14 Tips to Crafting Effective Healthcare Marketing with an Agency

JENNIFER BOULDEN

14 Tips to Crafting Effective Healthcare Marketing with an Agency | Healthcare marketing, Healthcare advertising, Healthcare Advertising Awards, Arkansas advertising, Arkansas healthcare marketing, Chip Culpepper, Shawn Solloway, Mangan Holcomb, EXIT Marketing, La Bonheur Children's Hospital, National Park Medical Center

Little Rock ad agency Mangan Holcomb Partners won Best in Show at the national 2008 Healthcare Advertising Awards for this "A Common Thread" campaign for La Bonheur Children's Hospital in Memphis. All the imagery included a red thread, which linked the ca
Editor's Note: Seeking out expertise in healthcare marketing for this issue, Medical News of Arkansas interviewed two Arkansas agencies that won national Healthcare Advertising Awards in 2008. Competing against numerous other agencies across the nation, in May EXIT Marketing received a gold award for a National Park Medical Center of Hot Springs campaign and Mangan Holcomb Partners received Best in Show for a campaign for Le Bonheur Children's Hospital in Memphis. Here are a few tips on marketing healthcare distilled from the agencies' creative directors, Shawn Solloway of EXIT Marketing and Chip Culpepper of Mangan Holcomb.


1. Know thyself.

The ancient Greeks had it right. Knowing who your hospital, group or organization is and what you do well is the cornerstone to any effective marketing.

"We work with hospitals in four states," Culpepper said. "Although they are all hospitals, they are all very different organizations, in very different market situations, different competitive sets, very different strengths. The best messaging, best campaigns we've ever created have had at their core a deep understanding of who the organization is at its heart. Once you get inside that most central of the concentric rings, if you can shine a light on that or hold a mirror up to it to the consumer, it rings true."

2. Differentiate yourself with messaging that reflects who YOU are.

Too many ads, Solloway said, suffer from a certain sameness.

"You see a lot of print ads where the execution is nice, but the problem is that it looks like everybody else's: this hospital looks like that hospital looks like that hospital. The negative result is that consumers, in their busy lives, have a hard time differentiating all those messages," Solloway said.

"We really need to know: What makes you a better hospital than the hospital down the street? Once we all agree on that, we bring the creative team to develop tactics that promote that dominant selling idea. Then, we never abandon it; we continue to embrace it each year so it builds equity."

3. Understand your consumers and approach your messaging from their point of view.

It's all about the consumers now, be they patients and their family members or the community at large. That's because they have more information, more choices, and more specific questions about their healthcare than at any previous time.

"In the past, communication may have been more image-oriented; now there's a lot more specific messaging and more specific dialogue that the consumer is looking for," Culpepper said.

"That's made for a more dynamic marketplace and a more robust need to communicate with healthcare consumers and understand what consumers are thinking and seeking. That's part of why marketing research has played a big part in what we do. Approaching messaging from a consumer-first mentality and understanding what they are thinking is a big help to getting them to respond to your message."

4. Define and set measurable goals, and hold your agency accountable.

"Marketing and advertising truly is a collaborative and goal-oriented business. It's not snake oil," Culpepper said. "It really works when you are disciplined about it and have measurable goals and objectives. You can sit and watch it work if you are patient and are looking for a long-term return."

People are talking about measurement more than ever and trying to understand their return on investment on the marketing side, Culpepper said.

"If you know what you're setting out to do on the front end when you are planning, set out clear measurements that you want in place. You can measure things like improved image or consumer attrition. As long as you are careful about what you are trying to measure, the measurements can follow."

Solloway said, "You have to have a relationship with a marketing company that truly understands the goals of the organization, so you work hand-in-hand trying to meet those goals. The hospital needs to put a value on their goals, and the agency needs to be held accountable to meet those goals. People ask, 'Is it expensive?' Well, it is expensive if at the end of the year we didn't even come close and we spent this much. Then it's time to re-evaluate the partnership. If we achieve the goals, then it was a great value. Then it becomes a partnership that's really priceless."

