By John Lavey | Hammock President and COO
I recently attended a business luncheon around the topic of disruptive technologies that are seeking to change the way we shop for or access healthcare. Whether it’s Google or Uber or many smaller firms, numerous companies without healthcare DNA are shaping the future of healthcare.
Michael Burcham, CEO of Narus Healthcare and moderator of the discussion, summed up the discussion with two pieces of advice for would-be disruptors: No. 1. Be very clear about what question you are answering, and No. 2: Make sure your solution connects to a smartphone.
These two ideas are not only great words of wisdom for would-be healthcare service providers, but they also apply to all healthcare marketers today. How can healthcare harness the power of disruptive marketing?
Start your marketing strategy by clearly understanding the problems and challenges faced by your audience. Then provide the answers that you know better than anybody. When marketers take this path, they shift away from the tendency to hype their own solutions, and concentrate instead on helping the customer.
Then, go the next step: Use mobile devices to deliver the answers to your customers’ questions. The latest “Think with Google” research affirms the necessity to think about mobile before anything else. Design and deliver content for small screens first. In an average day, 80 percent of your audience will use a smartphone, 67 percent will use a computer, and 16 percent will use a tablet.
For a quarter of users, it’s a mobile-only world. Fully 27 percent will use a smartphone only, versus the 14 percent who use a computer only. And when it comes to search, 39 percent search on a smartphone only, versus 32 percent who search on a computer only.
The legacy healthcare marketing approach is burdened with a “let me tell you what I can do for you” approach to problems. It may not only miss the mark emotionally, but it might also not reach you where you go for answers: your smartphone.
Takeaways:
1. Seek to understand your audience’s questions and provide clear answers.
2. Deliver the content to the small screen first.
Image Credit | Thinkstock
About Hammock Healthcare Idea Email | This post is part of Hammock’s award-winning Idea Email series. Idea Emails are sent every other week and share one insightful marketing idea. Idea Email comes in two flavors: Original and Healthcare. To subscribe to the original Idea Email (general marketing ideas), click here . To subscribe to the Healthcare Idea Email (healthcare marketing ideas), click here.