Navigating Healthcare Marketing:
Using Social Media to Connect with the Community

By Chad Campbell, SilverTech

Search engine optimization is the process of enhancing your website's visibility in organic search engine results. Search engine marketing allows you to promote your website through purchased ads displayed and highlighted in search engine results.

I work in the healthcare industry. How will this help me?

Healthcare is a challenging and complex environment with rapid law reform, increased competition, evolving economy issues, confusing best practices, educated patients and an unlimited, often misused and under-appreciated digital space. Utilizing online solutions to grow prospects and referrals is key in maximizing your potential as a leader amongst your peers.

Understanding Your Needs

Before making SEO decisions for your healthcare organization, it is important to have a comprehensive understanding of your business today, and what goals you want to accomplish with search engine marketing in the future.

As you begin to develop your overall strategy, outline and define your goals as they relate to all digital channels. Know your budget, understand your internal structure, and create a plan for internal approvals. Recognizing your current strengths and weaknesses will allow you to define and allocate resources to execute, optimize, update and analyze marketing campaigns and results. As you commit to projects, make educated short-term and long-term ROI goals with the understanding that an initial spend can generate more than just immediate financial returns.

Let's Consider the Following

• What is the competition doing and in what ways can you compare?
• What are the searching habits of your target patients?
• What does your ideal patient or referral look like?
• What do you want individuals to do after you direct them to your site?
• Do you have enough quality content to direct traffic to and retain traffic on your site?
• Is your brand clear across all pages of your website?
• How will you measure and justify your ROI?
• What kind of reporting and results are you looking to obtain?
• Do you have a unique offering that you could use to boost your SEO?
• What is your internal bandwidth for testing?

Are Your Own People Killing the Brand? 

By Carolyn Merriman, President, Corporate Health Group

Does your "caring" organization have an ogre in nursing or admitting? Do patients arriving at your ready-for-anything trauma center find there's no room?

Even the best branding dies when an internal obstacle gets in the way. Branding is about painting a picture in the mind of the customer, based on the actions of every�one associated with your organization.

Consider these five tips to help prevent internal breakdowns of your brand promise.

Keep anyone who might "touch" the customer involved in the branding strategy development from support staff to nurses, volunteers to housekeeping, and office managers to parking lot attendants. Ask how they would convince someone to use your service.

Ask department managers, "Is there anything at all that could prevent this brand strategy from being successful?"

Have anyone who's implementing the strategy, from physicians who get referrals to call center staff to those providing actual care explain how their area works, how they handle new patients, what they say or do when X or Y occurs. Be on the lookout for disconnects with the brand promise.

Tell your team what behavior is expected and give them the tools to translate the brand promise into something real that is clarified, quantified and put into action.

• Be specific in your strategy such as reducing wait time on hold by 20 percent.
• Demonstrate and explain how it can be done. New policies should state and enforce the expectation such as walking a guest to a location, answering the phone in three rings or resolving issues within 78 hours.
• Build the behavior and measure into customer satisfaction surveys as appropriate.
• Put them into performance reviews and reward the right behavior!

Position the value of brand behavior in terms that are of benefit to every member of your organization. For example, you might appeal to a physician's personal ego, desire for workplace pro�ductivity and positive reputation among patients.

To help people tune into the benefits, think about four levels:

• Corporate-level benefits - increasing market share, retaining covered lives, capturing out-of-pocket health care dollars that are self-referred
• Department-level benefits - increased volume, improved productivity
• Personal, employee-level benefits - job security, a sense of pride in successfully delivering a brand experience
• Customer benefits - realized when your organ�ization keeps its brand promises and makes them tangible so that the customer connects them with a provider he can count on.

Agree on the desired behavior (the radiology department wants to be more customer-oriented with physicians, for example) and test it with a scenario. What would you say when you can't meet the physician's scheduling demands?

Before the branding strategy, the scheduler might have said, "Nope, that time's taken. What's your second choice?" After the branding strategy, he might say, "I'm sorry Dr. X. An early morning slot that day isn't available. Is it early morning you're looking for or that specific day? Let's see what else we can find for you." While the answer is "no" in each example, the customer service-oriented delivery works much better.

