Marketing your brand internally is essential in promoting your brand externally. Therefore, a need for maintaining a well informed workforce to enhance external perceptions of your hospital’s brand, along with harnessing their influence with your hospital’s patients and visitors, is vital.
A hospital’s ability to leverage its internal workforce to realize this requires them to recognize their critical role in becoming active participants.
Here are five concepts to consider as you examine and improve your marketing potential:
#1: Education and Training
A hospital’s internal workforce can be key Website ambassadors if they are fully aware of what the Website’s content and capabilities are. The better informed they are, the better they can advise and encourage patients to use it.
It’s not uncommon for the majority of a hospital’s internal workforce to be unaware of the functions of their own organizational Website, or what information is located on the Website.
There are several places that can be used to engage your hospital’s internal workforce to implement internal brand building and marketing communications, such as:
- Employee Walkthroughs – where members of marketing or other departments set aside specific times and dates to demonstrate to hospital staff workers what is available on the Web for patients and how to use it, such as where clinical content can be found, how to sign-up for an e-newsletter and the process of paying your hospital bill online. Engaging a hospital’s staff to what is available will help promote the Website to existing patients and allow them to remain connected with the hospital once they leave the hospital
- Kiosks/Digital Signage – placed in various hospital locations where hospital staff members can easily access and receive hospital information, such as employee training seminars, when away from their desk or office
- Intranets – used to promote hospital culture and unite the workforce through a private network where hospital staff members can learn about the organization through messages from the hospital’s CEO or in employee discussion forums, and also find educational resources—like videos of surgical procedures— for sharing purposes
#2: Social Media and Web 2.0
Hospital workforce usage of social media and Web 2.0 applications is essential because it helps users engage and interact with any number of active communities—both internally and externally.
An example of how a hospital’s workforce can use social media is for each department (e.g. Pediatrics, Oncology) to set up a Facebook account or Twitter account to push out ideas and hear the community. These ideas will be received externally, as well as internally.
Once hospital employees are comfortable using social media and Web 2.0 internally, they will be able to utilize those skills when they are communicating to patients and can suggest patients to “friend” them or become a “fan” of theirs on Facebook or “follow” them on Twitter.
#3: Feedback and Focus Groups
Social media is a way for you and your employees to hear what others are saying about your brand. But what about hearing how your employees perceive your brand? As the backbone of your hospital—and as online and real-life ambassadors for your hospital—you want to ensure that they are given a voice and that they know that voice is being heard.
Encouraging your hospital’s internal workforce to participate in focus groups or to share feedback about topics relating to internal matters can prove to be a useful technique for assessing perspectives about your brand.
Through focus groups with hospital staffers, you can create an open environment that enables dialogue pertaining to your hospital’s Website and internal marketing efforts about:
- Employee insight on hospital policies and procedures
- Information on areas to improve upon to make the Website better
- Understanding on where there are communication gaps that need to be addressed
#4: Website Content Creation and Contributions
Providing your internal workforce with the opportunities to become actively involved in drafting their own department’s Website content is a highly effective way for them to develop ownership and pride in the Website.
Implementing a content management system (CMS) into your hospital’s Website would simplify the process for your internal workforce to contribute, as well as for administration to edit and control dispersed authorship. Not only will your internal workforce gain a positive sense of professional autonomy and empowerment (which will certainly yield its own rewards), but it can advance their ability to function as effective internal brand ambassadors by:
- Improving their ability to locate content and relevant resources
- Familiarizing them with the hospital’s Website content—in their department and elsewhere
- Leveraging their valuable “real world” experience to identify and produce information that patients want
#5: Integrating Traditional Branding Techniques
The best hospital marketing techniques don’t just focus on the hottest trends and technology. Instead—through traditional branding efforts and communication efforts internally—they skillfully integrate forward-thinking strategies with proven, traditional techniques. To name several:
- Branding campaigns
- New employee orientations
- Newsletters and e-newsletters
- Rewards and recognition events
- Employee promotions and incentives
- Company celebrations and milestones
- Teambuilding exercises to enhance company culture
By using some of these concepts to address the challenges and solutions of educating your internal workforce about your hospital’s Website, their knowledge can be better utilized to promote and market your hospital to patients, potential patients and visitors.
AVID Design can assist your hospital with implementing these five concepts into your overall marketing strategy to improve your internal marketing potential and to help educate your internal workforce into promoting your hospital’s Website to patients and visitors. Contact AVID Design today to find out more.
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