Author Archives: Diane Morgan

Healthcare Marketers: Expand Your Reach with Online Videos

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In our last blog post, we discussed the importance of giving patients what they want to see on your healthcare provider website. As you plan your content strategies, think about the rapidly growing reach of online videos. They’re an effective way to build your brand by engaging your audience.

Check out these related insights from a health consumer study by Google and OTX:

  • One in three people (32 percent) watch health videos online. That outranks the number of people watching videos about food, celebrities, beauty and fashion, sports and many other content categories.
  • More than half (54 percent) of patients want information on specific conditions when they watch health videos online. Additionally, 49 percent express interest in videos featuring experts, e.g. physicians (like these videos we helped create to introduce the doctors of Lawrence Memorial Hospital’s affiliated OB-GYN practice).
  • Four in 10 patients (43 percent) say they used a search engine for more information on health topics featured in online videos. Many took further action as well: 21 percent signed up for a health-related newsletter, 12 percent clicked on an ad, 10-16 percent recommended a website or forwarded a video link to someone, while another 7 percent shared a video via chat or blog. When you look at it this way, it’s easy to see how online videos make a very effective ‘gateway’ touch point between your organization and the people you want to reach.

In addition to being easy and relatively inexpensive to distribute, online videos excite and resonate with people who prefer to learn by watching (roughly two-thirds of the population). For your audience, videos are more closely linked to a storytelling experience than text on a screen, which makes video a more engaging and memorable medium by its very nature. Videos also offer a great deal of flexibility when it comes to production and execution:

  • They can be made on any budget. If spending is an issue, consider using a flipcam in a quiet work space with an attractive backdrop and good lighting. Feature your physicians speaking naturally (albeit from a well-prepared script) to deliver a clear, concise message with minimal post-production editing.
  • They can be repurposed for a variety of applications. Think outside your website and YouTube – your video content could be integrated into a webinar, included in e-newsletters, featured on your facebook page, displayed on tabletops at recruitment fairs and more.
  • They make very compelling online ads. If your budget allows it, go beyond educational videos and into the advertising arena. Video ad spending is projected to increase by 40 percent this year alone. Public service announcement videos are also effective at building brands by reaching out to people in meaningful ways – like this PSA we produced for Saint Luke’s Muriel I. Kauffman Women’s Heart Center, an oldie but goodie that moved the dial on heart awareness among Kansas City women.

If you’re new to video content creation and optimization, contact us for some useful tips. Then start planning – and producing – to establish new connections using online videos.

Healthcare Websites: Giving Patients What They Want

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Healthcare Marketing: WebsitesSo…what do you think of our new website? We hope you like it as much as we do, because if we don’t provide a helpful, informative and visually appealing experience while you’re here, then we’re just wasting space, plain and simple.

This is especially true for hospital and physician practice websites. These sites should be current, easily accessible resources for the eight in 10 internet users who seek health information online, but generally speaking, they’re not. Studies show many of today’s provider websites are mediocre at best. Why? Because these patient-facing sites don’t offer much when it comes to patient-friendly, patient-focused information.

What they do tend to offer in abundance is hospital- or practice-centric ‘About Us’ content. While it’s okay to provide an overview of the organization as a local patient care provider, that’s really not why people visit the site, especially when it comes at the expense of information patients really need, like whether their insurance will be accepted, what forms they’ll need for a first-time visit, which floor the lab is on, whether they can get a certain procedure at your facility, how to reach their specialist by phone, and so on.

Bottom line: the most successful healthcare websites put patients first. Why disappoint when you can ‘wow’ people instead? Making your site patient-friendly involves varying levels of complexity and expertise, but here are some things to consider that won’t require a complete overhaul:

  • Be accessible to everyone. Offer concise content at a high school reading level – no long, jargon-heavy paragraphs. Make sure it’s a mobile-friendly site, because one in five cell phone owners in the U.S. today have used their phones to look up health-related information. Offer bilingual content if English is a second language for many of your patients, and accommodate people with disabilities like visual impairments that limit web accessibility if you can. Thanks to a wide variety of plugins, extensions and widgets available for today’s most commonly used content management systems, these tasks are often not as difficult as you might think.
  • Make sure search engines can – and do – find you. Plugins for search engine optimization (SEO) are a dime a dozen these days. It helps to have key words and phrases in your content, but that alone is rarely enough to make you a top match in searches. Deploy SEO strategies to ensure people find you when your content answers the questions they’re asking.
  • Keep it fresh. Stale, outdated content engages no one. Be sure to update your site with new developments relevant to patients, like upcoming health promotions, new doctors and services, extended appointment hours and so on. And if one or more of your physicians is willing to blog in layman’s terms on key medical topics and news, we say go for it!

