Need marketing help? Seek a partner with healthcare expertise.

Marketing is a business function that’s fairly transferable from company to company and even across industries. It’s focused on telling the brand story and promoting the features and benefits of the product or service.

You probably realized quickly when you landed in healthcare that marketing for companies and organizations in this field requires a layer of expertise on top of that skillset.

In healthcare, whether it’s a large medical network or a small community nonprofit, marketing isn’t just about features and benefits; it’s about building trust, deep connections within your community so that people feel comfortable putting their physical or mental wellbeing in your hands. Marketers have to clarify complex medical topics, translating from practitioners and providers on one side to regular people on the other. And they have to educate patients about sometimes-intimidating health issues. Further complicating matters, marketers work on an island in an organization that may not understand or value what they do. 

When you’re enlisting outside help for your marketing team, you sure don’t want to waste time teaching them the ins and outs of the healthcare business. You need them to get to work. 

Expertise Brings Inherent Understanding

For the small urban nonprofits, the rural agencies, and even the big medical complexes we work with — no matter the size — the marketing team always seems to be under-resourced and under appreciated. They feel like outsiders in a sea of healthcare practitioners. 

There are many reasons organizations like yours need to hire an outside marketing team. Maybe your current team is already at its bandwidth and processes are breaking down. Maybe you’ve been charged with a key goal like bringing in more patients. Or you need people who can translate complex messaging around a new initiative or service offering, like an expansion of the orthopedic practice. 

An integrated healthcare marketing agency like us brings to the table expertise in strategy, design, writing, art direction, project management, and more — all with real experience in the mental and physical health category. This way you have a team of specialists to help you instead of putting all of these responsibilities on one or two people who already have a full plate. 

With an agency that specializes in healthcare, you gain a partner that understands:

• Medical terminology, acronyms, and lingo. We’re not practitioners steeped in the science, but we are comfortable with the language of medicine, mental health and substance use disorder..
• The nuanced whys behind medical care: why people need vaccines, for example, or why there are social barriers to accessing mental health care.
• The beliefs and sensitivities of your audience and the best way to reach them. For instance, we understand the independence and resilience of rural communities, the youthful outlook of seniors who don’t consider themselves old, the motivations that drive people to work in the healthcare field. And we can look at your marketing mix and identify channels or strategies you haven’t considered. 
• Rules and regulations such as HIPPA that influence how organizations communicate with patients and others. 

Healthcare Expertise in Practice

Bringing in an experienced healthcare marketing agency means you spend less time getting them up to speed and more time getting work done. 

For example, when COVID-19 hit in 2020, Northwestern Medical Center launched a rapid response campaign that emphasized practical things the community could do to keep safe. At the same time, they introduced telemedicine and needed a campaign to explain it. And as medical offices started reopening, NMC produced everything from digital messaging to make people feel comfortable, to in-office signage encouraging social distancing. 

They came to us to help them execute these time-sensitive campaigns. Our wealth of experience in healthcare helped us not only keep up with the communications plan they needed to rapidly roll out, but also freed them up from having to guide us through their world. We already knew healthcare customer touchpoints, what collateral worked well in those spaces, and the obstacles that might arise and how to work around them. When time is of the essence (and even when it’s not) you shouldn’t have to slow down to train your marketing partner. 

We’re great at leveraging strategic branding and effective messaging to create communications that work. We also act as stewards for the brand, so when lots of pieces are being produced quickly, we can ensure brand consistency. And we have a team of talented designers who create work that’s not only on brand, but great looking. 

Just as you’d entrust your own health to an expert, look to a healthcare marketing specialist to support your team. We’re ready to be that partner for you; let’s get in touch.

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.