Marketing Healthcare Digitally Before It Was a Thing...

Hard to believe this video was created 16 years ago and published on YouTube as a way to promote an MRI center. Additionally we implemented a full on digital marekting strategy before digital marketing was really ever a thing, ESPECIALLY in healthcare.

If you were around in the early days, 2006 - 2009ish, staunchy healthcare marketing executives (and non-marketing executives) were saying things like, "you'd never want to promote healthcare on a place like Facebook, where college kids are posting pictures of themselves at keg parties."

By the way the acting is average. I do cringe a bit everytime I see this video that has lived on YouTube all this time and grown to 71,000 views!

Remember this was a different era...

1. College aged kids were using Facebook, it's where it started on college campuses and there were really no other social media choices.
2. Healthcare was not yet ready to adopt digital mediums, i.e. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google Ads and websites.
3. I was...We build a website, created this YouTube video and page, implemented a social media strategy w/Facebook and Twitter and ran Google Ads.

With a limited marketing budget, I started to figure out the web thing pretty quickly. Not to mention I understood how disruptive we were going to be by taking our message digitally and talking directly to the patients.

Validation

Validation that I was onto something came in a few different forms.

• Physician practices controlled referrals, I took a nurse out to lunch and she commented that people in their practices, a number of schedulers were on "The Facebook" all day long. That was one point of validation that in order to catch fish, you got to go fishing where the fish are...I immediately created a profile and uploaded all our pictures of our MRI facility. Not to mention a Fan Page, and followed that up by inviting their office via email and other offices to follow our page.
• Our following started to grow so did our referrals. It was easy back then to post a message and everyone saw it.
• National trade publications covered stories on me and this imaging facility. Now that didn't necessarily generated referrals but it did gain a fair amount of exposure that I was able to leverage with local media for a public relations campaign.

The imaging center did good, but it was time for me to expand my horizon. As a result of running these digital campaigns, we'd also been a customer of GE Healthcare Radiology IT and they showed interest.

I ended leveraging my efforts with GE Healthcare, which I'll share at another time.

Over the next several months I'm sharing some of the marketing projects I've worked on over the years. This is one of them, while there's a lot of people that have entered the healthcare marketing world, and tout their digital services I've been around since the start.

It's awesome that I've got a fully backed marketing agecy with 898 Marketing and a number of clients in healthcare both on the Original Equiptment Manufacturing side and physician practices.

Whether you are headed to RSNA in November or a physician practice looking to grown we can help, hit me up with a DM.