For community-based wellness organizations and healthcare networks, a strong brand does a lot of heavy lifting. It expresses your mission clearly. It enables you to recruit talented employees and persuade prospective patients and clients. It engages stakeholders. It helps your organization stand out from peers.
Maybe most important: It creates your reputation.
And reputation matters in healthcare — we’d argue, more so than in most fields. That’s because with reputation comes trust, and trust is what people need to feel before they come to you for critical mental and physical care.
While reputation management tends to be commonly associated with the public relations function, we think that marketing is a critical driver of reputation and an important component in any PR tool kit.
Let’s look at a few subtle differences between marketing and public relations in the healthcare field.
Identifying your target audiences is a primary task for marketers. Segmenting your audience and choosing the right channels to reach them is both an art and a science. Through campaigns you’re speaking directly to current and potential patients — addressing their needs, using their language, answering their questions, and providing solutions. So marketing is personal, familiar, direct.
With that said, it is a good idea for marketing teams to also establish strong relationships with media and stakeholders. That way you can help drive the conversation around your healthcare organization and potentially get connected with influencers or media outlets that can help spread your message.
PR practitioners are increasingly using visual elements to connect their messaging with the intended audience. But photos, videos, and graphics have long been part of the marketer’s tool kit. Most healthcare marketing teams have a curated photo library to support multimedia campaigns. And we know that graphic design clarifies complex topics and helps people process information quickly.
A consolidated, coordinated marketing strategy lets you leverage all different types of digital platforms to spread your message and build awareness. A unified brand enables organizations to communicate with their audiences in a consistent way. When people see your messages on billboards and social media and local publications — when they see that the organization looks and talks and acts the same way, every time — they come to know and trust you.
When concerned community-based organizations in Burlington, VT wanted to address recent challenges to the city’s long-held reputation for safety and comfortable lifestyle, they could have focused efforts on getting city leaders to issue ordinances and held press conferences. Instead, they established a task force that, among other things, launched a campaign called Small Acts of Community.
We worked with the task force to design a marketing initiative to support the campaign, with a website, a tool kit for individuals and civic groups, and a place where residents could share positive feedback and their own acts of community. There are press releases and scheduled media appearances — traditional tools of PR — but the campaign is largely a two-way dialog. The solutions to Burlington’s challenges need to come from the public, not from leaders.
By communicating consistently, addressing potential issues before they escalate, and highlighting achievements and innovations, healthcare marketers can build trust and credibility over time. Ultimately, all marketing is reputation management. And when faced with scrutiny, a focused, issue-based marketing campaign is a productive approach.
As we’ve done for a variety of clients in healthcare and community wellness, we can help your team polish your organization’s reputation. Let’s talk about what you need.
Tenth Crow Creative is a brand marketing agency that creates, aligns, and promotes messaging for health and wellness organizations. Through insightful branding, engaging design and compelling marketing campaigns, we help these essential organizations find their identities and effectively communicate with their stakeholders so they can fulfill their missions.
