by Grant Evans | Sep 4, 2024 | Blog
One often overlooked yet powerful tool in a marketer’s arsenal is data. By leveraging data effectively, marketers can create compelling narratives that resonate with both journalists and decision-makers.
Too often, marketing relies on generic value propositions and broad claims about product benefits. However, in an era where evidence-based decision-making is paramount, data-driven stories have become increasingly important. Data-backed claims lend credibility to your marketing messages, making them more persuasive to skeptical audiences. In a sea of similar products, unique data insights can set your offering apart from competitors. And data allows you to tailor your message to specific audience segments, increasing its relevance and impact.
The shift from traditional PR to data-driven brand journalism is not just a trend; it’s a necessary evolution in healthcare technology marketing. By embracing this approach, marketers can create more forceful, credible, and impactful narratives that truly resonate with target audiences.
Sources of Valuable Data
To create data-driven narratives, marketers need access to relevant and reliable data sources. Your own customer base is a goldmine of valuable insights. Internal customer data and case studies can provide real-world evidence of your product’s effectiveness and impact. Independent studies, in the form of third-party surveys and research, can provide unbiased validation of claims, adding an extra layer of credibility to marketing messages. Additionally, contextualizing your product within broader healthcare trends can be powerful. Industry reports and public health data can help you demonstrate how your solution fits into the bigger picture of healthcare innovation and improvement.
Transforming Raw Data into Compelling Narratives
Having data is only the first step. The real magic happens when you transform that data into a persuasive story. Start by identifying key trends and insights. Look for patterns and unexpected findings in your data that could form the basis of an interesting narrative that underscores your positioning. Next, connect these data points to create a cohesive story. Don’t just present isolated facts; weave them into a narrative that illustrates the value and impact of your product or service.
Visual representation of data can significantly enhance understanding and engagement. Use data visualization techniques such as charts, infographics, and interactive visualizations (such as Ceros experiences) to make complex data more accessible and engaging. This not only makes your content more appealing but also helps your audience grasp key concepts quickly and easily.
Implementing Data-Driven Marketing
To integrate data into your marketing efforts, consider conducting and leveraging customer or broader cross-industry surveys. Regular feedback from your users can provide valuable insights into product performance, user satisfaction, and areas for improvement. These insights can then be used to create powerful marketing messages.
Partnering with research organizations can be another effective strategy. Collaborations can yield credible, third-party data to support your claims, adding an extra layer of legitimacy to your marketing efforts. But make sure to craft survey questions carefully –– think of the types of answers you want to elicit and work backward. Also – while the initial spend for an outside (reputable) research firm may be a bit rich for many budgets, consider the long-tail implications of the resulting data. Such campaigns can result in data that is used in reports, white papers, infographics, eBooks, speaking engagements, and other
Make data analysis a central part of your strategy, not an afterthought. Integrate data analysis into your marketing workflow, ensuring that every campaign and message is backed by solid, relevant data.
While powerful, data-driven marketing in healthcare technology comes with its own set of challenges, patient privacy and regulatory compliance should always be at the forefront of your efforts. Ensure that all data used in your marketing is anonymized and adheres to HIPAA requirements.
Data is crucial, but it’s important not to let it overshadow the human stories and emotional elements of healthcare. Strive to maintain a balance between data-driven insights and the human element in your narratives. Did the solution drive better patient outcomes? Did it help reduce clinician burnout? Consider the top-line takeaway from each data point, but don’t ignore the human element.
Lastly, be mindful of data overload. Focus on the most relevant insights rather than overwhelming your audience with minutiae. The goal is to inform and persuade, not to confuse or bore your audience with excessive data or ponderous analysis.
Looking ahead, predictive analytics and AI will enable more sophisticated, forward-looking marketing strategies. These technologies will empower marketers to anticipate trends and customer needs, creating more proactive and effective campaigns.
Personalization will also play a larger role, with data driving increasingly tailored messaging for different audience segments. This will allow for more precise and effective communication, improving engagement and conversion rates.
Different Audiences Require Different Approaches
Remember that not all audiences interact with data in the same way. When presenting to journalists, focus on newsworthy trends and surprising insights that can form the basis of a story. Journalists are always on the lookout for fresh, interesting angles, and your data could provide just that.
For decision-makers, emphasize data that directly relates to ROI, efficiency gains, and improved patient outcomes. These stakeholders are often focused on bottom-line impacts, so your data should clearly demonstrate the value proposition of your product or service.
