Finding the Why in Healthcare Marketing

Finding the Why in Healthcare Marketing

When the team at ClinicalKey approached us to help market their latest ebook, we knew we’d need to create a campaign that would cut through the clinical clutter.

Atomicdust had done work promoting ClinicalKey before, so we were familiar with the product. It’s a powerful clinical search engine that helps doctors make better decisions based on better answers.

The need for quick, accurate searches is more important than you might think. More than half of the time doctors are diagnosing patients, they have questions that require extra research. Without a resource like ClinicalKey, they might ask a colleague  for answers—or worse, look it up on unaccredited internet sources.

Clearly this can lead to misinformation, which can lead to inaccurate diagnoses or unnecessary tests and costs for both patients and hospitals. ClinicalKey helps physicians make more-informed decisions, leading to better treatment plans, better outcomes and even lower healthcare costs.

Making it meaningful to the audience.

The ebook focused on lower healthcare costs, which is clearly appealing to patients. However, we’d been hired to market the ebook to medical professionals, including physicians, hospital administrators, medical librarians, clinicians, nurses and the hospital c-suite. We needed to help medical professionals see the value in cutting costs, but do they care about cost savings for patients? We weren’t so sure.

Our challenge was to craft messaging that would influence physicians and hospital employees to download and read the ebook. And we also needed to stand out from the sea of messages healthcare professionals see every day—solutions that tout long lists of features, or fill their messaging with complicated medical lingo. We needed to figure out what would grab physicians’ attention and motivate them to explore the benefits of ClinicalKey.

What’s the “why”?

There’s a famous Simon Sinek quote we reference a lot at Atomicdust: “People don’t buy what you do. They buy why you do it.”

We needed to hone in on what medical professionals care about—their why—and explain how ClinicalKey is aligned.

We thought about why healthcare professionals do what they do, why they get out of bed every morning: they want to help people, and provide patients with the best care possible. And ClinicalKey helps them do just that—find better answers that lead to lower costs, and therefore improved care for their patients.

So how would we relay that message to doctors?

Turns out, the answer was right in front of us. The ebook illustrated the power and impact of ClinicalKey with stories of doctors using the tool to treat patients. By sharing relatable human stories, we could make our messaging more meaningful—and stand out against the jargon-y, sterile messaging healthcare professionals are used to seeing. The same stories used in the ebook could be used to inspire our target audience to read it.

Bringing the stories to life.

Once we had our strategy, we started building out the supporting pieces. We took the stories from the ebook and created videos that would live on the ebook landing page. We also built direct mailers, emails and social media graphics to grab peoples’ attention and point them to the site.

When the campaign launched, we were proud of the pieces we had created. The landing page attracted fresh eyes, and new downloads meant that more doctors, nurses, administrators and decision-makers were reading the ebook. More people were seeing all the good things ClinicalKey does for hospital staff—and the people they help every day.

The project was a great example of a foundational truth in marketing: If you want to inspire an audience into action, you need to remember what inspires them.