Health Care Marketing: Try This Recipe for Cooking Up Fresh and Relevant Results
// By Eric Brody //
Your health system or hospital story doesn’t matter—until it does.
What matters is simply how your story fits into the lives of your audience.
This simple concept is tough to deliver on, but it’s also critical to your success as a health care marketer. It really comes down to the difference between being fresh and relevant or getting lost in a BIG sea of easy-to-ignore, seen-and-heard-it-before, same-as-everyone-else noise. The big sea of course is the 5,000 other marketing messages that hit the average American—hence your audience—in the 10 hours a day or so they spend with various media.
So what’s a health care system to do? In my experience, the solution is to have the right ingredients at hand to cook up an effective marketing strategy.
Why Relevant Matters
Consider this: For the best of brands, it’s an epic battle to get consumers to stop and take notice, much less to care. For health system and hospital brands, they have to work even harder. Because let’s face it, in a world of retail, fashion, technology, entertainment, and consumer brands, you’re like the kid in gym class who always gets picked toward the bottom by the two assigned captains in dodgeball.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Every health system or hospital brand deserves to climb higher on the “I deserve a spot on your roster” list. Every health care brand deserves to tell, and demonstrate, a great story. It just takes hard work and practice. To help your brand improve and grow its standing, you need to help your customers improve and grow. And the more you’re in touch with their larger story, the more you create a brand story that they want to be a part of. You can even take this a step further—don’t tell people a story; give them a story to tell.