Many midsize and rural communities with one dominant hospital see local providers as inferior to “big city specialists.” They need to build confidence in the quality physicians that they employ to retain them. These systems need to focus on keeping profitable procedures local.

Urban hospitals in larger, more competitive markets need to increase relevance and positive perceptions versus their local competition. They will want locals to bond with the facility – seeing it as a source of health information and a center that supports wellness in their area. This will build affinity with the organization that will be rewarded by maintaining their fair share of procedures.

Here are 4 things you can do to build a better brand and create brand equity for your healthcare or hospital system:

1. Prioritize | Understand what truly makes your system special. Feature that in your messaging. Focus on those audiences that will benefit you the most. Become more important to them by being a more important part of their life.
2. Develop Loyalty | Loyalty is based on successful interactions. Create engagement with your audiences. Reward them with positive experiences. Help them live a healthy life & they’ll trust you when they’re sick.
3. Defend Your Turf | Large health care systems feed on growth and expansion. The best defense against intrusion is a good offense. Be proactive in your approaches and engagement.
4. Retain Physicians | Physicians want your support. They need you to maintain positive perceptions and top of mind awareness of your hospital. They often want to be featured in your advertising. Do this artfully and you will create a win-win for everyone involved.

STIR is an expert at leveraging existing healthcare marketing programs and resources to make a larger impact in the community. Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) want brand stewards who can help develop a marketing plan that strengthens the brand voice, avoids fragmentation and integrates beyond just promotions. With a strong marketing background we cultivate true, holistic business solutions for our clients that are grounded in sound marketing and ad strategies. We invest heavily in our client relationships by taking the time necessary to get the job done right. Let’s collaborate together on increasing the value of your healthcare brand.

You want your advertising and marketing to create return on investment. You want to build a brand that generates consumer preference and positive impressions. Who doesn’t? A few brands in each category make it happen – more often than not they are the best at creating Consumer Engagement. This is the lynchpin, the launching pad for all the best brand work today. Digital communications technology has greatly enhanced our ability to build engagement.

There is a new mindset that is essential to designing brand positioning, messaging and campaigns that create superior engagement and superior sales results today.

Here are six principals to creating Consumer Engagement.

1. Give – don’t take.
Give of your brand. This can take the form of samples, advice, association or invitation. Offer something – whatever you are in a position to offer. Don’t always ask for the $ sale up front. If you are creative, this doesn’t have to cost a lot. It’s the thought that counts…

2. Invite – don’t sell.
Invite the consumer to your space to take advantage of your offer. Let them experience the positive atmosphere you’ve created. An invitation is much more alluring than a pitch. If they don’t take you up on your invitation, keep the invitations coming.

3. Help them be better.
Everyone today wants a leg-up. They either want to perform better, have more fun, work less and make more money. Show them that they’ll get there if they listen to you (your brand). Interestingly, this benefit may not even utilize your product…

4. Make it cool, fun and easy.
It has to feel good. They have to like the interaction. People aren’t going to jump through a bunch of hoops for a brand they have no experience with.

5. Show them that you care.
You care more about your consumer’s success than your own, right? Well, you should. One begets the other. The better you are at communicating this, the more you’ll be preferred.

6. Generate some talk value.
Make sure that what you do is novel enough that people will take notice of the offer – whether they use it themselves or not, we want them to pass it along, buzz about it. So give it a unique spin. Take a little risk. It will pay off.

My advice is to challenge yourself with these concepts. They works every time for me. Once you have developed your engaging concept, you will need to build a smartly deployed campaign to pull your consumer in.

I’d love to help you bring more consumer engagement and bottom line success to your brand. Shoot me an email and I’d be happy to give you some ideas – cost and obligation free!

