This post is part of a series that explores how Unlock Health makes great work easier.

In his blog What makes great healthcare marketing, our CEO, Brandon Edwards, discussed why we built Unlock Health, our purpose, and how we define great healthcare marketing. I’d like to take that a step further and discuss how that translates into Unlock Health being a great healthcare marketing partner to our clients.

When you’re evaluating who to trust to help you develop and execute your brand and marketing strategy, here are three key things to consider.

Do they have industry expertise

Choosing a healthcare provider is complex. It’s based on both hard facts and intuition.

According to the American Hospital Association, the most important factor for consumers choosing a healthcare provider is whether they’re in the consumer’s insurance network. The rest of the decision-making process, however, is often based on less tangible factors. For most Americans, the healthcare system is a morass of confusing language, processes, and procedures. So, when they have a choice, they’re looking for a healthcare provider they trust and believe will take good care of them.

Effective healthcare marketing needs to convey that your organization has proven clinical expertise, delivers high-quality outcomes, and is invested in the health of patients and the community. It should make your vision and mission feel accessible and relevant to your audience.

Healthcare is a complicated field with very specific language that can be tough for consumers to understand. Taking complex information and clinical differentiators and distilling it into simple language is a skill set that develops with time and practice. There’s a special knack to making health information understandable by people with varying levels of literacy.

Do they understand who you are

Few industries have a closer connection between their work and the effect on the everyday lives of their consumers than healthcare. Every successful engagement with your audience creates an opportunity to materially improve someone’s life and health. When you work with an agency singularly focused on healthcare, they understand how important it is to reach your audience. There’s a shared purpose that makes the collaboration deeper and more meaningful.

Whether you’re promoting preventive health or supporting people in the most confusing and painful times of their lives, what you do is life changing. It’s also highly localized, even if you’re part of a geographically diverse organization.

The socioeconomics, insurance coverage — whether public or privately funded — and culture of the surrounding areas influence what you offer in each location and how you reach your patients. And it’s important to understand your competitive position as the only game in town, one of a crowded field of providers, or somewhere in between.

Do they offer what you need to execute efficiently and effectively

A holistic marketing strategy is critical. It should both build awareness of your brand before people need your services and also capture people who are actively making decisions about care. To pull it off you’ll need strategists and storytellers, designers and data scientists, people who keep the ideas big and the execution simple.

Look for an integrated marketing partner who can help you:

• Evaluate your brand equity, competitive position, and organizational goals
• Understand who your consumers are and how to reach them effectively
• Develop a differentiated, multi-channel strategy
• Break through the clutter with compelling storytelling and memorable visuals
• Deliver the measurable ROI your leadership team expects

Let’s look at a real-world example

A long-term client was ready to refresh their message to the market with help from Unlock Health. We never assume that because we have an existing relationship, we can skip the research phase of our BrandNext^®️ framework.  Since the launch of the previous campaign, the client had expanded their footprint and been recognized as one of the top ten academic medical centers delivering high-quality care. They were conducting clinical trials and investing in research. A concept sprang to mind, momentum.

Constant improvement is the organization’s vision and pledge — and the promise they make to their patients as a health system. The messaging would reinforce that momentum is in this client’s DNA. Every single day, health network staff push to make life better for both the sick and the well. In more ways. In more places. Forever raising the bar and testing the limits of what medicine can do. Never compromising. Never settling. Always pushing ahead. Because when you provide health care, there is only one direction we should be moving.

Unlock Health launched an integrated and mixed-media marketing campaign to reinforce the strength of the client’s brand and help drive demand for services, particularly in cancer care. The campaign elevated the impact of the brand’s positioning — in a bold but not boastful way. It drove consumer demand by reinforcing accessibility, convenience, and meeting people where they are across the system with the added benefit of academic medicine. And it reinforced brand awareness and reputation for high-quality, reliable, trustworthy, and safe care.

Since the campaign’s launch, the client’s homepage and cancer care landing page generated 50,000 and 44,000 views, respectively. The Unlock Health team tracked several conversion indicators, including:

• 32 Click to Call events
• 74 Request Appointment link clicks
• 15 MyChart link clicks

Qualtrics data shows that the brand has maintained their position as the lead over competitors in their marketing in advertising recall and has increased their percentage in unaided awareness.

Don’t settle for good, insist on great

As Joseph Campbell said, “People forget facts, but they remember stories.” A truly great healthcare marketing partner will help you find the right audience, tell your story in memorable ways, and prove that it can drive sustained growth for your organization.

For today’s healthcare marketers, the job is made even harder because achieving your goals has required a roster of agencies – the strategic agency, the creative agency, the tech agency. And yet there’s always been the missing partner — the agency who understands healthcare so deeply that it makes great work easier. Unlock Health is a full-service agency that makes great work easier through a combination of art and science — creativity fueled by data, insights, and deep expertise in the business of healthcare.