Hospitals have been really good at creating awareness in the marketing funnel, offline. They run medical camps that create awareness directly with their target audience. They have been doing it for a long period of time, after that, it’s about providing solutions to the patients who come in. Thus, the Word of Mouth spreads and addresses their business part in general. Relatively a solid marketing approach from a Healthcare marketing standpoint.
Now, digital has penetrated in all of our lives, that awareness part has been overtaken by digital especially through videos. The medical camps still hold strong grounds, it is absolutely fine to continue doing it, you may consider reducing the frequency but you don’t have to stop conducting camps.
How to Approach Digital?
There has been a lot of tactical approach towards marketing, this may be happening because it appears super easy on the surface or there have been a lot of people who are ready to take care of it in the name of digital marketing. They think of Efficiency first and Effectiveness second but it should be the other way around. What is the point of being efficient if there is no effectiveness?
Some hospitals are even approaching Instagram as a place to display their sales pamphlet. It doesn’t have to be that way. It is a short-sighted, tactical and counter-strategic approach.
Some hospitals jump directly onto Instagram and publish superficial content which never connects with the audience. The idea of any piece of marketing content is to grab the attention of the audience and/or grab mindshare and/or enable sales immediately and/or definitely.
Neat design, sharing informative/helpful content, basically educational in nature have better engagement thus earning mindshare of your audience is higher and beneficial to your business in the long run.
How to Approach Content?
This is where we all slip and choose the easiest option and thus, also, helps us believe it is efficient. If we choose to create meaningful content in the first place we can have better control over the entire line of digital marketing. Ie., Effectiveness over Efficiency.
This directs us to make a pillar form of content on a repository-based platform, from there on repurposing it across other feed-based platforms and nurturing our audience, making them our true fans to the platform where our pillar form content resides.
A blog site -> facebook/instagram
Basically, Pillar content(your content repository) → Repurposed content
The important thing here in this model is you have to make them subscribe to your blogs and manage that information through a mail service provider like Mailchimp. This model suits digital products industry and creators but not for Healthcare. Also, remember you have to create blog posts regularly that help your audience, not a technical one.
The better model would be:
A video channel on YouTube, repurpose that video and distribute it on Instagram and Facebook and attract your audience to your channel and retain them by continuously publishing valuable content.
YouTube → Facebook/Instagram
Basically, Pillar content (your content repository) → Repurposed content
In this way you don’t have to manage your audience who opted in for your channel, they naturally subscribe to your channel and stay with your content. We can boost your channel by distributing your video content into beautiful designs on Instagram and Facebook, thus taking them from those secondary platforms to the primary platform YouTube where they stay with you.
How to Create Videos?
- Connecting with your speciality with educational and helpful videos is the first step in creating the video rollout plan.
- Writing down the titles with respect to that is the next step.
- If you are the person to appear in front of the camera as the face of your hospital brand, it is fine. If not, choosing a few doctors who are good in front of the camera and articulating content is a good approach.
- Now the shoot is over, editing the video & publishing it on your video channel is the next step. Sticking to a set schedule is important as it helps in both directions in terms of video production and as well as from an audience perspective. (So & so time, a video can be expected – this is the expectation we have to set to build a successful brand channel).
[we have frameworks that address the video content creation part in line with your speciality(ies)].
Repurposing and Distributing it
After a while, you will have accumulated a set of videos that are ready to be distributed and brought to the audience. Ideally, you will reach this point after a week or even 2 months later, mostly depending on the volume of videos you publish.
Now that you have a content repository – YouTube (a pillar content), time to extract content in a nice way from the videos and design a cohesive set of images, and publish it on Instagram as a carousel or as images. Provide value in that carousel/Images independently, giving your audience the feel of the worthiness of their time.
In the last image ask them to watch the full video. However, in your video, you will be asking your viewers to subscribe to the channel. These all are small nudges to keep your audience in the line of our communication and to attract them.
Distributing those designs/slides on feed-based platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin and bringing an audience to your brand channel and in the process, a part of those audiences will stay with us(subscribers).
By doing it again and again repeatedly we accumulate an audience for our content hence they are our brand audience. In other words, True fans. They are going to get our name out and bring, people, in the short, mid, and long term.
Connecting Offline and Online
If you connect these contents with the offline audience, you are up for one of the few companies which get digital marketing right, on left, right, and centre.
How to connect with offline audiences? Remember about the medical camps we spoke about at the start of the article? You can literally hand off a print material that helps them scan a QR code and stay connected with your brand video channel. At this point, you have nailed a brilliant digital marketing strategy that serves you for years. In the entire process, optimise, optimise, optimise – that is efficiency.
If you want to connect with more audiences you might miss somewhere. Remember the walk-ins into your hospital? They might have walked in due to so many reasons (Existing patients, Emergency, Proximity favouring, etc.,) Connect them and take them virtually to your channel by placing a QR code on your hospital reception, staircase mid landing, elevators, etc.
