Embracing inbound marketing in healthcare
I had the weird experience recently of stumbling upon a piece of jargon I hadn’t heard before, but which described a concept I knew quite well. The term is “inbound marketing.” (I’m told the concept is close to Seth Godin’s “permission marketing,” but I stopped reading after his 37th book, so maybe that’s why I missed it.)
According to the Hubspot Inbound Internet Marketing blog, inbound marketing is defined as “marketing focused on getting found by customers.” This is the opposite of traditional, or “outbound marketing,” with its goal of finding customers. (Or what Godin calls “interruption marketing.”) Instead of pushing your message out to potential customers to compel them to try your product or service, you create content of one kind or another that pulls people to want to find out about you. Instead of TV commercials, it’s spreading videos virally on YouTube. Instead of a print ad, it’s a blog. (Check out the Hubspot blog post for a great overview of the concept.) In essence, it’s the difference between quantity and quality. With outbound marketing, the quantity of impact is usually measured, and more is always better. (Think of the millions of impressions you might get from a billboard campaign.) With inbound marketing, your goal is far fewer contacts, but those contacts are of much higher quality because they want to connect with you. So while the numbers may be lower, the effort is more effective, because you’ve spent far less money for more qualified contacts.
According to the blog post, there are three components of inbound marketing – content, Search Engine Optimization and Social Media. However, it would seem you could expand the concept beyond using only social media channels or assuming the end destination is a web site.
For years, we’ve been advocating that hospitals and health systems pursue inbound marketing, we just didn’t call it that. When we outline why “Joe Public Doesn’t Care About Your Hospital” and what do to about it, we’re invoking the concept. When we stress you need to remember consumers are driven by “what’s in it for me,” we’re invoking the concept. When we suggest hospitals connect with consumers about “health” (something everyone is interested in) instead of “healing” (something only the sick are interested in), we’re invoking the concept. (In one basic example, it’s the difference between a seminar on joint replacement surgery and one on joint pain.) One of the most successful campaigns we’ve ever created for a client, the St. Joseph’s Hospital movie campaign, had at its heart a strategy based on inbound marketing.
So fair warning: now that we’ve belatedly discovered an actual definition for this concept, expect us to bludgeon you with it for some time to come. What are other examples of this strategy in healthcare? Why is it effective? What are the drawbacks? What hurdles might you face in pursuing such a strategy? We’d love to hear from others on how they’re using inbound marketing successfully at their hospital or health system.
- Published: May 27, 2009
- Filed under: Branding, Interactive, Marketing, Social Media, Trends