Few events have changed our world more than the COVID-19 global pandemic. And that is particularly true for health care organizations. The pressures and demands of the pandemic severely stretched most organizations. Yet some organizations, because of how they responded to the crisis, report increased positive public and patient opinions. Health care organizations that 9R Health works with from Wisconsin to Massachusetts to North Carolina all have reported higher patient ratings than before COVID. That led 9R Health strategy teams to search for underlying causes behind the changed percept ..read more

Great advertising that drives results. It’s what every organization seeks when investing in a campaign. On paper, it’s a straightforward expectation. In practice, however, success is often more difficult to achieve. Even the best-laid strategy, messaging, creative and media mix can be impacted by other factors that make successful advertising hard to come by. Here are 10 of the most common reasons. 10. Not understanding the health of your brand Around here, we have a saying: “If you fix the brand, the advertising becomes the easy part.” Fixing the brand means creating something that peopl ..read more

During the course of a project, you may interact regularly with only two or three people at your advertising agency. (That’s by design — things can get really, really confusing otherwise.) But there’s an entire team working behind the scenes. Some, you might have met in a meeting or a concept presentation. Others you’ve never seen at all. This series will provide a rundown of all the different team members working together to make your project a success. There will not be a quiz at the end. You’re sitting in your ad agency’s conference room (ah, the days when we could sit in conference ro ..read more

What comes to mind when you think of a “full-service advertising agency”? Ad campaigns, definitely, with all the print ads, commercials, social media and other elements you might need. Strategic planning to make sure that campaign is effective. They’ll be able to design and build your website, if they’re full-service, and write web copy and content for you, and buy media. It’s an impressive list, and all of those (yes, even print ads) are important for reaching your audience in an evermore digital environment. But there are other services out there that advertising agencies provide. Maybe ..read more

During the course of a project, you may interact regularly with only two or three people at your advertising agency. (That’s by design – things can get really, really confusing otherwise.) But there’s an entire team working behind the scenes. Some, you might have met in a meeting or a concept presentation. Others you’ve never seen at all. This series will provide a rundown of all the different team members working together to make your project a success. There will not be a quiz at the end. Remember when you walked into your ad agency’s conference room (ah, the days when we could walk int ..read more

Healthcare organizations and healthcare marketers know how important it is to communicate with their audience, and they’ve found effective ways to do it. Patient testimonials are compelling. Testimonials by video are even more so – hearing stories from current patients makes it easier to put yourself in their place. Landing pages with information tailored to the concerns of your audience tells them you know and care about what they need. Those approaches to healthcare marketing are hardly outdated. They’re certainly still effective. But some healthcare marketing teams have found ways to t ..read more

As a marketing professional, you almost certainly have a brand guide for your organization lying around. It probably has your logo, and how it can be used, and your colors, and your tagline, and your values and mission statement. It probably includes tone of voice, and even words to use or not use. All of those are important — your brand is a way of expressing the essence of your organization at a glance, and those elements are part of it. For communicating with your audience, it’s essential. For communicating with your employees? Eh. A little. When you’re communicating with your employee ..read more

Social media is as important for healthcare marketing as it is for any other industry. Healthcare organizations need to connect with their audience, and to do that, they have to be where their audience is. Marketing teams and individual healthcare providers are using social media to share important updates, news and personalizing photos and stories, and that’s good. It’s also risky because of a little thing called HIPAA. Anyone working in healthcare has heard that word a lot, connected to the general idea of keeping patient information private. But there are some specific details you migh ..read more

Here are just a few ways healthcare and medical marketing differ from other industries, starting with one of the biggest ones.   1. Healthcare marketing can come up against major regulations regarding privacy. Anyone even vaguely connected to the healthcare industry has heard of HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). HIPAA strictly protects the safety of patients’ PHI (protected health information), which is essentially any information that can be used to identify a patient. It’s as applicable to the marketing team in a healthcare organization as it is to an ..read more

At the beginning of the pandemic, many companies were forced to throw together a hasty work-from-home arrangement to allow their workers to stay safe while staying productive. The expectation was that it would be a short-term solution and that workers would be back in the office before you know it.   Things didn’t exactly work out that way.   Months later, many companies remain fully remote, and others are partially so, with half of the employees working from the office while the other half works from home. And some have almost entirely returned to the office, with a few employe ..read more