Marketing Your Simulation Center
Phillip Wortham, MBA, BA, CHSOS-A, FSSH
Chief Clinical Simulation Officer
Simulationists know the services we have to offer are of high value. The question is how do we showcase that value while generating necessary revenue to support our programs. To me, the answer is in plain sight. Marketing your services and your outcomes can and will yield a high reward and push forward the value proposition of your program to your institution and beyond.?
In my world, marketing is everything! Steady dedication to promoting services offered, good stories and rich outcomes will help your simulation center/program thrive. Whether the communication is geared towards key internal stakeholders or external parties, engaging an audience while keeping them informed will assist in spreading the overall mission and vision of your program and aid with operational success.?
As with most advertising and communication the marketing strategy of any simulation program needs to be built on a solid foundation to prevail yet flexible or nimble enough to adapt the ever-changing world of simulation education and marketing.??Both traditional media and social media channels should be utilized to maintain that balance, casting a wide net around the target audience specified for your program.?
The key to a successful marketing strategy is to put your plan on paper, tell your story, stay consistent and track key metrics to be used in a continuous improvement cycle.?
Social Media
There are many social media services to choose from when marketing your simulation center for the various purposes discussed earlier. The key is to narrow the scope or social media focus to the best of your ability in order to hit your target audience. Ultimately, different platforms may help hit different markets. In my opinion one size does not fit all.?
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn are five of the most commonly used social media platforms leveraged by traditional businesses to engage various audiences worldwide. Though all can be used for your marketing strategy, simulation leadership should determine the audience and the content that will go out and then find the service that will meet their communication and engagement needs.?
Let’s start with Twitter. According to statista.com, in the last reported quarter, the number of monthly active U.S. Twitter users amounted to 84.41 million.?Twitter generally targets younger generations of the population as well as professionals interested in sharing information on specific topics. To many professionals, Twitter is considered to be a supportive platform for specialized growth and a gateway to content sharing from other social media platforms i.e. LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube.?
I hear from Simulationists on a regular basis that they don’t use Twitter because they don’t understand it. My response to them is always the same, It is time to understand it and leverage its capabilities especially to advance the mission and vision of healthcare simulation, patient safety and quality. A hashtag goes a long way in support of program buy-in and brining in potential revenue, getting the word out or simply networking.
Facebook Is much more of a common household name. In fact, there are more than 260 million monthly Facebook users in the United States and Canada as of the third Quarter 2021.??What once was a place to meetup with friends and share pictures of your pets has now become a platform for forums and specialized interest groups as well. There has been a large number of healthcare simulation groups develop on Facebook over the past few years. If you have not yet joined the conversations, now is a good time. The Simulation Technician Network is one great example of a growing group with nearly 4,000 members from around the globe!
Here you can post a question and have it answered nearly instantaneously by simulationists with varied expertise, or promote the work your team is doing.?
Some simulation centers have gone as far as building out an entire page for their program which helps learners, faculty, staff and other key stakeholders engage with one another in a casual manner. The Center for Advanced Medical Learning and Simulation (CAMLS) has a great Facebook page with almost 2,500 active followers.
I have been a part of the building of several of these groups including the Utah Simulation Coalition Facebook page. It’s a quick and easy way to gain traction for the work you are already doing. Since the internet is available 24 hours a day 7 days a week, your content can always be seen.?
Number of Monthly Active Facebook Users in the United States and Canada, 2021
The third social media network I would recommended for marketing your simulation center or program is Instagram. Instagram is a platform that allows corporations and individuals to post single images tagged to other users, social media networks and services.??Since simulation is highly visual and exciting to simulation staff, participants, moulage artists and administration, many pictures and videos are taken. This outlet is ideal to not only house such items but lend a hand in support of the overall marketing strategy.?
Instagram can also be used to manage a photo album of events to be shared either publicly or privately. It is important to remember your institutions policy on sharing photos and video of participants and to follow the terms of your confidentiality forms and photo release.?
As with other online marketing tools, Instagram can be setup as a private account, which allows corporations or in this case simulation programs to house material and share content as needed. This functionality saves storage space on internal servers.
The secondary benefit to setting up an Instagram account for your simulation center is clearing the simulation photos off of your phone. If you have been running simulation sessions for any amount of time, you most likely have more photos of your moulage masterpieces on your phone than you do of your own children or grandchildren. We are always excited to share those photos when we get together for conferences but why not share your creativity to the simulation world all the time.??I have an Instagram account established purely for my simulation adventures and to showcase my professional wins. You can follow me on Instagram @PW_Simulation.
One hospital-based institution I worked for allowed our simulation program to start several social media channels, Instagram being one of those. In looking at the followers and engagement data we discovered that most of our several hundred followers were system employees. The hospital system caregivers were engaging in our content which we believe was helping drive a grassroots movement for more simulation and task training.?
