This checklist is not exhaustive, but it’s a great starting point. We recommend meeting with key representatives from each department to customize the plan for your company. From there, you can assign tasks and deadlines for a timely and thorough roll-out.

Update your website and sites that link to you:

• Get the domain for the new name and, when ready, redirect the old domain to the new site URL.
• Change the name and logo wherever they appear on your website.
• Update SEO/keywords if applicable.
• Revise metadata on web pages as needed, including page titles, page descriptions and image alt-tags. Leave a “trail” in the meta-tag description and keyword of the old name.
• Update your listings in applicable online directories.
• Send updated logo and company name/descriptions to any partner or affiliated vendors that mention your company and/or link to your website from their own.
• Write a press release and post it on your website explaining why your company name has changed.

Update your social media sites, which may require new pages built from scratch:

• Different rules and procedures apply depending on the social site, so study up on each to get a better understanding of what’s involved. For example, Facebook will only let you change the name of your page if it has fewer than 200 likes – and even then, changing the page name does not change the page URL.
• In many cases, it will be necessary to start a whole new page and encourage existing fans to “follow” you on your new pages instead.
• Wherever you are currently linking to social pages that will become outdated once you’ve built new pages, be sure to update your links. These URLs are most commonly embedded in social icons on the company website and/or email templates.

Facilitate the trade name change across your operations:

• Finance: invoices, statements, checks, credit applications, change of address forms, banking information, contracts, employer identification number and other IRS records.
• Human Resources: company policy statements, employee handbooks, internal forms, applications, training materials, payroll, etc.
• IT: company intranet, related web domains, vendor notices.
• Legal: incorporation articles, business registration and trademarks, board of directors’ materials, memberships.
• Customer Service: service scripts, forms, contracts, return authorizations.

Update all business systems:

• Name badges
• Business cards, email signatures and addresses
• Letterhead, envelopes, labels, folders, coversheets
• Telephone greetings and messages, including:
  • Outgoing voicemail greetings
  • Standardized greeting when answering live calls
  • Company “on-hold” messaging
  • Answering service/after-hours call center greeting
  • Outgoing caller ID
• Signage/way-finding
• Internal documents (forms, applications, etc.)

Last but certainly not least, update all affected marketing materials:

• PowerPoint templates and existing presentations that are still in use
• Word templates
• Brochures, flyers, patient education materials, other print
• Trade show booth
• Poster presentations
• Case studies, white papers, customer testimonials, etc.
• TV and radio spots if applicable
• Digital banner ads if applicable
• Newsletter/e-newsletter templates
• Videos and product demos
• Customer-facing training materials
• Promotional items (pens, notepads, etc.)
• Web content
• Leadership biographies
• PR boilerplate copy

Have you ever been involved in a corporate name change? If so, what additional insight can you share? We’d love to hear from you!

When they reveal their new corporate identities in January, they’ll do it with all the right messages to every applicable audience across every applicable channel. In doing so, they’ll revitalize their brands in ways that are meaningful for employees, consumers and all other audiences, which will lead a steady pace of new prosperity in the new year.

But, as these clients know, it’s a lot more work than meets the eye. Choosing a new name, logo and tagline is only part of the puzzle. There is much work to be done and many factors to consider when changing a company name. It’s brand-building at its core. So, in the true spirit of a New Year countdown, we present to you…the 10 essential steps to successfully rolling out your new company name.

It’s a countdown, folks, so say it with us…

“Ten!”
Know your audiences…all of them. Who are the various groups you’ll unveil the new name to, and why should they care? The latter depends on the former – different stakeholders have different reasons for taking interest in what you say and do. Using a mix of methodologies, we helped our clients identify all targets and the brand attributes most relevant for each group. For our client in health technology, we mapped key attributes across seven different audience groups; for our client in supply chain solutions, four groups.

“Nine!”
Study your competition to pinpoint how and where you can stand out. Start with the obvious – their websites – then explore anything and everything you can get your hands on, like sales collateral, digital and print ads, social pages, and so on.

“Eight!”
Choose the name. Share what you learned in the previous steps with key representatives from your internal teams, noting their additional perspectives on exactly what the new name should convey. Carefully narrow the focus to the most universally meaningful brand attributes, then find a name that fits just right.

“Seven!”
Write a tagline that clearly and succinctly communicates your value proposition. Capture only the true essence…you will have plenty of opportunities to expound on it in copy. For both clients, we helped craft powerful taglines using only three words each.

“Six!”
Redesign your logo. Bring the new name and tagline to life with a visually appealing, contextually symbolic logo. Whether you outsource or use an in-house designer, choose colors and other visual cues wisely, as they should become the basis for the new brand standards you’re about to develop (later in the countdown, that is).

