Hear the Brand: A Hospital Marketer’s Field Guide to the Surprising World of Sound
// By Colleen Fahey //
This two-part series explores the concept of audio branding and looks at how a tailored audio vocabulary can boost your brand influence more than you might ever expect.
In this first section, we focus on social media in the quirky world of hospital marketing and introduce the subtle way branded audio can be used to tie content back to the overarching brand.
The second part, which will run in an upcoming issue, will cover best practices for infusing audio into your full customer journey and will look at the role audio branding can play in bringing coherence, differentiation, and impact to your brand.
Want to get a groan at the hospital marketing summit? It’s easy. Just mention that a doctor asked Marketing for a billboard with his/her picture on it. Voilà, a chorus of groans! If you really want to rile the audience, say it was a surgeon. If you want them to put their heads in their hands, specify that it was an orthopedic surgeon.
I’ve seen it happen more than once.
Patient-Centered Marketing
I don’t understand these distinctions, but from the outside it appears that some medical professionals haven’t completely wrapped their heads around the idea of patient-centric marketing.
But now I know what the doctor is likely to hear back from Marketing. It will be, “Have you thought about creating a blog post, podcast, or ‘How to’ video?’”
The brave marketers working in the hospital world have experimented and refined and succeeded in branded content and social media this year. Many have learned to valiantly defend themselves in front of their C-suites (and, apparently, orthopedic surgeons) with many kinds of analytics. The subject of defending social media comes up as often as does the work itself.
In fact, these days, hospitals create so many videos about nutrition tips, brain tumor care, nurses’ week, hospital tours, patient stories, and “Why Dr. X loves working at Hospital Y” stories that they own a built-in platform to build a long-lasting brand earprint. Some hospitals we’ve researched have more than 700 pieces of video content online.
Using Audio to Distinguish Brand
Imagine if they all merely began and ended each video with their own brand’s Audio Logo.