By Tara Raeber Vail and Gur Tsabar
If the best advertising is the kind money can’t buy, then surely the best advertising for a health care network is the kind that comes straight from a patient’s heart.
Take new mom, Michelle M., for example, who recently gave birth to her youngest child at Ascension, but who became worried when her labor stalled, and her birth plan turned into something unplanned. “I knew my OB was great, but it was the nurses who really blew my mind. She knew I didn’t want to have a C-section, so she pulled out all the stops. She coached me, she encouraged me, she pushed me along. And when the doctor came back an hour later, I was fully ready to deliver. My nurse took the time to help me have the kind of experience that I wanted to have. I really feel like I left there with a friend.”
In a matter of seconds on video, Michelle was able to demonstrate why there’s no greater asset in a hospital’s portfolio than a deeply satisfied patient who has experienced the high-quality care the hospital network provides from start to finish. Without even trying (or being scripted in any way), Michelle authentically attested to the fact that the nurse actually kept the tenets of the Ascension brand promise – "listening to understand" and "compassionate, personalized care." And therein lies the trick to unleashing the power of word-of-patient marketing.
Getting a patient to this very place — where they are attesting on their own volition that your brand’s promise was actually kept — has little, if anything, to do with the mechanics of getting them on video to share their stories. That’s the easy part. The hard part is grasping all the things that had to go so very right to get them to that very point – where they’re so selflessly sharing such compelling and heartfelt words and moments.
Those things include, but are in no way limited to:
- Giving up on the idea that you, as a marketer, can actually control what patients will say about their experiences with your brand;
- Creating a culture of content within your organization so that you can effectively and systematically identify, harness, target and amplify your patients’ most telling stories; and,
- Doing everything in your power to ensuring that your patients’ stories are personal and truly relatable to the consumers you are working so tirelessly to reach.
Learn More at the SHSMD Annual Conference
At the SHSMD Connections Conference in Nashville on Wednesday, September 11 at 9:45am, we’ll go much deeper into the insights we’ve gathered from our experiences marketing to patients in a neatly packaged session titled: “The Five Secrets to Unleashing the Power of Word-of-Patient Marketing.” It will be one of a broad range of educational sessions offered at the conference designed to position SHSMD members for success in the new health care landscape.
This blog was written by:
Tara Raeber Vail
Vice President, Marketing and Communications
Ascension, St. Louis, Missouri
Gur Tsabar
Executive Vice President, Digital Strategy & Innovation
Ketchum, Los Angeles, California