Before you launch your next marketing campaign, Chris Bevolo from ReviveHealth has a question he wants you to ask yourself: What does success look like and what kind of action do you want people to take?
He posed this question yesterday at his strategy session at the Healthcare Marketing & Physician Strategies Summit, “Personalized Marketing: Moving from Persona to Patient,” with his colleague, Chris Boyer.
“Healthcare marketers need to stop focusing on feelings — like changing people’s minds or attitudes,” Bevolo says. “We need patients to take action. For example, one of the biggest problems with brand journalism is that there aren’t any strong calls to action. People need to do something, after seeing your content.”
Throughout the presentation, both presenters talked about how patient engagement is essential to the success of hospital organizations.
Here are the three reasons why you need to engage patients:
1. You’ll be more successful in building a stronger brand.
2. If you engage with someone the “right way,” you’ll wind up with a conversion.
3. You can tie your marketing efforts into real business results. This will improve your standing within your C-suite.
Bevolo and Boyer also focused on the type of technology tools hospital marketers need to use to start measuring what kind of action patients are taking. Among those tools: CRM, CMS and EMP.
“When you do personalized marketing, you need the right tools and technology to deliver the right content, to the right individuals, at the right time,” Boyer says.
Several attendees wanted advice on the best CRM tool. However, both stressed that no CRM tool was perfect. The biggest mistake hospital marketers make before purchasing a CRM is not doing their homework before buying it.
“Once you get a CRM, it’s really hard to get out of it,” Bevolo says. “That’s why you really need to get all your major stakeholders together to figure out what you need, before you buy. You should tell CRM vendors what you’re looking for, instead of them telling you what you need.”
By Jessica Levco, for Forum for Healthcare Strategists
Debbie Reczynski is Director of Communications and Program Development for the Forum for Healthcare Strategists.