5. Delegate or Do-It-Yourself, as the marketing goal requires.

It's tempting to think of using an agency as a luxury, but sometimes it may be the smartest choice. Other times, not.

"Great people can do great things, whether they are agency professionals or work for a hospital part-time," Solloway said, adding that the choice between whether or not to outsource should be determined by the goals of each project and the internal resources you have available.

"If you have a goal to have 30 people come to a seminar, and you think you can achieve that through having an in-house designer design and print a direct mail piece, then that's great, it should be done in-house," he said. "If the goal is something that will come up short if it's done in-house, or will not look right, not match the brand, then you need to outsource it. Spend the money needed to meet the goal, or adjust the goal if it's too expensive. You shouldn't spend a little bit of money to not reach the goal."

6. Communicate with your agency well and often, and expect the same in return.

Culpepper, whose 25 years in the industry include several on the other side of the table, through the marketing department at UAMS, agreed that clear communications between the agency and the client can help find the most effective use of resources.

"Understanding both the resources within your walls and your agency's walls, and understanding what they can do best is really the big part of that decision-making process," Culpepper said. "Often one side isn't aware of the need and the other side isn't aware of the ability to fill the need. Sometimes those things go unsaid; it's valuable to sit down from time to time and ask, for example, "What are you doing in financial services for your bank clients that we might be able to apply to something we're doing?"

7. Embrace creativity, but understand it is a discipline as well.

It's a myth that advertising agencies are just places full of artists and writers who sit around having fun and amusing themselves, Culpepper said.

"The creative side can be fun, but it's a discipline just like anything else. Good creative is based in a business discipline," he said. "It has marketing goals and objectives that you are trying to accomplish, but it tries to do that in a way that sets the client apart from the competition, and in a way that is true to the personality of the client."

Solloway said EXIT Marketing works to take the client's dominant selling idea and wrap it up in an original package for the hospital or organization. Adding an element of entertainment value—be it wordplay, strong visuals, appropriate humor, music, or something else entirely—can not only grab the consumer's attention, but give them a more meaningful experience of your message and leaves them feeling good about your organization.

Culpepper said people outside the advertising industry often underestimate how grounded the imaginative elements of the work are in research. "You can't just be flashy and colorful for the sake of being flashy and colorful. It has to have a reason. When you have a good creative team, there's a lot of thought that goes into those things, from the font that you are using to the colors that you are using, and the psychology and consumer behavior that is behind those things."

8. Get your staff on board.

"What's important about healthcare marketing is not only that the external audience is reached and gets the message, feels better about sending their family to you for services, but that the internal audience also connects and takes pride in the messaging," Solloway said. "With our National Park Medical Center campaign, we got a lot of positive feedback, both internally and externally. They said it didn't feel like an ad, it felt like we were telling their story."

Culpepper agreed good research can result in a message that resonates with employees, and said that was vital.

"Your staff will always be your best possible salespeople, your best source of advertising. If your own people believe in the organization and are out there in the community telling the people they encounter about where they work and the positive things that happen there, if they see themselves being truly represented through your advertising and marketing through a voice that sounds like theirs, that's when you've done a good job of digging in and really understanding your brand."

9. Put the voice of the people to use in your marketing.

Both Mangan Holcomb's and EXIT's national award-winning campaigns used their research and creativity to prominently feature the ordinary people of the hospital—patients and employees—in extraordinary ways.

"With National Park, they had had some really good results in key service lines for patients and wanted to get the message out there in as real a way as possible, through testimonials with the real people, to reflect the character and charm of their hospital and the community they serve," Solloway said. "We went out, shot from the hip, let the photographer capture them being natural and real. We spent several days in Hot Springs, getting to know these people and their stories, and that helped make the difference."

Culpepper said the most powerful campaigns Mangan Holcomb has created so truly reflect the clients' identities, they do not feel like "advertising."