“Five!”
Refine your key messages. You’ve already identified who your target audiences are and what each one seeks from your company, and now it’s time to further develop and fine-tune your key messages accordingly. Craft reader-ready key messages, tuned to the listening preferences of each audience, for use in copy across an assortment of communications and media.

“Four!”
Develop a brand styleguide. Using the colors of your new logo as your starting point, select a full color palette for your brand and create a manual to govern employee use of colors, logos and even editorial standards if appropriate. In some cases, it’s necessary to create co-branding guidelines as well, for vendor partners to use under co-marketing circumstances.

“Three!”
Reveal the new name, tagline, logo, key messages and brand standards to everyone inside your organization. We suggest a meeting – or even better, a fun event – where you can present the new look and feel in ways that excite and engage the troops. Wherever possible, draw attention to the ways their input contributed to these decisions and developments. Assure them that you are providing all the tools they’ll need to live the brand in their daily work and professional interactions.

“Two!”
Prepare for the external launch, and leave no stone unturned. Like looking under your couch cushion and finding assets (okay, coins and pens) you’d forgotten you had, you might be surprised to discover just how many parts and pieces have your outgoing company name on it. From minutia like mailing labels to the big things like your corporate website – and partner websites that feature and/or link to you – it’s time to get downright tactical, no matter how tedious it may seem at times. We recommend using this handy company identity checklist as your starting point.

“One!”
Happy New Year! Proudly light up and embrace the new you, and make it your resolution to uphold the integrity of your newly revitalized brand all year long.

Best wishes to you and yours throughout the coming year, from all of us at Dobies Healthcare Group.

Author’s Note: If you’ve checked out our blog or the new content here on our website, then you’ve already seen news and information I’ve published on behalf of Dobies Healthcare Group. This time it’s my pleasure to write about new additions and developments within the Dobies team – we are proud to say we’ve experienced a lot of growth, both inside and out. Here’s the scoop, as told in a press release we issued earlier today: 

Top Row: Amy Schemenauer (left), Randee Gannon (right)
Bottom Row: Kelley Williamson (left), Diane Morgan (right)

KANSAS CITY, Mo – Dobies Healthcare Group, a healthcare marketing and advertising agency now in its 20th year, is growing. With expanded client services and several new accounts, the Kansas City-based company created two new positions and promoted two staff members since last year.

“We focus on every client as if it’s our only client, so it’s important to align our capabilities with their strategic goals,” said Carol Dobies, President. “Our new team adds greater diversity and bench strength to our reach in healthcare marketing.”

Amy Schemenauer joined the team in July 2012 as Director, Strategy and Media – a new role created in response to growing client needs for strategic marketing services. Schemenauer’s 22-year background in healthcare marketing includes account leadership, project management, media planning and tactical creative execution. Most recently, Schemenauer led the healthcare marketing practice for a Milwaukee-based agency. At Dobies Healthcare Group, she directs marketing initiatives and media strategy for large hospitals and health systems.

The year prior to Schemenauer’s arrival was marked by internal expansion as well. Randee Gannon – a company leader since 2007 – was promoted from Director to Vice President of Client Services. Gannon oversees the development, implementation, and measurement of strategic healthcare marketing plans and advertising campaigns for the agency’s portfolio of clients. Kelley Williamson, who has been with Dobies Healthcare Group since 2000, was also promoted. Williamson now serves as Senior Manager of Creative Services.

To accommodate an expanding client base with highly diverse physician and consumer audiences, the agency also added a new position – Content Development Specialist – and hired local talent Diane Morgan to fill the role. With a background in pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing since 2006, Morgan brings extensive copywriting and content development experience to the organization.

“The internal changes we’ve made at Dobies are part of our vision to be an industry leader in healthcare marketing,” Gannon said. “Our learning curve in healthcare operations and communications has always been very short, and now, it’s even shorter.”

Meet the people of Dobies Healthcare Group.

For healthcare organizations undergoing a rebranding effort, this “domino effect” is more than an analogy – it’s a certainty that impacts the ability to deliver an authentic brand. We believe most rebranding strategies falter not because they are poor ideas or ill-conceived, but because they fail to consider the characteristics and influence of organizational culture and leadership behavior.

Here’s what I mean:

We all know strong brands create value for healthcare organizations by building emotional bonds with customers. Emotional bonds build preference, which leads to utilization. At Dobies Healthcare Group, we help our clients understand that a brand is defined and delivered by the culture of the organization – and the culture is guided by the organization’s strategic intention. Strategic intention is important because it tells everyone within the organization how to realize its brand promise.

