Author Archive for Chris Bevolo

Guest Post: Probing Viral Marketing Tactics

Exclusive:

Disposable toilet seat covers offer new form of social media marketing for hospitals

Hospital marketers now have a new form of social media to explore to get their message out—disposable toilet seat covers. At least, that’s the pitch from Tom Teynor, president of Slip-U-Not, the leading manufacturer of disposable toilet seat covers in North America.

“The options for custom designing your TSCs are really endless, and it’s a perfect medium for hospitals given their large toilet volumes,” says Teynor. “We consider this a form of social media given the open format and networking aspect of the medium.”

Teynor, whose company offers a special adhesive solution to prevent slippage, notes that the TSC industry is over $3 billion in annual sales, with the majority coming from healthcare. While no hospital is currently using the customized TSC for branding purposes, GI Centers have been fast adopters, according to Teynor.

I’m sorry, what?

OK, so if you haven’t caught on by now, this isn’t a real story about healthcare marketing. But it’s the kind of story you’ll find at The Weekly Probe, a Web site our firm created in April. [more]

Guest Post: Healthcare Branding After Twitter, Reform, and the Economy

My book on healthcare branding, A Marketer’s Guide to Brand Strategy: Advanced techniques for healthcare organizationswas released about a year ago, which got me thinking: Has anything changed in the past year that might impact the value of brand strategy, or how healthcare organizations should approach brand strategy development?

For starters, social media has become the trend in healthcare marketing. Conferences and publications tout the benefits of blogging, smart Facebook strategies or ten ways to use Twitter to market your hospital. A growing number of providers are beginning to implement social media tools, affecting in small and significant ways how they engage their audiences. From a brand perspective, social media offers a powerful means for connecting with core audiences in a new and more intimate way.

Then there’s healthcare reform, which has been thrust into the spotlight by the election of President Barack Obama. [more]

Guest Post: Marketing’s Turn for Transparency

As many hospitals continue to struggle financially, all aspects of marketing—plans, projects, staff and budgets—are now under siege. And marketing leaders are under intense pressure to continually demonstrate the value of their discipline to organizational leaders. To achieve this, most provide regular updates to C-bosses, the board or service line leaders. But how can they—you—better demonstrate the value of marketing to the entire organization in a relevant and consistent way? One idea: Take a page from the growing trend of quality and price transparency and create a “marketing transparency” website for your organization.

In response to the growing call for healthcare transparency, many hospitals already have created sections on their website to show quality reporting, national rankings and pricing. (Omaha, Nebraska’s Alegent Health is a great model.) But what if hospital marketers followed suit with a section directed at internal audiences? Imagine a microsite that houses the organizational brand strategy, service line marketing plans and other key directives. A destination that provides internal audiences with real-time updates on marketing initiatives complete with goals, objectives, status reports, results and feedback. It also could include a marketing blog written by staffers that would keep the organization up-to-date on the latest thinking and respond to common concerns or competitive threats.

What are the benefits of such a “marketing transparency” web presence?

• A comprehensive website will show the scope of your marketing efforts, helping to quell critics who claim “We’re not marketing enough.”

• By proactively communicating all of your key marketing activities, your responses to individual questions or concerns such as “Why can’t we advertise more for my service line?” will sound less defensive and more strategic.

• While not everyone will care to use your marketing website, you’ll better engage those who are interested and concerned with your efforts and will have created an ongoing forum for marketing education within the organization.

• With a public commitment to goals, strategies and results, your team will be more careful in what it promises and will likely increase performance to keep those promises.

• Transparency demonstrates confidence, and that builds trust. If you’re confident enough to show everyone what you’re doing and how it is going – good or bad – people are more likely to support what you’re doing.

As competition and consumer driven choices continue to trend upwards, we predict (and hope) more hospital marketing teams will push through the “cobbler can’t fix his own shoes,” syndrome and put forth the resources and effort to develop this tool. The cost of the resources required to create the marketing transparency website – either as part of an existing intranet or as a stand-alone, secure website—are more than worth the investment based on the potential long-term benefits not only to the organization but also to you and your staff.

Guest Post: Does Your Hospital Suffer From Hidden Gem Syndrome?

You probably hear it all the time, from physicians, executives, board members: “If people only knew what great services we offered, we would be set.”

We call it the Hidden Gem Syndrome, as in “Our hospital is a hidden gem.” The thinking is “If we just communicated the quality/scope of our offerings, we’d have all the patients we can handle.” Those of us in healthcare marketing have to help others in our organizations move past the Hidden Gem Syndrome so we can focus on the true challenges at hand.

The Hidden Gem Syndrome is caused by four main assumptions:

• That people aren’t aware of your offerings (which may or may not be true).
• That your market wants to know about your offerings (most don’t, at least not until they need care).
• That if consumers did care about your services, they could know, understand, and value all of them.
• Worst of all, it assumes that addressing this notion (being hidden) is enough to convince people to use your organization. It’s not enough, not by a long shot.

Those who are pinning the financial survival of a clinic, service line, or hospital on simply “telling their story” are in for a rude awakening. In today’s world, marketing starts with awareness, but it ends with compelling customers to choose you over your competitors. How can you help your organization move past the Hidden Gem affliction? [more]