How to make bold healthcare marketing choices

Healthcare marketing can sometimes feel like walking a balancing act. On one side, you want to inform and educate your audience, but on the other hand, you want to make an impact and truly engage with your audience. In the healthcare sector, this can be a bit difficult, given the seriousness and often complex nature of the content.

One solution here is to make bolder choices when it comes to your marketing. These bolder choices can manifest themselves in all types of different ways, including updated and more direct messaging, attention-grabbing images and more.

Let's examine some of the do's and don'ts of bold healthcare marketing, and how it can help you maintain your relevancy in the industry.

What does "bold healthcare marketing" look like?

While it's a bit of a challenge to define and can change from brand to brand, bold healthcare marketing combines a few elements and breaks away from traditional patterns. This type of marketing:

• Incorporates emerging marketing trends.
• Branches out from traditional marketing channels (i.e., video content, social media posting, etc.).
• Helps humanize your brand, enabling you to make a better connection with your audience.

Overall, making bolder choices with your healthcare marketing is all about engaging with your audience, and ensuring that the attention of the right people is on your brand.

"Incredible ideas are often pushed aside because we fear the downside," noted Medical, Marketing & Media contributor Abby Galardi. "There is safety in following last year's marketing plan or choose a campaign that did 'okay' in research. It takes guts to put the campaign that had the most impact in if it was polarizing. This is where a bold choice takes courage, and a plan for winning and learning."

Using new marketing approaches and incorporating trends can help engage your audience.

The do's: Tips and best practices

First and foremost, when changing up your healthcare marketing strategy to allow bolder choices, it's imperative that you have a keen understanding of your audience, their needs and opinions. Identifying what matters most to these individuals and creating campaigns that speak directly to these needs can help you grab your audiences' attention and make an impact.

It's also important that healthcare marketing teams use available data to their advantage, and build upon insights by leveraging new approaches. For instance, if research tells you that your audience seeks more information about a specific healthcare process, creating a video and circulating it on social to directly answer this call can be of particular benefit for you and your audience. Video content is continuing to take off in marketing, and is a great way for healthcare organizations to show, as opposed to just tell.

The don'ts: What to avoid

Bold marketing choices can sometimes feel uncomfortable. It's imperative for you and your marketing team to push past this, and not fall into previous patterns. As Galardi pointed out, while it may feel safer to create a campaign around a somewhat vanilla topic and use the same strategies you've leveraged in the past, going for something more spicy can help you make a bigger splash with your target audience.

As you work to break away from your more traditional strategies, you should also work to understand the risks involved, and mitigate these issues ahead of time. Don't stop your efforts just because a campaign might fail - instead, list out all of the potential issues, and create a plan for meeting these problems head on.

Finally, it's important to understand that even failures can be beneficial learning opportunities for your next bold marketing choice.

"We live in a world where failure is undervalued and feared - but it's essential," Galardi wrote. "There's no question we learn more from big-time losses than wins. And we're positively impacted when people or brands are honest about their failure. So what stops us from making bold choices?"

To find out more about how changing up your marketing can better support your healthcare company, connect with an expert consultant today.