By the way, online videos are also a great way to provide truly engaging content that users can access and absorb with ease. But that’s a whole other blog topic – read more here.

And finally, in terms of design, here’s your new mantra: No Clutter Allowed. Apply the same levels of neatness, logic and organization to your site as you do at your facility. Remember, your website – and in particular the landing page – is often your first chance to make a good impression, so use it wisely. Put the needs and interests of patients first.

Associated Purchasing Retains Dobies to Lead Healthcare Brand Initiative

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KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Associated Purchasing Services (APS), a group purchasing organization jointly owned by Missouri Hospital Association and Kansas Hospital Association, has retained Dobies Healthcare Group to facilitate planning related to its corporate identity and brand. Dobies will lead the initiative by working closely with APS leadership and staff to enhance corporate identity, establish core messages and create a communication action plan to support the roll-out of the organization’s new messaging and identity.

Dobies Healthcare Group Nominated for Small Business of the Year and Mr. K. Award

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KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Each year, the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce holds the Small Business Celebration, a series of events honoring small businesses in the Greater Kansas City area. Dobies Healthcare Group was nominated again for the Small Business of the Year award in 2012, along with and the Mr. K. Award, an award named after famed Kansas City entrepreneur Ewing Kauffman.

Lawrence Memorial Hospital Renews Commitment with Dobies as Healthcare Marketing Agency of Record

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KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Lawrence Memorial Hospital (LMH), a 173-bed, not-for-profit hospital in Lawrence, Kan., recently renewed its contract with Dobies Healthcare Group as agency of record. Since 2008, Dobies Healthcare Group has provided strategic marketing counsel to the hospital, along with the development and implementation of marketing campaigns that increase awareness of LMH services.

Brand Promises in Healthcare: How to Deliver through Patient Touch Points

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Healthcare consumers are more empowered than ever to choose according to their perceptions, and they know it. As health plans get more flexible in letting people pick providers – and online platforms enable word-of-mouth to cover more ground at faster speeds – the competition to be anyone’s provider of choice is fierce.

Which brings me to the importance of patient touch points—those many opportunities for healthcare providers to ‘live their brand’ by enhancing patient experiences. Every interaction counts, whether direct or indirect, clinical or non-clinical.

In a sea of how-to’s and must-do’s surrounding social media and health information technology, it’s important to keep more conventional methods in our strategies as well. With today’s patients empowered to think and act like retail consumers, providers are wise to take pages from consumer-oriented business models to elevate service levels and deliver fully satisfying experiences at the point of care. Think Disney, Zappos and Nordstrom.

Here are three great places to start:

  • Personalize Care. People love it when they feel camaraderie with their care team, and they respond with loyalty when they believe you know them as individuals. Introduce yourself, call patients by name and look them in the eye. Also, be mindful that your presence in the community is making impressions on people even before they become your patients, so find ways to customize every encounter.
  • Be Responsive. It goes without saying that patients are happier when healthcare providers eliminate wait times. Go beyond the obvious. Ask patients about their expectations and respond to their personal needs. Unanticipated opportunities to show extraordinary service go a long way toward improving the patient experience.
  • Keep Patients Informed. Whether it’s about medications or when the doctors are likely to make their rounds, keep patients informed. Explain tests, treatments and procedures; describe the technology you use. Include patients (and if appropriate, their families) in decision-making.

At Dobies Healthcare Group, we encourage healthcare marketers to champion the notion that brand is what you do. It is not a logo or tagline—a brand is something that lives in people’s hearts and minds. It’s defined by expectations developed over time through your communications and more importantly, your actions.

In other words, when you make a brand promise related to patient experience, you need to know you can keep it. You also need to continually strengthen the promise by identifying and translating consumer expectations into touch points that matter most to patients.

Dobies Presents Social Media Strategies at KCHCS

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KANSAS CITY, Mo. – “How to Deploy Social Media to Improve Patient Engagement” – that was the topic at hand when Carol Dobies, president and owner of Dobies Healthcare Group, led a panel discussion at the Kansas City Healthcare Communicators Society (KCHCS) 2011 Fall Conference last week. Healthcare professionals who attended the interactive session gained a better understanding of best practices in social media strategies. Panelists included representatives from two area hospitals, and a data and analytics expert from a local firm that monitors web and social media traffic.

