by admin | Sep 6, 2017 | Branding & Identity, Springboard News
If you aren’t already using testimonials in healthcare marketing plans, I hope that this inspires you to do so. Testimonials are a powerful tool that can persuade potential customers to buy or use your services. In fact, testimonials could be one of the most powerful marketing tools you have! People feel more confident engaging in a relationship when they know there are other satisfied customers. Through testimonials, you can give potential patients a reason to believe and a trusted opinion from a third party. Testimonials are effective because they: Build trust. Your customers share the positive experiences they’ve had with your organization’s services. Provide feedback. Asking for testimonials is a great psychological spur to encourage companies to continually strive for their best performances—and allows quick corrections if they begin to drift off course. Aren’t “salesy.” Because they aren’t written in your corporate voice, they stand out as unbiased and authentic. Overcome skepticism. A good testimonial has the power to convince your toughest prospects that your products or services are worth pursuing. A few quick tips: Ask for testimonials at every opportunity and quote the best ones throughout your marketing materials: brochures, website, emails, etc. Customers value different things, so select a range of testimonials that will appeal to all of your customer segments. You can’t have too many glowing customer testimonials! Don’t use family members, friends, or paid actors to do testimonials. Testimonials in healthcare should come from people you’ve selected who genuinely admire your healthcare system. Get written permission from your customers before using their testimonials. Keep your testimonials up-to-date. The information will begin to seem irrelevant if...
by admin | Nov 3, 2016 | Branding & Identity, Springboard News
When you check your newsfeed of your favorite healthcare social media site, there is always one – okay, many – of your friends, family, or co-workers whose updates are annoying enough to make you cringe. It may be posting a picture of every meal they eat or sharing too many cat videos. It could be a bad joke or (especially this time of year) their political views. As much as you may “like” this person in real life, their actions have probably left you hovering over the unfriend button more than once. Individuals aren’t the only ones on social media who can be annoying. Brands are right up there. A report from Sprout Social titled, “Turned Off: How Brands Are Annoying Customers on Social,” contains some very interesting insights from a consumer survey centered around this topic. As you may have guessed, there are a number of things brands do to rub their audiences the wrong way. These include posting too many promotions, trying to be funny when they’re not, and not replying to their audience’s messages. Lack of engagement on the brand’s part is particularly a problem in healthcare. Per Sprout Social, healthcare is ranked number one out of 15 major industries in terms of how engaged consumers are with brands on social media. But, it is ranked number 14 in terms of how responsive the industry as a whole is to consumers. It boils down to this, consumers really want to communicate with healthcare brands and healthcare brands really aren’t responding. There is a huge opportunity for hospitals and other brands in the healthcare industry to separate...
by admin | Jul 20, 2016 | Branding & Identity, Springboard News
You can call Baby Boomers lots of things: Ambitious. Workaholics. Optimists. Just don’t call them old. As the generation who vowed to never trust anyone over 35 enters retirement, they’ll want to retire their own way — not the way their parents did. Don’t expect the people who went to Woodstock to sit around all day, quilting and eating pea soup. We know the term “senior living communities” runs the gamut: active, independent places to communities with 24/7 care for seniors facing end-of-life diseases. When it comes to marketing your senior living community, you don’t have to be everything to everybody. Just as each senior is looking for something “different,” you don’t have to offer a cookie-cutter approach to care that your competition does. Below are a few trends and examples from senior centers that know how to standout: Focus on Luxury The Clare in downtown Chicago touts their Gold Coast address as a sign of luxury. This independent lifestyle community appeals to an affluent market. It boasts an onsite beautician and vegetarian meal options. In fact, it’s not just selling the community — it’s selling the city of Chicago. It’s a place to retire, but still offers people the glamour of big city living. Caring for Caregivers Some nursing homes concentrate on end-of-life care or caring for elders with long-term health problems. For this type of market, it’s really important to reach out to caregivers. Usually, a family member will pick out a nursing home for their loved one. Are your marketing materials speaking directly to this audience? Are you showing that you’re a trusted partner? And are you...
by admin | Jun 21, 2016 | Branding & Identity, Springboard News
Everybody is buying somebody. Or somebody is getting sold. So it goes with the latest flurry of activity with hospital Mergers and Acquisitions. With all the Mergers and Acquisitions out there, odds are — your hospital might go through one in the future or may be going through one right now. With a M&A, you might find yourself saddled with a bunch of urgent care centers. Or immediate care clinics. Or walk-in clinics. Or convenient care clinics. Whatever you want to call them, the list of possible names goes on and on. All these names can be confusing for your brand, especially when you’re dealing with an M&A. Since an urgent care clinic can be called and labeled so many different things, your job is to figure out how to simplify the naming process. Here’s how: Pick a retail name “Retail health” is one of the hottest trends in hospital marketing right now. That’s when a hospital tends to think more like a Nordstrom or Starbucks, in terms of servicing and reaching target demographics. For example, MultiCare Health System in Tacoma, WA named its urgent care clinic Indigo Urgent Care, with its own logo and branding. Henry Ford Health System, MI, did something similar when it named its urgent care clinic, QuickCare Clinic. If your hospital is going through an M&A with a former competitor or outside partner, there might be a more neutral, retail-type name that fits your urgent care centers. Make sure you’ve got a solid PR and marketing strategy Urgent care situations happen infrequently. But you want patients to think of you first, when a medical situation...
by admin | Jun 21, 2016 | Branding & Identity, Springboard News
Being a mid-sized health system in today’s healthcare marketplace is tough. If you’re busy trying to compete on a grand scale and make claims how your features are just as good as the big hospital the next metro over, it might be time to take a step back and think about what really matters to both you and your community. This is where a solid brand promise can work for you. While it’s important to know your strengths and your identity – you need to provide value. A unique brand promise becomes an effective shorthand for how you can best meet the needs of your community. Solid, effective branding engages with people at an emotional level. It’s not a logo, a color scheme, or a typeface. Yes, those are visual representations of your brand. But what really matters is your “heartbeat,” what makes you come alive and breathe in the minds of your consumers. It is your distinctive message, your personality. It’s who you are, how you talk to people, and how you present yourself and your organization to the world. And being a mid-size, community health system, you have an advantage over your larger brethren. Your deep roots and long history with your communities give you a personalized connection the big guys don’t have. This becomes even more relevant because reimbursement is transitioning from fee-for-service to value-based. So what’s the best way to hit on your brand promise? First, think about who you are, what you do best, what your customers need from you and how your organization fits in their lives. It may sound simple, but that’s really what...
