Sure, National Nurses Week is down the road, yet nursing administration in your organization has already been planning the festivities for MONTHS. It’s never too early to put May 6 -12 on your radar because it’s prime time for celebrating perhaps the largest, most arterial part of your hospital’s workforce.
The Power of Nurses
Nurses not only work on the front lines of patient care, but they also reportedly spend more time with patients than any other healthcare professional. And their work impacts patient outcomes and patient satisfaction. So it’s important not to sell the power of your nurses short.
As healthcare marketers, we know leveraging our providers is critical to a successful healthcare marketing strategy. We focus these efforts on physicians, because they are the public faces of our organizations.
Individual nurses may not attract patients to a healthcare organization the way that doctors do. But they play a critical role in the patient experience, your brand image, and, therefore, have the potential to keep patients coming back.
Nurses Week Ideas
This Nurses Week, give your organization’s nurses the recognition they deserve by sharing personal stories (called profiles) about some of your key players. Get started by asking nursing administration to identify top-performing nurses. You can also engage employees in the selection process for boosted camaraderie.
Take a holistic, multi-channel approach by incorporating these profiles into all media forms:
- Owned media includes channels that your organization controls such as its website, blog sites, email and social media platforms
- Earned media includes placements in print publications, online and other organizations’ owned media channels
- Paid media includes traditional advertising
Owned media
Focus first on what you can control: your owned media channels. Try this:
- Place the full-length nurse profiles on your organization’s website or blog site — and don’t forget professional photography.
- Create campaign URLs for the pages where the profiles will live such as [your website domain]/nurses, [your website domain]/ournurses/, or [your website domain]/nursesweek.
- Promote the stories using email, social media and even your internal communication news site, and drive traffic to the full-length profiles on the website or blog site.
Earned media
Collaborate with your communication colleagues to get more mileage out of the nurse profiles. Local media outlets and consumers want to hear about great people doing great things in their community.
Paid media
As a healthcare marketer, you’re really good at leveraging owned and earned media to get the job done. But don’t underestimate paid media. Paid media often leads your audience to your owned media channels and creates earned media interest and mentions.
Need help making your nurses shine this Nurses Week and beyond? We’ll help get you to the next level. Contact Jennifer Horton. VP Strategy, at jhorton@tenadams.com or 812.253.6311.
