You’re a healthcare marketer. You need an agency that speaks health care.
Obviously. For an agency looking to work in healthcare marketing, that’s table stakes. We have to know how to talk with doctors. We need to be able to translate healthcare jargon into American English. It helps to have a basic familiarity with the human body and how it works and what can go wrong with it.
But healthcare experience isn’t enough. The best healthcare marketing agencies aren’t just healthcare marketing agencies. Here’s why we think an agency like ours may be a better choice for your healthcare organization.
More-than-healthcare agencies speak more than healthcare.
It’s important to remember that patients come from all walks of life—and if you’re a health system or hospital, they’re coming to you for everything from the happiest to the saddest moments of their lives. They don’t all respond to the same appeals, and it’s difficult to maintain a consistent platform when the tone of your messages can vary so widely.
That’s why it’s so important to have an agency that knows how to communicate with all kinds of people in all kinds of circumstances—without stumbling off your platform. Without great care in creative development, your branded house can start to look and sound like a house of brands. But an agency like ours—especially one with significant nonprofit experience—knows how to negotiate very different messages and emotions to widely disparate audiences without losing the essence of your organization.
More-than-healthcare agencies bring new ideas.
For as ubiquitous as healthcare marketing has become, no one’s ever accused it as being a wellspring of innovation. For example, we know first hand how long it took for most hospitals to embrace social media. Facebook, which has become a platform for reaching vast swathes of your market, looked like the perfect place for HIPAA violations. Healthcare marketing tends to lean conservative—for good reasons.
But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep your eyes open to new possibilities, even if you’re not ready to implement them yet—and an agency with broader experience is the perfect partner to offer them. Case in point: Nearly a decade ago, we wrote a blog post about QR codes in healthcare marketing. It’s amazing how relevant that post remains today.
An agency with a more diversified client base is always looking for new things. You may not be ready for them today. But you just might be able to own a whole new space, too.
More-than-healthcare agencies focus on finding the difference.
How different, really, is healthcare advertising from market to market? How different is it within your market? Change a logo and a couple of colors, and most healthcare advertising could be for any healthcare organization.
When you focus on the same thing every day, you can get into strategic and creative ruts. When you’re working for schools and utilities and nonprofits and saving the world, you’re inspired to look at things in new ways every day. We know that, to really tell your story, we have to make it stand out—and that means finding ways—like the Grouchies campaign for Gateway Hancock Health—to tell it differently from the way everyone else tells it.
In that, we think our healthcare work speaks for itself. Our work has always stood out in the marketplace, and we know that it’s been inspired and augmented by the work we do for other clients doing great things in the world.