By: John Lavey | Hammock President/COO
Google reports that 7% of its searches are health-related. This adds up to 70,000 searches a minute. That’s a lot of time consumers are spending looking for help before taking action.
We know providers and payers also have a voracious appetite for helpful content. Those companies typically have nine people involved in a purchasing decision of any healthcare IT solution, and they report spending much of a yearlong sales cycle doing research before ever entertaining a sales professional (2018 HIMSS and Content Marketing Institute survey).
Whether marketing to a consumer or a company, delivering something helpful through all the noise demands much more thought about who you are talking to and what you have to say. I thought about that this week when I was in an onboarding meeting for a new client.
One member of the client’s team took the time to listen to questions and would then frame his answers in a clear and simple way. “If I’m at a party and have to explain it, here’s what I say,” he said. “I want to make sure their eyes don’t glaze over.”
Periodically, a member of their team would also stop the discussion and say, “Does everyone understand what X or Y means?”
It’s not only courteous to consider how your audience might be able to best understand information you’re sharing, but it’s also vital to being effective. Healthcare is incredibly complex. While you wouldn’t want to “dumb down” a message and impact the quality of the information, healthcare marketers can be guilty of spewing information like a firehose at their audience.
Resist the urge to tell someone all about your amazing solution. Instead, think about the audience. They are going to spend maybe a year doing research on what they need to solve a problem, while numerous buyers with different training and professional knowledge will all weigh in on the purchase. That sounds a lot like a party. How will you explain your solution to them so their eyes don’t glaze over?
Image: Getty Images
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