By John Lavey | Hammock President and COO
If your company slowed or stopped sharing content with clients since the pandemic started, have you begun to reemerge? Or are you struggling to figure out what conversations to have with your clients right now?
If so, you aren’t alone.
While some companies have been communicating amid this period of uncertainty and doing their best to provide solution-oriented content, others took a wait-and-see approach or had their marketing budgets slashed. Some of those marketers are now reemerging, and are challenged to determine what topics are most relevant to their customers and prospects.
What should you do if you are a healthcare marketer who wants to jump back in with content that hits the mark?
- Don’t try to predict—Nobody knows what’s going to happen in the weeks and months to come. We all hope things like patient volumes return to pre-pandemic levels, but we can’t create content based on that assumption. We also don’t know how long the pandemic will last. Think about what works no matter what happens.
- Be a realist—Good to Great author Jim Collins uses the term “Stockdale Paradox”* to describe how you “must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” Good marketers are going to be helpful to clients by providing solutions that they can believe in, while acknowledging the current reality.
- Don’t ignore possibilities—There are larger forces shaping healthcare that may have been delayed, or even accelerated, by the pandemic. Consumerization and interoperability, in particular, are forces that are shaping the future. One question to ask yourself: How is what you are working on bringing about the healthcare system of the future? Finding the right way to share that content is an important and timely conversation to have sooner rather than later.
If you want to talk about how to jump back in right now, feel free to contact us, and we can help you think through the right approach for you.
*Admiral James Stockdale was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and the Stockdale principle, or paradox, was something he credited with how to survive a difficult situation.
(Image: Getty Images)
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