An achievable brand platform is built on the foundation of the strategic intention. The brand platform becomes authentic when the organization’s brand promise (what is communicated) aligns with the brand experience (what is actually delivered via daily operations).

Organizations often fall prey to aspirational or unrealistic brand platforms, whereby goals are too far from customers’ current brand perceptions to be believable. This does not mean companies shouldn’t set goals for enhancing the brand over time. However, the entire organization must be mobilized and empowered to deliver emotional and functional customer experiences that together form an authentic brand platform.

For organizations to sustain change, they need leaders that pursue brand platforms and develop cultures in alignment. It is through this alignment that organizations, and their people, create emotional bonds with their customers. And win at dominoes.

In other words, as you execute your strategic plan over time, make it a priority to assess the current landscape against your long-term marketing goals. What’s at stake if you don’t? Shelving your strategic plan means missing out on regular opportunities to:

• Conduct a historical review. Compare marketing imperatives against new data, and pay keen attention to key benchmarks that align with your plan. For example, hospital marketers should look at measurements like outmigration trends, physician referral patterns, clinical quality measures, patient satisfaction scores and so on.

• Uncover new opportunities. Looking at fresh market data through the lens of your long-term strategic plan enables timelier decisions that help you meet market demand and gain competitive advantages.

• Forecast what lies ahead. Being forward-thinking and adaptable to an evolving landscape is important for marketing plans to be both efficient and effective.

• Identify emerging challenges or limitations early on. It’s important to pinpoint where operations are poorly aligned with strategic priorities and to respond swiftly when local, regional and national healthcare developments affect your organization. Regular strategic plan reviews help with that.

• Inform key players of progress and lessons learned. Marketing departments lead marketing plans, but when patient-facing and decision-making personnel are not engaged and aware of the objectives, success will be out of reach.

At Dobies Healthcare Group, we encourage and often lead quarterly strategic plan reviews with clients. There’s no better way to make sure actions continuously align with the objectives that inspired them in the first place. Give yourself the insight you need to make better decisions and revitalize your marketing strategy today.

According to “strong patterns in guiding philosophies” that emerged from CEO insights in the study, the top three hospital success factors are listed below, each accompanied by my own assessment of its application in marketing:

• Unwavering Commitment to Quality. As top CEOs demonstrate a strong and clear commitment to quality, marketing staff must respond by becoming champions of transparency who communicate results and drive healthy patient experiences.

• Making Great Relationships with Physicians. Top CEOs recognize that keeping physicians engaged, motivated and aligned is a key success factor. Unfortunately, many of today’s hospitals do not have a dedicated physician relations program. Instead that role is shared by the CEO and other hospital leaders. The future requires a data-inspired, fully committed approach to physician relations that offers support and direction to physicians. The hospital’s marketing officer should be integral to these efforts.

• Ability to Overcome Today’s Greatest Challenges: Reform and Reimbursement Cuts. As hospital CEOs face unprecedented pressures to operationalize under health reform, marketing officers need to lead the charge with new business strategies that position the organization to compete more effectively. We see marketing leaders becoming much more focused on shorter-term scenario planning and research and development of new care management programs (e.g. CHF clinics, access strategies, medical home models, etc.) to help the organization excel in a value-based purchasing environment.

If you’re in hospital marketing, ask yourself: do your current responsibilities align with the top three hospital success factors, and therefore, your CEO’s expectations? If not, it’s time to rewrite your job description. Start by thinking practically about how you can drive your organization to greater success using the points above as your guide.

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.

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 is often your first chance to make a good impression, so use it wisely. Put the needs and interests of patients first.

Maybe the person who manages community relations at your hospital has a new title, maybe not. Regardless, the purview of the position has expanded. At Dobies Healthcare Group, we see three core responsibilities for hospital marketing officers:

• Drive the patient experience. Today’s hospital marketing officers own the patient experience. They take a lead role in creating loyalty and repositioning the patient at the center of the hospital’s delivery system.

• Develop overall business strategy. In addition to increasing market share, hospital marketing officers are now responsible for new business and program development to enhance the hospital’s competitive advantage.

• Nurture the system of care. Now more than ever, it’s important to be proactive rather than reactive in creating and nurturing an emerging system of care. Working with leadership on service line, physician engagement and system of care issues has become a routine function.

Even from this quick summary, it’s easy to see how the role of hospital community relations has evolved far beyond its more traditional PR/promotional functions. That’s why many hospital leaders turn to healthcare marketing specialists who can help them navigate these complexities and grow into the next generation of healthcare.