Let your customers tell your story

Anyone involved in healthcare marketing knows that having a clinician show how they are using your product to deliver positive outcomes is great PR.

This point struck home for me recently in a social media exchange involving a company called Patientrack. Nurses and NHS trust executives demonstrated at the recent Patient First event how they were using the electronic track and trigger system to record millions of observations on potentially deteriorating patients, which was helping to deliver a 50% reduction in cardiac arrests. This was reported on by trust employees on Twitter, providing a rich insight for others as to the benefits Patientrack can deliver. You can see the exchange on the Patientrack Twitter account.

Such testimonials are given great weight in any form of marketing; in healthcare marketing, especially so. Clinicians learn from other clinicians. They talk frankly about the tools that they use and how they can have an impact on patient care. If something does not help them, they will say so – patient’s lives could be at risk if they don’t.

Clinicians are also customers, and as such they help define a brand. An organisation may have an idea of how they want to be perceived by customers. Customers perceive things differently, and we all know that perception is reality.

Part of this perception is informed by the views of their peers. Customers can tell you what they like about your product. But when they start telling others in their network about how they like your product, you have hit gold.

Having a strong brand is important; it provides reassurance and can help guide a prospective customer into an understanding of your values, and how your products could meet those values.

But it is what your customers say about your products that demonstrate the value they are getting from your brand. Make sure that the customer voice is an important part of your marketing activity.