Word Clouds Put the “Fun” in Functional for Marketers

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You’ve seen them on blogs as handy visual aids that spotlight keywords from page content. Word clouds make it easy for web surfers to determine if any given blog or post interests them enough to keep reading. But for marketers, word clouds offer communication tools that can be used outside the blog as well.

At their most basic level, word clouds make text on a page look more exciting than, well, text on a page. You can use them to convey data and information in a way that breaks the mold of standard presentation formats like slides, spreadsheets and pie charts.

Looking for a creative way to share marketplace feedback to your executive and board leaders? Instead of a report with lengthy quotes and testimonials, consider presenting a word cloud that displays what consumers are saying in one quick, easily digestible image. Information that’s easy to absorb at a glance resonates more with readers.

Word clouds can also help you take a keen look at the content on your website, particularly if you’re not employing search engine optimization tactics. In seconds you’ll know exactly what words appear most frequently on key pages. You can use the results to assess whether or not you’re communicating what you want—and don’t want—to say. Try the same thing with key pages from your competitors’ sites to compare and contrast key messages.

And speaking of your Internet presence, do you know what’s being said about your organization online? Word clouds are a great way to determine if your online press is positive and aligns with your key messages. Google your organization or a specific topic, then enter text from the search results into a word cloud app. You’ll get an instant visual representation of your online image and what it says about you.

Your consumers and employees have suggestions for improvement – do you know what they are? Word clouds can help you figure it out. Just as they can be used to draw attention to your strengths, they can also uncover weaknesses. Without making it public, try making a word cloud to zero in on specific areas needing improvement.

There’s no shortage of word cloud generators available online. Look around on sites like Wordle, Tagxedo and Word It Out (to name just a few). Pick the app you like the most and discover what it can reveal about your marketing and communication efforts. Why not start right now? It’s easy, it’s creative, and it’s fun.

 

Dobies Healthcare Group Facilitates Strategic Planning for NATCO

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KANSAS CITY, Mo. – The North American Transplant Coordinators Organization (NATCO) engaged Dobies Healthcare Group to conduct a brand audit earlier this year. The strategic healthcare marketing and branding experts at Dobies performed a systematic, board-directed review of the company’s branding efforts, which included a communications audit, an internal audit and an external audit. After presenting key findings from the brand audit to NATCO leadership, Dobies Healthcare Group facilitated a two-day strategic planning session earlier this month to convert data-driven recommendations into strategies and tactics.

Healthcare Pros Explore Patient-Centered Care

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Healthcare Marketing Tip #28Last year we developed a deck of 52 marketing tips and collected more from our peers at SHSMD. A big “thank you” goes to Lisa Crockett, Manager of Strategy and Business Development at Providence Health & Services for this month’s Healthcare Marketing Tip:

“Before starting any marketing effort, think about what patients will experience.”

Hospitals and other healthcare providers that differentiate themselves by building a brand identity around a patient-centered approach to care are poised to thrive in this era of healthcare consumerism. But the brand promise must meet healthcare consumers’ increasingly high expectations.

“It’s easy to be comfortable with how we’ve delivered healthcare in the past, but change is necessary if we want loyal patients,” said Crockett. “It’s important to continue to advance patient experience beyond acute care to patient’s lives post-discharge to ultimately improve outcomes and lower costs.” According to numerous studies, patient-centered care can lower operating costs and ultimately save hospitals time and money.

Other Benefits of Improved Patient Experience:

  • Shorter patient stays
  • Lower cost per case
  • Reduced staff costs
  • Low cost improvements can make the same impact as expensive ones
  • Higher employee retention rates
  • Decreased malpractice claims

Opponents of patient-centric care argue it won’t provide enough financial return to justify the cost associated with staff training and patient volume disruptions that can occur while programs and facilities are updated. Supporters of improved patient experience maintain that the benefits outweigh the costs; in addition, they say it is a moral obligation to provide a better experience. “It’s the right thing to do,” said Crockett. “If we’re not here to help people, then we’re in the wrong business.”

Patients have increasingly high expectations for the way care is delivered. Hospitals need to meet this demand by embedding the concepts of improved patient experience into the fabric of the hospital’s core values and culture. According to Crockett, most hospitals are already intent on improving patient satisfaction and they can make gains in improved patient experience by monitoring and quickly responding suggestions and complaints. “Thank you notes and complaint letters tell you a lot about gaps in service. Once you involve everyone on the healthcare team in the changes that are made, you’ll start to see the benefits of patient-centric care.”

What ways has your hospital or practice implemented patient-centered care? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter @DobiesGroup.