Marketing That Saves Lives: Jasmine Gee on Marketing Smarts [Podcast]
As marketers, we strive to make sure our jobs are meaningful and that we’re having a positive impact on people’s lives. In today’s episode, Jasmine Gee shows us how marketing is working to actually save lives by helping with the rollout of Covid vaccines and ensuring critical information is reaching those who need it most.
It’s no secret that healthcare marketing tactics often seem behind the times. As an industry that’s chock-full of regulations, healthcare is not one where the words “new” and “innovative” are typically applied to marketing efforts. It’s usually pretty easy to identify healthcare marketing when you see it (hint: look for a lot of blues and whites, and smiling people in lab coats).
Jasmine Gee, vice-president of marketing at Arcadia.io, joins Marketing Smarts to talk about how marketing is helping to save lives by ensuring that patients make (and show up to) appointments and that they hear from their individual practitioners.
A lot of what’s happening now in healthcare tactics, Gee concedes, would be considered Marketing 101 for those outside healthcare, but those tactics have proven remarkably effective.
For example, we think of patients in the same way as we’d think about leads. Someone who has missed a visit or needs a vaccine is a “lead” and we’re hoping to get that person to a “conversion.” Only, in this case, the conversion is not downloading a whitepaper or completing a webform; it’s reaching out to their clinician and getting a vaccination or the treatment they need. It’s about facilitating real, meaningful change in patients’ lives.
We also discuss the evolving role of healthcare professionals and how they now have to wear the marketing hat as well. It’s no longer enough just to practice medicine, practitioners now need to ensure they’re winning the hearts and the minds of their patients.
One way to do that is by ensuring that they’re reaching and serving their patients in the ways patients want to be reached—and for marketers that’s all about personalization and relevance. To make a stronger connection, the message should come from their doctor—the last one they’ve seen. Gee notes that such relevance can come only if the data is there: Having the right list is critical; imperfect data make this type of personalized outreach nearly impossible.
Aside from making connections and being relevant, the real coup is getting vaccine information out to the public and ensuring that those most at risk are aware of current guidelines and updated information. Such outreach programs have been “shockingly successful,” having sent over 2 million messages with open rates of up to 50%.
“Healthcare lacks humanity, which is ironic, because it’s healthcare,” says Gee, noting that the standard blue and white healthcare marketing with doctors in lab coats isn’t cutting the mustard any more. “We need real faces of real-life people dealing with real-life situations, feeling supported.”
And there’s nothing wrong with injecting humor into the marketing mix, as Jasmine demonstrates. Those of us marketing in highly regulated industries can still have fun with our marketing; we just need to be mindful in how we approach the use of humor.
Listen to the entire show now from the link above, or download the mp3 and listen at your convenience. Of course, you can also subscribe to the Marketing Smarts podcast in iTunes, via Spotify, or via RSS and never miss an episode.