Script questions and responses. Record people saying them. People make natural improvisations - some will be good and some won't. Re-script the good ones until they're second nature.

Enlist your human resources team or an outside trainer to help you reinforce the message with formal training.

Rather than jumping ahead to the next campaign, make sure whatever you do next fits the brand strategy.

Think about your organization as a real person. How would it talk in a certain situation? How would it behave at a party? Make sure everything you do is consistent with that image.

Ignore the competition. Instead of getting wrapped up in where they're advertising or how big their ad is, say "so what?" Don't play the same game they do, or you'll end up getting lumped into the same commodity they are.

Keep the brand sacred. If you're going to keep your brand's integrity, mandate compliance at every turn and keep your eye on the brand.

Carolyn Merriman, founder and president of Corporate Health Group, has been working with providers to innovate, negotiate and navigate the healthcare marketplace since 1988. She provides consultation for strategic and business planning, occupational health, physician relations, and call centers, marketing and sales. Visit www.corporatehealthgroup.com or contact Carolyn at 1.888.334.2500 or [email protected].

When the Media Circus Comes to Town

Thursday, February 26

9-10 am

Presented by Ellen Slingsby and Gail Carvelli of Rhode Island Hospital/Lifespan

Hear how Rhode Island Hospital managed the intersection of media, staff and patient privacy, as well as the delicate balance of working with a large entertainment company whose employees were injured on the job, when eight performers in the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus were injured in a circus accident in May 2014.

Successful Reporter Relationships 

Thursday, March 26

9-10 am

Presented by Felice Freyer, Boston Globe; Amy Blustein, director of marketing, Women & Infants Hospital

Boston Globe health care reporter Felice Freyer has worked the beat for 25 years. She'll tell us what reporters are looking for, and share her biggest pet peeves.  Amy Blustein is a health care communications veteran who has changed her media relations strategy to leverage websites, social media and blogs.  Learn how these women have worked together to tell amazing stories of innovation, medical miracles and health policy.

This webinar will give you takeaways to improve your media relations efforts and land that front page story for your organization.

How to Speak with One Voice...When You Don't Speak the Same Language

Thursday, April 30

9-10 am

Kim O'Leary, Communications Strategist, The University of Vermont Medical Center and Michael O'Farrell, Director of Marketing & Communications at Lawrence + Memorial Hospital

When hospitals affiliate, how do you create consistent, culturally-sensitive messaging across multiple organizations with different needs and methods of communicating?  Especially when you're only just getting to know your affiliate marketing communications colleagues?  Join speakers Mike O'Farrell and Kim O'Leary as they share lessons learned during their respective organizations' affiliation processes.  They'll discuss how to establish strong, trusting relationships with new colleagues; deliver effective system-wide internal communications; and navigate tricky rebranding situations.

A discussion with author Sheri Fink, MD 

Thursday, May 28, 2015

9-10 am

BE OUR GUEST! Non members please join us for this special webinar. Enter the discount code GUEST on the payment page to join us for free. 

If you are already registered from the previously scheduled date, you do not need to re-register for May 28. 

Buy the book here 
(You do not have to read the book to participate in this webinar)

Join physician and author Sheri Fink, MD who will discuss her New York Time best seller Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital for this riveting discussion. After Katrina struck and the floodwaters rose, the power failed, and the heat climbed, exhausted caregivers chose to designate certain patients last for rescue. Months later, several health professionals faced criminal allegations that they deliberately injected numerous patients with drugs to hasten their deaths. Five Days at Memorial, the culmination of six years of reporting, unspools the mystery of what happened in those days, bringing the reader into a hospital fighting for its life and into a conversation about the most terrifying form of health care rationing.

About the Presenter 

Sheri Fink is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (Crown, 2013), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, the Ridenhour Book Prize, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Fink's news reporting has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Magazine Award, and the Overseas Press Club Lowell Thomas Award, among other journalism prizes. A former relief worker in disaster and conflict zones, Fink received her M.D. and Ph.D. from Stanford University. Her first book, War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival (Public Affairs), is about medical professionals under siege during the genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina. She is a correspondent at the New York Times.