Your All-In-One Guide to Growing Your Health System in 2025.

 

Developing an effective brand architecture—which is often part of a rebrand—is worth every bit of the effort it takes. Get it right and your organization can increase top-of-mind awareness, improve healthcare quality rankings in your community, and become recognized as a preferred health provider.

A strong healthcare brand architecture clarifies brand identities, supports accurate customer perception, and expands product or service lines effectively—all with a more efficient spend of marketing dollars. 

TAKE ACTION: Maximize The Impact of a Strong Healthcare Brand Architecture in communicating your offerings and values to customers and stakeholders

 

 

Rebranding your health system isn’t a question of if, but when. To stay relevant, brand promises and experiences must shift to meet new expectations – and expectations for patient care keep evolving.

Learn the four steps of a healthcare rebrand, key changes and events to trigger the need for a rebrand, and two types of rebrand strategies to consider in the new year. 

TAKE ACTION: Decide if 2025 is the year to update your health system's brand identity and what to do to get started with How to Approach a Health System Rebrand

 

 

Employer branding for hospitals involves creating and promoting a positive image of your hospital as an exceptional healthcare employer. It’s about developing and communicating your hospital's unique values, culture, and benefits so you reap the rewards of attracting and retaining highly skilled and qualified physicians and nurses.

By aligning your external brand with your employer brand, you establish consistency and authenticity in the eyes of both patients and potential employees. It will strengthen your overall brand identity and attract top talent who align with your organization's values, leading to long-term employee engagement and retention.

When employer branding and external branding work hand in hand, they create a powerful synergy that sets your hospital apart and reinforces your position as a destination of choice for both patients and healthcare professionals. 

TAKE ACTION: Improve your organization's reputation with these 10 Essential Steps for Hospital Employer Branding

 

To achieve your health system’s objectives and goals, you need a healthcare marketing team that can turn your organization’s vision into reality—attracting new patients, fostering loyalty, and engaging your community.

These strategists and creatives will be the engine behind all of your brand building efforts and help you create a strong, captivating, and engaging brand with a trusted reputation.

Whether you’re new to your role as a leader or experienced, building and retaining a healthcare marketing dream team that works well together and stays loyal to your organization is a continual priority. It’s key to driving growth and success for your hospital or health system.

TAKE ACTION: Use these 7 Tips to Build and Retain a Strong Healthcare Marketing Team

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Bonus Resources to Explore Expanding Your Team's Capacity: 

• When to Get Outside Help with Your Healthcare Recruiting
• 4 Benefits of Outsourcing Your Hospital's Social Media
• Five Questions to Ask a Branding Agency Before You Hire Them

 

In our 39+ years of working with hospitals and health systems, we’ve observed that the teams who realize the greatest success in executing their strategic healthcare marketing plan have one thing in common – a specific amount of time set aside for working on the plan.

The 10% Secret is a way to make sure you actively keep these four areas at the forefront of your thought process. It quite literally means spending 10 percent of your strategy time devoted to the upkeep of your strategic marketing plan. The remaining 90 percent of strategy time is spent executing the plan.

TAKE ACTION: Maintain strong brand equity by staying consistent all year with The 10% Secret to Healthcare Marketing Plan Success

Let’s get candid for a minute. As healthcare marketers and strategists, we're working in an industry that, in many ways, is lagging behind others. Healthcare’s slow progress to innovate creates ripple effects that amplify consumer frustrations, especially when it comes to the patient experience.

Consumers are measuring their experience interacting with your brand against 30 of the happiest, most carefree seconds of their life zipping through their favorite restaurant drive-thru. They are demanding their customer journey and patient experience be that good or better.

Unfortunately, that's not always the case.

Negative patient experiences make your job as a healthcare marketer harder, hurting your organization’s bottom line and, most importantly, getting in the way of people receiving the care they need.