Regardless of your audience, strive to balance technical details with accessible insights. Ensure your data tells a clear story, regardless of the audience’s technical expertise. Use plain language to explain complex concepts, and always tie your data back to real-world implications and benefits.
By harnessing the power of data, healthcare technology marketers can create more compelling, credible, and impactful narratives. In an industry where decisions can literally be a matter of life and death, data-driven marketing isn’t just a strategy—it’s a responsibility. Embrace the power of data in marketing efforts and watch as your messages resonate more deeply with target audiences.
by Jim Sweeney | Aug 21, 2024 | Blog
I love the NFL draft, and not just because I’m a Cleveland Browns fan for whom the draft offers an annual opportunity to indulge in wishful thinking about next season.
I love the draft because it’s when sportswriters and analysts strain to produce synonyms for words like big, tall, fast, strong, quick, smart and aggressive. And they struggle to find alternative ways to say, “He’s a good blocker” or “He runs precise routes.”
That’s how you get player descriptions like, “positional versatility,” “rare length,” “jitterbug quicks,” “bendy,” “piano feet,” “excellent physicality,” “excels in space,” and “bounding lateral burst.” And those are just from one website.
But my favorite player description from recent draft coverage has to be: “He possesses great length in his arms.”
Think about that sentence for a moment. You know the writer initially thought, “What can I say about this player? Well, he’s got long arms, that’s for sure.” I like to think the writer even typed the sentence, “He has long arms.” But then he fell victim to a common fear among writers (not just sportswriters) and replaced it with that truly awful bit of writing: “He possesses great length in his arms.” The name of that phobia? Fear of a Simple Sentence.
Fear of a Simple Sentence (FOSS) whispers in writers’ ears that short, simple, easy-to-understand sentences will cause readers to think they’re unimaginative hacks incapable of writing sentences with multiple clauses and hard-to-understand terms. It’s the writerly compulsion to be creative when all that’s needed is to be clear.
Consider this example from an NFL draft site: “A hallmark of his game, the palpable explosiveness, permeates through his every move, asserting dominance in gap penetration and providing a perpetual disruptive presence.” Sounds like a paean to one of the lesser Nordic gods.
FOSS is the irresistible urge to embellish, to turn nouns into verbs and adjectives into nouns. It’s the impulse to forgo the clear and obvious in favor of the murky and imprecise. And it results in bad, hard-to-understand writing. It also can produce zombie sentences, which I explore in another blog post.
Here’s an example from the business world, a press release announcing a new hire: “In her new role, Judy will be responsible for connecting consumer insights with brand needs with the right product solution to optimize value of Return on Experience back to clients.”
Anyone know what Judy is going to do? It’s a fair bet even Judy doesn’t know.
This isn’t to say every sentence needs to be simple in the vein of “See Jane. See Jane run.” That would be repetitive and boring. In the hands of a good writer, long, complex sentences and similes and metaphors can be glorious. Just read some non-fiction by Tom Wolfe or Gay Talese. But they were masters, and they knew when to ramble for effect. They also used plenty of simple sentences to set up the complicated ones.
Like sports writing, business writing seldom demands long, complex sentences. Even when the subjects are complicated, the sentences should be direct, straightforward and, above all, clear and free of unnecessary jargon. There’s no need to invent new ways to describe commonly understood things; you’re not a poet.
Keeping it simple means your message will be better understood and your busy readers will be grateful for not having to decipher your writing. One good way to avoid overly complex sentences is to read them out loud. If they sound ridiculous or incomprehensible when spoken, they should be rewritten.
Like most phobias, Fear of a Simple Sentence is curable. It just takes practice and determination. So, the next time you want to point out that a lineman has long arms, just say so.
by Brandon Glenn | Aug 7, 2024 | Blog
We all understand that the role of a corporate marketing department, among other things, is to promote its company, educate potential customers, and strengthen the company’s brand image – with the ultimate goal of driving higher sales.
Most marketers know how to articulate the benefits and value proposition of their company’s products, and, generally, they do a solid job of it.
What fewer marketers understand is when NOT to talk about their companies – particularly on social media. (For the purposes of this article, we’ll focus on LinkedIn because it’s the most valuable social site for business users.)
It’s important for marketers to remember that social media platforms are intended to encourage two-way communication, as opposed to functioning like a megaphone used to blast messages.
Accordingly, corporate social media must focus on providing value to followers. Indeed, corporate social media success requires putting followers’ wants and needs above the company’s own objectives.