Percentage of U.S. adults who use Instagram as of February 2019, by age group
YouTube
The fourth piece to the social media puzzle proposed for use is YouTube. YouTube has become the TV of the future for millions of individuals around the world.??YouTube can be set up as a channel that will showcase all of the marketing video, DIY, and informational content an organization has collected over the years. These videos will play without interruption once a viewer has arrived at that channel.
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YouTube has been a staple in social media content since 2005 and in fact was bought by Google in 2006. YouTube is a great place to house your longer marketing video clips and the traditional media news stories. This is a great landing place for content to be organized and stored.??Once uploaded, video can become dynamically shared across the social media spectrum including Twitter, and Facebook.
Since YouTube is owned by the world’s best and most effective search engine; Google. It is effective in searchability and function. You may have noticed that when you Google a topic a big list of videos pop-up from YouTube.??This is what I call an effective mode of advertising and systems integration.?
Much like Instagram, YouTube can be used to store large content which relieves storage space usage on internal servers, Your IT department will love you (Maybe)! Video content can be marked as Private and Public to allow for securely sharing content or opening it up for the world to see. Once again, it is important to remember your institutions confidentiality forms and photo / video release policy when posting content.?
Lastly, LinkedIn?is a platform primarily used for?professional networking?and career development, and allows job seekers to post their?CVs?and employers to post?jobs.?To me, LinkedIn is much more than that.?
I hear more often than not that people are afraid to do too much on this platform due to the fear of their supervisor thinking they are looking for a job and trying to leave the position they are currently in. Though this is somewhat of a relevant concern, I see it differently. Networking in any fashion is a must professionally. I personally am very active on LinkedIn, and, I encourage my staff to join in. Our simulation center has a LinkedIn account and our simulation team uses their personal accounts to push institutional content further and vice versa. Over the past year, the simulation center and individual staff members have had posts reach over 20,000 interactions, shares or likes.
This platform allows for career growth, building a living resume or CV, posting articles and connecting with others in the healthcare simulation industry and beyond.?
Social Media Management
Management of these channels including content of traditional media stories, twitter, Facebook feeds and Instagram or YouTube channels should be maintained using a social media tracker/management system such as Hootsuite. There are several other platforms out there that work in relatively the same fashion.?
These social media content platforms allow the manager of the social media accounts to schedule posts and marketing material to one or all social media sites with the push of a button. This is genius! They also allow for tracking of all feeds and notifications to be populated in a single location, optimizing the workflow and unnecessary steps in the work with social media.?
The icing on the cake is that your simulation program has social media engagement metrics on a single dashboard that allows you to leverage the best times to post and connect with your target audience and drive either an ROI or ROE (Return on investment or Return on Expectations).
The media channels that have been pinpointed in the section above have been selected using several methods including individual usability, function and monthly usage data. Since media outlets have coined themselves with specific properties and characteristics not one site is deemed better than the other. It is important to mention that social media trends change and evolve sometimes on a regular basis and much more often than traditional media outlets.??The social media channels discussed for your marketing strategy will need revising on a regular basis to stay relevant and up to date with the stakeholders your program is trying to reach.
Traditional Media Outlets
Though the use of social media platforms will by far trump the amount of traditional media outlets simulation programs will utilize, they should not be left out.??Traditional media plays a large role in marketing and will solidify the quick and changing nature of the social media outlets.??Contrary to popular belief, newspaper, television and radio marketing can still be useful and play a role in the effectiveness and sustainability of your marketing campaign.?
As we know, most simulation programs / centers hold many conferences and events that are extremely interesting to the general public. These events are innovative enough to draw the attention of the general news agencies including local news and newspapers.?
In my experience, news agencies will typically pick up two to four news stories from local simulation programs a year and sometimes more.?
Over the course of my career, I have had several morning news programs broadcast live from the simulation center which includes several segments on various simulation topics. The trick is pitching a story to various stations that is engaging, relevant to what is happening in the community and will draw an audience.?
Such stories and content should be housed on your YouTube Channel and then distributed through other social media accounts for maximum leverage, ultimately reaching an audience that is undeniable. Both the older generations and younger generations will have the opportunity to be exposed to the services and life-saving techniques simulation centers provide which in turn will support the push for patient safety and quality.?
Stories
Lastly, simulation stories go a long way and especially for your internal stakeholders. We all have had the emails come through our inbox that state something like “Several days after I went through postpartum simulation, I had a patient follow the same decline as the patient in the scenario. I knew what to do thanks to sim.” Or, “Thanks to simulation, my team is able to recognize the early signs of sepsis and the bundle is implemented quicker. We saved a very vulnerable patient today due to such education”
Having a one-page template to write up a story using an SBAR format and quotes from caregivers with a picture or two will yield more reward than what you may expect. This is a simple way to market to your leadership.?
In one simulation program I was involved in, we took this theory to heart. I accredit much of our success with key stakeholders to simply sharing stories once a month and did so through an email and writeup. This practice still happens to this day and many years after we first implemented it.?
In summary, marketing is everything and especially for simulation programs at any level of operational experience and size. Never underestimate its power or need.?