TAKE ACTION: Use these 6 Easy Tips to Improve Patient Experience with Patient Journey Mapping

 

Since ChatGPT launched in late 2022, healthcare marketers have increasingly adopted the AI natural language generator to enhance their marketing efforts. With its user-friendly interface and advanced algorithms, ChatGPT can simplify everything from brainstorming to targeting and help you achieve your healthcare marketing goals more productively, creatively, and effectively.

But what’s the best way to approach ChatGPT to reap the benefits?

We suggest an attitude of experimentation. Look at best practices for prompts to get the results you want. And, remember that the greatest outcomes flow from balancing and blending human expertise and technology.

Let ChatGPT help you deepen your connection with your patients by training it to use a more conversational approach to patient inquiry responses and incorporate information that may be relevant to the patient's medical history or demographic. 

TAKE ACTION: Automate and scale meaningful patient interactions by deploying the best practices in How Healthcare Marketers Can Benefit from ChatGPT and AI

 

Five years ago, any healthcare executive would’ve cringed at the idea of using influencer marketing to meet their goals. Influencers have long been seen as “overpaid” models to an industry that prides itself on education, data, and science. But in today's market, the data says something different.

According to Forbes Top Social Media Statistics And Trends Of 2024, 50% of Millennials (arguably the most sought after audience in healthcare) place their faith in social media influencers’ recommendations, surpassing their trust in their favorite celebrities, which stands at 38%.

The drive behind this trust? Authenticity. An eye-opening 88% of Millennials say they value the authenticity of influencers they follow— providing clear insights, grounded in reliability and sincerity.

Influencers play a key role in building trust and credibility, educating audiences, and addressing stigmas and misconceptions.

Finding individuals who create content that aligns with your organizational needs, but add their own flare and lens, is rewarding and an often untapped medium for engaging and connecting with potential patients and consumers.

TAKE ACTION: Map your plan for deeper connection with Is Healthcare Missing an Opportunity to Influence?

Thanks to Uber, Amazon, and Walt Disney, consumers have elevated expectations for on-demand services and one-click purchasing. And reality doesn't always match expectation when they’re in your organization’s facilities and experiencing your healthcare brand on the deepest level.

Considering consumers’ expectations and the emotions they feel, they need a lot of nurturing — more than you can provide using traditional marketing. The good news is that you can create meaningful brand moments and a positive experience using experiential marketing.

Experiential marketing promotes a company’s products and services through events and partnerships. It provides a brand experience in a way that directly and immediately benefits consumers and creates encounters that are more emotional.

These emotional interactions not only build loyalty but also encourage people to share their experiences and create FOMO (fear of missing out) — activating the oldest, most tried-and-true form of marketing: word of mouth.

TAKE ACTION: Learn how to execute a high-impact, experiential marketing strategy with Experiential Marketing: Creating Meaningful Brand Moments

 

 

We live in a world where you can have goods delivered to your door within hours and customer support lines are accessible 24/7 through at least three different avenues — chat, email, phone. The high bar of customer satisfaction continues to feel out-of-touch for healthcare, and the gap is only growing.

Patients are seeking care through online platforms as much as possible and are leaving provider and system loyalty behind, for good reason. The user experience is frustrating.

It’s no longer sufficient to highlight clinical expertise exclusively. The ease of scheduling, canceling, and following up on appointments through an online portal is a key component for many patients as they select a provider.

Enhancing the online patient experience can also alleviate tactical strain on providers, allowing them to provide the quality of care they strive for — reducing turnover rates and increasing job satisfaction.

TAKE ACTION: Improve both the patient and provider experience and regain patient confidence and loyalty by deploying the strategies in From Nitrile Glove to White Glove, the Overlooked Benefits of a Digital Patient Experience

 

Regardless of the size of your hospital, staff, or budget, your team can only focus on so many projects at the same time. That means someone has to prioritize the work and provide a rationale for how and when service lines receive Marketing's attention. Without a data-informed strategy, each internal client or department director will insist their task is most important and your team will spend its valuable time playing whack-a-mole instead of meeting goals. (We like to call this firefighter marketing.) 

