Introducing: Healthcare Idea Email from Hammock | Like Hammock Inc.’s popular Idea Email, the new Healthcare Idea Email briefly explores one topic, every other week. Learn more about the new Healthcare Idea Email at the bottom of the page.
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Idea: Help Customers Be Healthy With Micro-Moments
By John Lavey | Hammock President and COO
I am a creature of routine, and ever since I lost my dad to heart disease, I’ve been more vigilant about what I eat. On weekends, I make my family’s meal plan for the upcoming week, and all groceries are purchased on Sunday night. I eat clean during the week—a modified Paleo diet—and then indulge in whatever I want on the weekends.
All these habits are mildly annoying to my wife and daughters, but perhaps none more than my weekly attempts to cobble together a meal based on what’s left in the fridge, because I hate to see good food go to waste. We call this meal our “Chopped” dinner, based on the Food Network show of that name. (On the show, four chefs compete against one another using baskets of ordinary—and not very complementary—ingredients to prepare a three-course meal.)
My habit of typing what I have on hand into the Google search field—tonight it was mushrooms, peppers, basil and chicken—means I’m engaged in a “micro-moment,” using my phone to get immediate help with something I’m trying to do.
Health marketers will succeed in engaging consumers, particularly around wellness content, if they can deliver help or advice at the very moment that advice is desired. This is a topic we’ve discussed before in the Idea Email.
Healthy eating habits and micro-moments are part of a growing trend that Google has tracked in this fascinating piece from “Think with Google.” The story shows how increasing numbers of people—millennials, in particular, even more than middle-aged guys like me—are using Google to learn more about how certain kinds of “functional foods” (such as protein-heavy diets or gluten-free options) can help them enhance their health.
We know that eating well and staying healthy takes a lot of time and education to do correctly, especially if the habits aren’t ingrained. If the future of healthcare relies on engaging customers before they become patients and helping manage a population’s health, then understanding how and when to deliver micro-moments matters.
Photo | Thinkstock
About the new Healthcare Idea Email | As our popular Idea Email has a large number of healthcare marketers who subscribe, it did not surprise us that the No. 1 request we’ve received is to “offer more ideas about healthcare.” So we have. In addition to Idea Email, on other weeks you can receive the Healthcare Idea Email that is focused exclusively on healthcare-related marketing, media and content trends and topics. You can visit the Healthcare Idea Email archive and subscribe for your own copy here.