The 80/20 rule for social media success
The 80/20 rule is the answer for keeping marketers focused on delivering value to their audiences. This cardinal rule for social media simply holds that 80% of the content posted to a social account should deliver value to the audience (think general industry news, opinions, and observations) while it’s ok for the other 20% to be blatantly promotional.
In my experience, most corporate marketing departments have mastered the 20% aspect of the rule but tend to struggle with the 80% part. Admittedly, it can be a little daunting in the beginning to understand and figure out how to fulfill this goal.
First, start with a list of keywords that pertain to your company’s niche in the industry. For example, if the company works in the virtual care space, create news alerts and perform searches for keywords like “telehealth,” “virtual care,” “virtual nursing,” “value-based care,” “healthcare staffing shortages,” and “healthcare burnout,” for example. Relevant hash tags can also help to surface third-party articles that discuss industry trends.
These articles make up the 80% of non-promotional content, while the other 20% can consist of product and technology-related information specific to the company.
Professionals go to LinkedIn when they need information, making it a great place to demonstrate thought leadership by sharing insights, stats, and case studies. These users want to discuss topics in their industry, cultivate professional connections, and better themselves as professionals along their career trajectory.
By adhering to the 80/20 rule, brands can help LinkedIn users accomplish these objectives. Just keep in mind the cardinal rule of social media: It’s not all about you.
by Chris Nerney | Jul 24, 2024 | Blog
My colleague Philip Anast recently shared some advice from the Wall Street Journal via the Advisory Board regarding situations “where it’s better to slow down at work.”
Let’s be honest: In the hyper-paced world of healthcare public relations and marketing, where there’s a product rollout, speaker submission, or awards deadline around every corner, the notion of “slowing down at work” is downright antithetical. When you’re managing multiple accounts – and trying to make each feel as if they are your highest priority – you instinctively fear that slowing things down will derail your strategic timelines, frustrate your clients, and send your blood pressure soaring. Why make an already intense job even more stressful?
The answer is there are times in PR and marketing where slowing down is essential to doing the best job for your clients, your agency, and your sanity. Here are three situations when slowing down pays off in PR and marketing. These apply to in-house marketing/PR pros, who face pressures similar to those of agency workers.
When you’re the final set of eyes
Marketing and PR pros must create and process high-level, detailed content every day. Thought-leadership bylines, case studies, white papers, press releases, sales sheets, analyst pitches – it never ends. If your client is a life sciences company, you may be writing about concepts that may be ever-so-slightly outside your wheelhouse. That’s OK – you probably didn’t go to medical school, and your yearslong devotion to Grey’s Anatomy will only get you so far.
Still, when you’re delivering content assets, it’s important to get everything right. And no matter how many people look at the “final” draft of a byline, press release, or other public-facing deliverable, someone will be the last set of eyes before the news release is sent to Cision or the byline to your client’s CEO.
Even if it’s the 10th time you’ve read it, do so with intense focus just one more time. Read slowly, scan for typos, and pay attention to flow and impact. This is your last chance! Put another way, if there’s something wrong that you didn’t catch, you may be catching flak from the client, who is paying the agency good money to not mess up content.
When your client wants to do something impulsive and perhaps ill-advised
Clients can be quite emotional. Which is understandable. They’re under pressure on multiple fronts from competitors and investors. They are responsible for executing on product, market, and growth strategies. They’re probably working 70 hours a week. Plus their chief marketing officer just abandoned the company for a new job. And their kids have the flu.
Nonetheless, when the client’s CEO decides what the company needs to do is issue a press release every day for a week before HLTH to carpet-bomb the market into recognizing the pioneering brilliance of their platform (something I heard an investor for a startup insist on), you must slow their roll. Politely but firmly explain how a press release a day doesn’t really align with the rhythm of how the healthcare tech media operates – “Company X made a big splash today. I can’t wait to see what they’ve cooked up for tomorrow!” said no tech reporter, ever – and that it also would be a waste of money. (The money message eventually got through to the investor.)
Similarly, if a CEO wants to confront that editor from Healthcare IT News who omitted the company from a roundup of startups to watch in Sector Z in the coming year and clearly harbors a grudge against us, you must counsel restraint. Emphasize the importance of cultivating long-term relationships with the media, analysts, and others in the industry ecosystem who could help the company down the road. Just giving your excitable clients some time to vent often is enough to defuse a mini-crisis.