Portfolio mapping is a great tool for healthcare marketers trying to get a handle on the performance -and importance - of multiple service lines. As part of a larger prioritization process, this activity gives your team a solid understanding of which service lines are currently performing well, what’s actually driving dollars for your organization, which areas need assistance and initiatives that could perform well without much effort from marketing.

TAKE ACTION: Build your service line prioritization strategy for 2025 with 20 Questions to Ask Your Service Line Leaders

 

 

Whether it’s cardiology, women’s health, or cancer care, attracting and retaining patients for key hospital service lines continues to be a priority for organizational growth and sustainability. If you’ve been asked to put together a service line marketing plan, boost your chances for success by following these three tips:

• Specify roles for marketing initiatives
• Listen to frontline experts for the service
• Communicate with the health system's C-Suite

TAKE ACTION: Set clear expectations and get critical cross-departmental input with the tips in Boost Your Service Line Marketing Success

 

 

In our 39+ years of helping hospitals and health systems attract and retain patients, we've found evaluating and optimizing the patient journey increases conversion rates and secures new business. We've learned the quality of your website and digital marketing channels directly contribute to patient experience. We've also discovered that one of the most basic marketing tools actually generates the most significant return on investment.

What is that tool? It's the patient testimonial. 

There's nothing more authentic than hearing a real person share their healthcare story. In an age when audiences, especially millennials, express skepticism of all things corporate and hesitate to believe messages pushed on them, personal experiences carry extra weight. 

Patient testimonials have the power to reach a variety of audiences and drive business to your targeted provider or service line. 

TAKE ACTION: Make it a priority to find impactful stories for each of your strategic marketing objectives and get ready to monitor tons of inbound traffic with these 4 Tips for Creating an Impactful Patient Testimonial 

 

 

Healthcare recognition events are a wonderful reminder to celebrate and appreciate our providers and teams, but savvy healthcare marketers know these milestone celebrations can also boost your reputation, increase referrals, and drive service line growth. 

TAKE ACTION: Use these articles to build your recognition, revenue, and referral-driving plans for 2025 and highlight specialty services, quality of care, and your team's unique skills and expertise

Need a full list of Health Observances and Recognition Days? Check out this resource from the Society for Health Care Strategy & Market Development (SHSMD).  

 

Because healthcare happens online now, potential patients are scrolling and searching for the best provider for their unique situation long before they step foot into one of your facilities.

That's why it’s crucial for patients to have easy access to provider info early in the acquisition process. Put another way, people want the opportunity to get to know the providers and learn the values, passions, and expertise your organization offers before they schedule an appointment.

We know video is still king when it comes to engagement and generating ROI. Experience also tells us that a straightforward, effective, and cost-efficient way to highlight any health system provider is to create a profile video. So, we leaned on our experiential marketing tenets and strategies to take video marketing to the next level to make warm, yet informative, profiles. 

Profile videos can clarify a provider's relationship with the health system and highlight each physician or advanced practice provider's skill set and passion for medicine. As the public finds specialists who can address their needs, engagement numbers and new patient appointments will increase.

TAKE ACTION: Drive new patient growth by highlighting your providers' knowledge, personality, and expertise with the tips in Leveraging Your Providers to Grow Your Market Share

 

 

Building a successful strategic marketing plan requires tracking key metrics and KPIs. As you create your strategy, be sure you consider the following:

• How will you measure brand health and determine if your tactics were successful?
• What’s the expected ROI?
• What metrics will show market share increase or improved reputation?
• How will you demonstrate traction toward your strategic goals?

Determining the right KPIs for your hospital or health system marketing strategies can prevent a lot of unnecessary data mining and spreadsheet creation. It also will allow your team to focus on meaningful metrics that prove your business case and inform future strategy.

TAKE ACTION: Choose the Right KPIs to Drive Growth in Your Hospital Brand Campaign