about 25 miles outside of Boston) and makes these experts available right in the suburbs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

Finding New Ways to Be Heard

As the largest not-for-profit community-based hospital in the Greater Boston area, Brockton Hospital’s 245-bed, inpatient location serves the health and wellness needs of residents in 21 surrounding cities and towns through an array of services, including medical/surgical capacity, pediatrics, and obstetrics.

Marie Gross, Vice President of Business Development for Signature Healthcare

The hospital is also in an area that in recent years has been inundated with news of mergers and partnerships. This fact prompted Signature’s staff to brainstorm new angles to highlight the new Tufts/Floating Hospital relationship—rather than just promoting the affiliation—to ensure they would be heard by parents without getting drowned out by all of the other noise in the marketplace, explains Marie Gross, Vice President of Business Development for Signature Healthcare.

Taking a Straightforward Approach

In collaboration with Dan Dunlop of Jennings, a health care marketing firm with offices in Boston, Massachusetts, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Gross says she and her colleagues decided that instead of getting too complicated with their messaging, they would have more success just taking a straightforward approach to telling people about what pediatric hospitalists are, and the benefits they offer for patients and their families.

“‘What is a Pediatric Hospitalist?’ was our lead-in,” Gross says, adding that just by asking this question, they effectively drew in parents to find out more.

“The concept of a hospitalist really isn’t complicated. Pediatric hospitalists are simply trained pediatricians who specialize in caring for children in a hospital setting,” Dunlop says. “They are a resource for the family and for the referring physician. It is a good news story, and we didn’t want to hide that in complicated headlines or body copy.”

Dunlop also points out that this straightforward messaging also needed an equally direct design approach. This translated into black-and-white photograph ads that feature copy in a font that looks like children’s handwriting.

Swimming Against the Tide

But while the idea—and the layout—may be simple, the concept behind the campaign is actually quite strategic. Dunlop says this is because many health systems currently shy away from promoting the hospitalist model, in large part because patients don’t understand the role of hospitalists, and some may even worry that the presence of a hospitalist means they are getting inferior care compared to what they receive from their own physician. But in fact, Gross says that having hospitalists on board actually elevates the level of care, and patients need to know this.

Therefore, Signature wasn’t afraid to shine the spotlight on its new children’s hospitalists and dispel any misconnections about them by providing some basic—yet concrete—education.

“The pediatric hospitalist campaign was unique in its focus, since many organizations shy away from marketing hospitalists. We took the opposite approach and embraced the idea of promoting hospitalists and the benefits they provide,” Dunlop says.

Creating a Multi-Focused Campaign

To accomplish their goals, Signature decided to do a combination of traditional and digital advertising and to also launch a comprehensive educational component.

The campaign took a multifaceted approach, including:

• Blog posts
• Video introductions of the hospitalists and the hospitalist program
• Traditional advertising—print ads, transit ads, radio
• Internal communications launch of the campaign throughout Signature Healthcare
• Digital advertising—including digital banner ads using the Everyday Health network—and pay-per-click advertising using Google Adwords and Facebook Ads
• Media Relations/Editorial

Using the Hospital’s Mommy Blog Strategically

One important part of the marketing strategy was sharing the value of hospitalists through Brockton Hospital’s award-winning mommy blog.

Lorraine McGrath, Director of Marketing, Signature Healthcare

“Our mommy blog is one of the hottest blogs in our market,” says Lorraine McGrath, Signature’s Director of Marketing. The blog currently has 2,500 subscribers and is growing steadily. “The premise of our blog is that moms are constantly looking for information and insight on their parenting challenges of the day,” she says. The blog is a joint effort written by a handful of carefully selected mothers who represent different segments of the target population and share their experiences so other mothers can relate and become engaged.

Gross says Signature shared a video of the hospitalists on the blog to resonate with readers and to encourage them to share the news of this important new resource with their neighbors and friends.

“The video shows the chief of the pediatrics hospitalist program discussing the whole concept of what a pediatric hospitalist is so people can understand it,” McGrath says. She adds that the hospital doesn’t use the blog for advertising purposes, but as in this case, it does take advantage of this format occasionally to share information about resources within the hospital or community that can make life easier or better for parents and families.

Educating Pediatricians About the Benefits

Both Gross and McGrath agree that their messages about the hospitalists’ presence have been very well received by parents. In addition, pediatricians have also been enthusiastic about having the hospitalist relationship locally.

“Pediatricians are finding having hospitalists to be much more convenient,” Gross says. “It makes things so coordinated for the pediatricians. Through this relationship with the Floating Hospital, they can make a referral to a specialist and all of the information is easy to access within the Signature Healthcare system,” she adds.

Timing Is Everything

While the campaign has been effective in communicating with parents and pediatricians and filling the current needs in large part because it has been so well designed, Gross points out that timing has also played a part in making it so well received.

“At the time we were aligning with Tufts, other health care systems in the area were moving away from offering pediatrics,” she recalls. This means that Signature Healthcare’s own commitment to strengthening the quality and offering of its own pediatric care is helping to fill a growing need.

The Results Speak for Themselves

Dunlop points out that the focus of the hospitalist campaign is not only about gaining new patients. The marketing program also includes an effort to educate existing patients and families. He says that some of the best ways to measure the success has been through digital engagement. Here are some of the results that they have achieved in the past year since the campaign has been under way:

• A Facebook pay-per-click campaign that ran from September to November in 2013 generated a total of 753 clicks to the campaign landing page.
• The Google Adwords component of the campaign generated 1,123 clicks during the same timeframe. These, combined with the digital banner ads placed through Everyday Health, were the most measurable components of the campaign.
• The digital campaign through Everyday Health led to 662 click-throughs and 258,356 impressions over the first two months of the campaign. The click-through rate of 0.26 was 160 percent higher than the industry standard.
• In response to the traditional advertising, 482 individuals typed in the campaign URL to directly access the landing page in the first two months of the campaign. These hits came from people who saw the URL and typed it into their browser to navigate to the page, rather than click on a link in a digital ad or pay-per-click ad.

Next Steps

Signature plans to continue this educational campaign moving forward. It also hopes to adapt this straightforward educational model to other relationships and services that Signature Healthcare offers.

Lisa D. Ellis is Editor of Strategic Health Care Marketing.