Does quality bring quality to your hospital marketing?
Regrets, I have a few. One is not covering the issue of quality as a healthcare marketing message in my new book, Joe Public Doesn’t Care About Your Hospital. In the namesake chapter, I mention many of the ways hospitals rely on chest-thumping messaging in their mass consumer marketing. Messaging based on attributes like certified physicians, new facilities, awards and rankings – all of which are not relevant to the vast majority of consumers, because those consumers aren’t currently in need of hospital services. And that makes marketing based on these messages pretty gosh darn ineffective.
What I didn’t include in that discussion, at least not explicitly enough, is the use of quality data as the basis for marketing messaging. But as with all the other “me-focused” messages listed above, if I’m someone who’s not in need of a hospital or health system, why would I pay attention to your outcomes data or other quality information? I don’t need you, so I don’t care about that stuff.
Yet we often hear of folks advocating the exact opposite of this recommendation. While there are obviously different schools of thought on this, as with many issues, some of the differences of opinion may stem from subtle situational differences. So here’s an explanation of our position on using quality data as a marketing message:
- As noted above, with any marketing effort aimed at the market at large (which consists primarily of “Joe Public”), quality messaging is likely to miss the mark. Beyond the idea that Joe Public doesn’t care about your quality message, Joe also doesn’t really understand your quality message (which is directly related to the idea that Joe doesn’t care. If he doesn’t care, why take time to learn and understand?) Finally, even if your strategy is to beat Joe over the head with ubiquitous promotions around quality (and long-term, ubiquitous marketing can impact Joe Public, it’s just very expensive and transitory), rare is the healthcare organization that has such overwhelmingly positive quality data that they will stand out from the herd based just on this messaging.
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For those who do care about your hospital because they are in need of healthcare services (an audience we call “prospects”), quality messaging can be very relevant. Not only are prospects shopping for care (explicitly or implicitly), and thus are looking for differentiating points, but because they are in need of care, they are more likely to dig deeper to understand the often-confusing definitions and qualifications that surround quality messaging. Of course, you should be hitting this audience with targeted efforts, not mass marketing.
If you’re using quality data as a promotional message for this audience, it still needs to fit the following criteria:
1) has to be easy to understand
2) should be differentiating (if possible)
3) has to be meaningful(For example, promotiong your surgical prowess with a statistic like “lower than average rate of infection among patients aged 18-25 who receive the flippo-trans-orthocranium procedure” will have limited impact).
Your website is the perfect place to provide the context necessary for anyone interested in your clinical quality data. You can provide content specific to a targeted effort, such as a page within your cardiovascular section to support a cardiovascular campaign. Or you can create an overall “Clinical quality” section on your site, which allows for a more transparent treatment of this content.
- Finally, quality messaging is always effective with the key audience of referring physicians. They always care about your quality because it affects their patients, and they do understand how to interpret that content.
In the end, quality is simply another example of “look how great we are” messaging. For the right audiences, that message can be relevant and differentiating. For Joe Public, it’s likely to be ignored.