Micro-Influencer Marketing in Healthcare

Good marketing is flexible. Especially in the healthcare industry, standard approaches don’t always work. The least likely ones can turn out to be winners.

It’s one of the joys of the business we’re in: Cookie cutters need not apply.

A Study in Flexibility

Our experience with one healthcare client is a case study in flexibility. In evolving approaches. In understanding that traditional techniques were only the starting point in a multi-faceted healthcare marketing program that has earned the attention of hospital executives and physicians – and has brought success to our client.

For the sake of confidentiality, we won’t go into the details of the ongoing marketing and PR program, but some general concepts are worth sharing with anyone in healthcare marketing today – specifically marketing to hospital executives – and may very well apply to other industries, too. Our client provides a relatively new service – telemedicine – to clinical teams in hospitals. It’s a service that has gained traction over the last 10 years, and though there were skeptics in the early days, telemedicine is widely accepted now and even termed “mainstream” by the American Hospital Association.

With that kind of endorsement, we knew the time was right for our client to turn up the volume on its marketing efforts, to leverage the impeccable credentials of its founder – a physician himself – and to reach out aggressively to hospitals of all sizes with clean, direct new messaging about our client’s solution and the hospital challenges it can help solve.

Knowing the Buyers and Their Pains

We quickly created new brand positioning for the company. We knew the key buyers were typically C-level executives on the business side – CEOs and COOs – and the clinical side – the Chief Medical Officer – as well as some new titles such as Executive Director of Patient Services – staff members whose job might include advocating for the kind of services our client provides.

We also knew these executives faced a similar set of pains regardless of the size and location of their hospitals. Confronted with Medicare’s system of financial penalties and rewards, hospitals must reduce their readmission rates, reduce hospital acquired infections and improve patient and family satisfaction as measured by the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS), a survey required by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for all hospitals in the U.S.

We identified the “low-hanging fruit” – financially strapped rural hospitals that have difficulty hiring doctors and need cost-efficient ways to provide new services to their communities, thus avoiding the loss of patient volume when they must transfer patients to big-city hospitals to get the care they need.

Well-Guarded Executives

With just over 5,500 hospitals in the U.S., it’s a relatively small target universe, and yet the changing nature of the industry, the high rate of turnover and the ongoing acquisitions and consolidations made it difficult to find, let alone, hit the target.

Even if the executives were in, they were surrounded by gatekeepers. While the common set of pains made it easy to craft the right messages for the website, a video ad campaign, and for sales scripts, it also made it difficult to break through the noise. All the competitors were saying the same things.

Leveraging the Micro-Influencer

We knew we had a star in our toolkit: Our client’s CEO and founder is a highly respected physician, well-known and well-liked in the industry. Leveraging him for influencer marketing was part of our plan, one that quickly gained ascendance as we saw the value of peer-to-peer marketing with our target audience. Hospital CMOs and CEOs are typically smart, strong-willed individuals who don’t have time to pay much attention to a sales pitch…unless it comes from a colleague whom they trust and respect.

Our marketing work evolved in this direction – spending our time on word-of-mouth promotion of the CEO, beefing up his trade show attendance, helping him take advantage of thought leadership opportunities such as:

• speaking at conferences
• authoring articles
• promoting his involvement in social groups and associations

By using LinkedIn to generate and cultivate high-level relationships for him over the past 2.5 years, we have grown his LinkedIn network to nearly 7,200 people. It’s not just the quantity, but the quality of his followers that is impressive. An estimated two-thirds are healthcare C-level executives. Regardless of their role, they have indicated an interest in telemedicine by following our CEO – and that pre-qualifier is of enormous value to us.

The LinkedIn profile is a great place to showcase the CEO’s thought leadership, sharing and commenting on posts and repurposing his own blogs on LinkedIn Pulse. Through this messaging strategy, we have tracked nearly 200 leads – and our client is thrilled. The LinkedIn activity is far more than we ever would have projected. But it stands to reason. Influencer marketing has been a core component of marketing campaigns for several years now, and we predicted in an earlier blog post that micro-influencers – those with a total audience size of between 1,000 and 100,000 followers – would become more important in 2018. That prediction is certainly borne out in this particular healthcare success story.

Micro-Targeting Regions, Industry Segments

The other arrows in our marketing quiver include targeted email campaigns, often by region and job title, and digital marketing with sophisticated SEO tactics and social media ads. We also conduct ongoing media relations activities that have editors of industry publications coming to us for a quote from the CEO or to answer questions on a particular issue involving telemedicine.

Because laws vary from state to state regarding telemedicine regulations and reimbursement, our next step has been to design a campaign that targets more progressive states. In addition, new hospital industry segments such as long-term acute care facilities (LTACHs) and micro-hospitals are targets for new campaigns, which begin by building out content regarding the unique application of telemedicine in each segment.

A Future of Relationship-Building

With this client, we head into the future knowing success depends on balance. We certainly won’t drop the high-level brand recognition work we are doing, but based on experience, that work will be backed by solid peer-to-peer relationship-building between colleagues, as we continue to amplify the CEO’s voice and provide a platform for existing customers to share their experiences with prospects. In a competitive world, trust is the best thing we know of to cut through the clutter.

Are your healthcare marketing and PR campaigns on target with the unique characteristics of the industry? Contact us today to learn how we can help.