Check us out at www.stirstuff.com
For more advice along these lines visit STIROLOGY

The most powerful and effective way to market hospitals to their consumer population is Stir’s strategy called “Community Building.” As a strategic approach, “Community Building” builds your healthcare or hospital brand equity, drives the right attributes and integrates messaging through all touch points. Increase the value of your brand through “Community Building” by:

• Creating a non-traditional event and marketing strategy that sends employees into the community to do random acts of kindness in highly visible ways, driving home the point that we are neighbors, friends, a partner who cares.
• Working with local government health departments, school systems and service organizations to identify, address and improve wellness statistics in a highly visible mass media and grassroots campaign that lets the populace know who the most benevolent healthcare organization is in the community.
• Building social web sites around disease states, such as cardiac, oncology, diabetes, etc… that link survivors with patients and create a forum for physicians to share important information with all – regardless of affiliation to healthcare organization
• Tying mass media awareness themes back to broad themes connected to service and community support while assisting physicians and centers of excellence.

The role of Chief Marketing Officer at hospital or healthcare system is difficult and extremely demanding. Working with Stir enables us to champion and steward your brand. We ensure your brand message is consistent, tells a story and shows a different facet to the same persona through our innovative approach to “Community Building.”

Oftentimes, people make raising community awareness for hospitals a tricky and complicated thing. To be incredibly simplistic, hospitals can grow their awareness and their business by making people “feel better.”

When it comes to community awareness, here’s how we help build belief in healthcare professionals:

• We help people feel more confident in their healthcare provider by telling them what they need to hear – rather than what the hospital wants to say.
• We recognize that the brand persona must be likeable as well as intelligent.
• We send these messages through the media that’s most credible to the consumer.
• We understand that all patients, all health states bring different concerns that need to be individually addressed.
• We target consumers that are most likely to take an active role in their own healthcare choices – thereby enhancing profitability.
• We avoid the trite, generic images that hospitals generally use to feature complex technologies or statistics and awards that mean nothing to consumers.

These efforts rarely have lasting or significant impact on the consumer’s long-term perception and belief about their local hospital. The most powerful and effective way to market hospitals to their consumer population is Stir’s strategy called “Community Building.” STIR is an expert at leveraging existing programs and resources to make a larger impact in the community.

The Mayans may have been right.  The world as we know it may end after 2012 – at least the advertising world, because here’s what I am seeing:

The most popular spots on the Super Bowl (Doritos^®) were created by consumers, produced by consumers and voted on by consumers.  This was the advertising agency’s idea, and it worked brilliantly.  It was tied to an online promotion and social media extravaganza that overshadowed the paid media placement value. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a business article – not a religious one. And for the record, I am a devoted Catholic. But in this instance when I speak of communion I am using the secular definition:

“Interchange or sharing of thoughts or emotions; intimate communication: communion with nature. The act of sharing, or holding in common; participation.” Read the rest of this entry »

As I surf marketing industry blogs I see much discussion about the new economy and new agency business models. I’m shocked that I haven’t heard the topic of client collaboration discussed at all. It has been a critical part of the STIR business model and our success in this economy.

What is client collaboration?
It entails the fusion of agency and client resources to produce efficiencies. It often takes the form of coordinating the creative, digital, PR and promotional staffs of both entities on the same campaigns. Readers of this who are not agency veterans may not realize what an innovative step this is, because it sounds like simple common sense. Our industry has long harbored the unfortunate stance that client side talent was somehow inferior – they’re “dumb,” unenlightened and an obstacle to good work. As a result, communication between teams generally feels awkward and strained, which leads to critical evaluations of agency work. Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone has seen the movie Social Network, so you know the company’s origins. Facebook now has a bigger share of online traffic than Google, making them #1 on the web.  They collect $2 billion in revenue through advertising. Facebook is flush with confidence and has even more ambitious plans.

Recently, Facebook announced that it is going to be testing a Groupon inspired service that will provide discount offers. It’s no accident that this comes on the heels of the dizzying earnings and value of Groupon, which recently turned down a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google. Facebook sees this as a growth opportunity and doesn’t want to be left behind in the race for your eyeballs and your pocketbook. Read the rest of this entry »