10:50 a.m. March 30: You’re walking through the hospital from one meeting to another and notice that the corridors are buzzing with an abnormal number of caterers pushing carts down the hallway. You wonder what’s going on for a moment but quickly shift back to mentally preparing for your 11 a.m. meeting.
Two hours and two meetings go by — yep, you worked through lunch again — and you arrive at the assigned location for your 1 p.m. meeting. As soon as you enter the conference room, you’re greeted with the smell of sandwiches and a staff member who’s hurriedly cleaning up from a lunch event.
And then you’re confronted with an image that very suddenly changes the direction and pace of the rest of your day: a sign reading “Happy Doctors’ Day.”
The feeling you’re experiencing can be best described with the flushed-face emoji.
If you, too — despite your organization and planning — have been late to the “Doctors’ Day” party or at least found yourself panicking as the end of March draws near, you’re not alone. And if you’ve managed to pull off a National Doctors’ Day marketing strategy in record time, then consider yourself a healthcare marketing magician.
Either way, don’t let Doctors’ Day catch you off-guard this year. And better yet, make the commitment to plan ahead for a livened-up approach that goes above and beyond checking a box with gifting promotional items. Your doctors deserve to be celebrated in a visible way that supports your overarching marketing goals.
A humanizing approach
As healthcare marketers, we not only strive to convert consumers into patients but also to turn them into loyalists. But before we can expect patients to feel and show their loyalty toward your organization, we need to build trust. And trust comes from human connection.
While much of this human connection is formed in the clinic between patients and their providers, don’t sell your impact as a healthcare marketer short. You play a critical role in laying the loyalty-inspiring groundwork to get patients in the door. You might do this by taking a personal approach to your marketing efforts and featuring your organizations’ doctors.
This Doctors’ Day, take your marketing efforts a step beyond personal, and go for humanizing. Remind your target audience that their physicians are real people with real stories. For example, does one of your doctors have a family member who struggled with a health condition that inspires them to provide better patient care? Is this what inspired them to go to medical school and become a doctor in the first place? These are the stories that your consumers and patients want to hear and they will lead to increased engagement and build connection, trust and loyalty.
Doctors’ Day marketing ideas
- Physician videos: Video is the most effective medium for communicating and eliciting emotion—and when building loyalty, an emotional response is what you’re after. While resource-intensive, this may be the most impactful. At Ten Adams, we have demonstrated success by leveraging your providers to grow your market share.
- Blog posts: Blog posts offer a great source of sharable, evergreen content that adds content to your website and enhances your organization’s search engine optimization.
- Social media: Social media is the perfect platform for inspiring and tracking engagement. It also extends the reach of your blog or video content by making it sharable among networks.
