Imagine knowing what will most significantly impact your work in the next year. Imagine knowing what will most significantly impact the healthcare industry this coming year.
Would you change strategies? Would you adjust your priorities?
In Franklin Street’s 2018 Health Care Marketing Trends Report, key trends and opportunities are identified to help you stay ahead of the curve and navigate the chaotic times facing healthcare organizations today.
Here’s a closer look at the trends and how you can begin leveraging them today.
1. Design Thinking
Rooted in empathy and human-centeredness, Design Thinking applies rigor to creativity and innovation, driving to solutions and improved business outcomes with speed and reduced risk. It’s a powerful tool to explore the unknown, expand thinking, and ultimately, change behaviors.
Starting with a true understanding of the needs and desires of individuals gives you the power and clarity to make decisions and drive to sound answers.
2. Culture Wars
Gone are the days of push and pull marketing, buying and selling, and controlling your own narrative. Your brand is not your own. It belongs to your people.
Leading minds in the business world have long said positive culture plays an important role in reducing turnover, enhancing employee engagement and commitment, and creating brand ambassadors willing to share who you are and why you matter. Increasingly, social media, video, and the hive mentality intersect.
Recognize the importance of your outside-in image and lift the veil between the version of your organization you put out into the world and the inevitable fact that as the world interacts with your employees, it will come to know who you truly are.
3. Successful Brands Make Life Easier
When consumers rank their most preferred brands, names like Google, Amazon, and Netflix are consistently among the top results. While they span multiple industries and exist to solve unique consumer problems, they all have one thing in common—they make our lives easier. That’s why consumers reward them with their trust.
But in healthcare, we have an efficiency problem. We must find ways to build sustainable brands that make lives easier. Because in a world full of choices, if your brand isn’t making people’s lives easier—their choice will be easy to make.
4. The Decline of Institutional Trust
Public trust in major institutions like banks, government, and media has been on a steady decline for years. But 2017 saw a deadly combination of technology, cultural shifts, and politics. The result? Trust, as we know it, has changed.
Brands now have the opportunity to redefine trust through action.
Humans yearn for something to believe in. Those brands that stop thinking, “What are we going to say?” and instead start asking, “What are we going to do?” will have a massive competitive advantage in this new reality.
5. The Rise of Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) isn’t coming. It’s here. And it’s going to change almost everything.
Making it possible for machines to learn from experiences instead of coding methods, AI can perform human-like tasks. Soon we’ll see AI improving patient outcomes with advanced robotic surgery, virtual nurses, and automated imaging diagnosis.
AI is going to radically change marketing analytics and automation as well. By leveraging big data, AI will give health brands the opportunity to provide real personalization on a large scale.
What’s Next?
Knowledge isn’t power. Acting on knowledge is power. To learn more about these five trends and how you can act on them, join Franklin Street for a webinar on March 6 at 2PM EST. Register here.
Download the full 2018 Health Care Marketing Trends Report.
Megan Walworth is the Director of Client Relations at Franklin Street, a health care brand and marketing consultancy based in Richmond, VA.