Introduce some Paranormal Activity to your marketing

If you haven’t heard of Paranormal Activity, chances are you tripped over your router cable a few months ago and forgot to plug in back it back in. This independent film has made quite a stir through Twitter and other social networking outlets. In fact, this low budget ($11,000) flick has relied almost exclusively on social networking for promotion. And it pulled in over $7 million last weekend.

CNN covered this story today. In it are a number of valuable nuggets for all marketers – healthcare and otherwise.

1. Create something worth talking about and your customers will take care of the rest
Paranormal Activity was a movie was worth talking about. And talk about it, people did. Social media outlets were set ablaze, as were other social networking outlets — you know, like actually talking to someone in person or on the phone? With minimal marketing this movie blew the socks off other high-budget films. Largely thanks to word of mouth.

Like high school students longing for acceptance, hospitals and health systems are jumping all over Twitter and Facebook. The sad part is that most don’t seem to understand what it really means to be there. Having 10,000 fans or followers is nothing compared to having 10,000 people talking about you. There’s a huge difference. The latter is where the real power of social media lies. And guess what? You don’t even need to be present for it to happen.

Are people talking about you? Or are you just filling feeds and walls with news, photos and have-a-nice-days?

2. Sell the experience not the product
With a tiny budget for marketing, the trailer for this film wasn’t a high-end montage of movie scenes set to intense music. Instead, it was raw footage from a screening of the film showing film-goers experiencing the movie. You can take a peek at the trailer below. Warning: the trailer left me freaked out! I don’t know that I’d do well with this film.

In the article, Megan Colligan, Paramount’s co-president of marketing, states, “It was very important that we sold this as an experience rather than just a movie. People loved it so much and there is such a slow build of terror that you have to sit through it to experience the full effect. The fans have really made this their film and they are doing the bulk of the work.”

Healthcare can be more scary than anything that’s come out of Hollywood. Yet the experience you provide to help people through their health issues can be truly inspirational. Sell that experience. No more doctor portraits or coiled up stethoscopes in those ads. Deal?

3. It doesn’t have to be beautiful to be remarkable
There was talk of reshooting this movie with well-known actors. They didn’t think it would sell if it wasn’t “beautiful.” They were wrong, obviously.

Remodeling your ED will do nothing if the service still sucks. Fix that first. And for Pete’s sake don’t promote it until you do. Word of mouth works both for you and against you. Increasing volumes to an area with shoddy service means you’re also increasing volumes on the social networking scene — of people complaining.

If you happen to catch Paranormal Activity let us know what you thought.