"The highest compliment I've ever been paid was for a hospital campaign that I wrote," Culpepper remembered. "A nurse spoke up in a focus group and said, 'A nurse must have written that.' That really made me feel exceptionally good that we were able to find the voice of that organization so well that a floor nurse thought one of her peers had written it. That is to me the most powerful compliment you can be given, that you spoke the words that someone standing next to them in the trenches would have uttered."

10. Be wowed by an agency's work and workers, not its glamour.

When looking for an agency, look at the substance, Solloway cautioned. He said the three most important things to research are what its other clients say about working with them, what you think of the actual people who make up the creative team on your account, and whether the agency's portfolio matches your hospital's personality.

"It's easy to get impressed with the size of an agency, or how slick their office looks," he said. "What you really want to know is what their other clients think of working with them, what you think of the five or so people who are going to be working with you day in and day out, and whether you like what the work says about the agency's strengths and personality. You can get a good sense of whether it's a fit from those three things."

11. Don't fear the budget discussions.

Too often, Culpepper said, when a client or potential client is asked for a budget, they want to hold back because they think the agency wants to spend every dollar of that. If you have a good agency and partnership, he said, there is no reason to fear talking money.

"I've never asked anyone for a blank check and never will," he said. "If people approach the agency relationship as a true partnership, rather than a vendor, then the expectation of value rather than cost comes into play. An agency worth its salt is asking you for a budget range, not because they want to spend every dollar you have, but because they are seeking to understand what kind of investment you can make together on this idea to get the return that you are looking for on the objectives. It's about a long-term partnership rather than about trying to cash a check today."

12. When warranted, harness new technologies to deliver your message.

New technologies and media channels are evolving every day. Solloway said that doesn't mean a hospital should jump to produce podcasts and blogs for its consumers, but it also does not mean it should avoid those things entirely.

"There are now many inexpensive ways of getting valuable, meaningful communications out to prospective or existing patients, through e-Blast, webinars, blogging, podcasting," Solloway said. "All those things are things a hospital can develop—often in-house, or with the help of an agency to set up templates—pretty inexpensively and continue to send out. A monthly e-newsletter can lead to downloads and links and continue to sell the hospital and build the brand. And establishing yourself now with the younger generation is important."

That said, Solloway said research on the newer advertising methods is still trickling in, not all of it positive.

"Some things everyone was real excited about initially are now becoming the junk mail of the Web. For example, just placing a banner ad on a website is not enough by itself. For a long time, people thought, 'This is great, this is a silver bullet, I can reach a million people for very little money!' But the numbers coming in show that that alone, just having that placement, is not creating the results you might have thought," he said. "The Web continues to bring new mediums and new ideas, and your agency should be comfortable exploring those with you. The good thing about the Web is that it's pretty cost-effective, especially in a statewide or regional area, so you can do a lot of trial and error without having to write huge checks."

13. Take advantage of the slow economy.

Like almost every industry, advertising spending forecast is down for 2009. That presents a prime opportunity to outshine the competition.

"Marketing, when done consistently over time, if you stay focused on the objectives, can be very effective, even in a down economy," Culpepper said. "Those who really capitalize on the opportunities to remain visible and consistent with their messaging when their competitors may pull back or go back completely to save money in the short term, you have a tremendous opportunity to gain ground. That's the long-term view of it, that's been proven through every recession, and even the Great Depression."

Solloway said the change could be good for the advertising agency, too.

"We're all going to have to work with a little less money, but through it, we're going to come up with new opportunities, new ideas and ways of doing business. I think the ad industry as a whole will be smarter and stronger when we come out of this from putting our creativity to work in new ways."

14. Continue delivering on your service promises.

At the end of the day, caring for patients to the best of your abilities is the smartest way to spend a dollar.

"No marketing is going to replace quality service to the consumer. If it's institutionalized, part of the culture of the organization, that's always going to be the most important thing healthcare organizations can deliver," Culpepper said. "When that is in place, consistently and over time, the messaging follows naturally and gets traction. Being true to the brand that you are while providing real and perceived value to the consumer is really the crux of what makes good marketing."