When there’s a full-blown PR crisis
Sometimes an actual crisis will arise – your client’s product is the subject of a recall or warning, a customer files a major lawsuit, an investigative article in the mainstream media that mentions the company in a negative light blows up on social media, etc. You’ve got to move fast or things will quickly spin out of control!
Making a public statement that can be easily contradicted, however, will only worsen the problem. Thus, it is imperative that you know the facts. Make sure you take the time to gather all the facts surrounding the issue and are interpreting them correctly. You only have one chance to respond the first time to a crisis. Make it count.
Conclusion
In the PR and marketing biz, you need to think fast and move fast. Sometimes, though, slower is better.
by Jim Sweeney | Jul 10, 2024 | Blog
Hey, want to hear an announcement from my company?
Or,
Hey, want to hear a story?
Which got your attention?
If you’re human, it was probably the latter.
We are hardwired to listen to and learn from stories. From the earliest days of painting on cave walls through Aesop’s Fables and TEDx Talks, stories have proven themselves to be the best way to convey information to an audience. Even business information. Write a memo reminding people to always file their TPS reports with a cover sheet and they’ll ignore it. Tell them a story about the coworker who got fired for forgetting the cover sheet and they’ll remember.
But we largely abandon the power of narrative when it comes to press releases, which tend to be dry recitations of facts fleshed out with manufactured quotes and a corporate boilerplate.
For years the standard thinking on press releases has been to cram as much of the important information as possible up top on the theory that journalists won’t read past the headline and opening paragraph. There is merit to this approach if you’re announcing something truly significant or newsworthy, like a corporate merger or a new iPhone.
But, if we’re being honest, that’s the minority of releases. In most cases, the news isn’t a big enough deal to sell itself. So we, as PR practitioners, need to sell it. And stories are the best way to do it. A compelling story wrapped around a somewhat-less compelling piece of news can make an irresistible package.
Here’s an example: A chemical company wanted to announce a new polymer that would be used to line the surfaces of artificial joints. That could have been a straightforward product announcement, but I wanted to humanize the impact of the product, so I focused on the recipients of the artificial knees and hips, not the polymer itself.
I found Senior Olympics basketball players, each of whom had at least one artificial joint, and shot a video of them playing and talking about how grateful they were for the technology that let them hoop it up into their 80s. It was a step or two removed from the actual product, but it brought home the idea that this polymer had real benefits for people.
For the most part, Amendola clients are B2B and work in healthcare IT, which doesn’t easily lend itself to narrative. However, like with the above example, it’s often possible to bring it to the level of the patients and users of the technology. What does new perioperative scheduling software accomplish? Fewer delays and cancellations in scheduling surgeries, which is good for patients and clinicians. How about a new staffing platform for nurses? It gives them greater flexibility and allows them to earn more money.
Sometimes the narrative can be built around a single illuminating fact. I wrote a press release for a company whose seals were to be used on the Mars Rover. In and of itself, not that big a deal; scores of manufacturers had components on the Rover. What I learned from talking to company engineers is that it is impossible to build a seal that doesn’t leak, particularly in space; success is building a seal that leaks very, very slowly. How slowly? In this case, so slowly that it would take 1,000 years to empty a Coke can.
In the release, I told the story of these engineers working toward this ridiculously exacting specification. And it got picked up more than the dozens of cookie-cutter announcements that went out from other parts suppliers.
Of course, the stories must be interesting and short. They can’t meander and they can’t obscure the news. And they must be relevant. Don’t announce a brand of hard seltzer by telling a story about how a surfer took on a 50-foot wave and then enjoyed a can of seltzer back on the beach. Save that for the commercial.
Most press releases vanish with little notice or impact, like gnats flying into a bug zapper. But tell a good story, and people will remember it.
by Jodi Amendola | Jun 26, 2024 | Blog
As I look back at two decades of running a successful PR and marketing agency, I can draw two conclusions: Predicting the future is impossible, but preparing for it is a necessity.
That’s not the contradiction it first appears to be. Twenty years ago, it was the dawn of the digital age for healthcare and I was certain there would be an opportunity for an agency devoted to healthcare, health tech and life sciences. I didn’t know with any degree of precision what was coming, but I knew I wanted to be a part of it.
So, I took the leap and founded Amendola. My crystal ball was clear enough to spot an emerging opportunity, but it could not have anticipated everything that would happen in healthcare and health tech over the next two decades: generative AI, machine learning, genetic and precision medicine, telehealth, the shift to value-based care, remote patient monitoring and more.
In all, it’s fair to say the last 20 years have been some of the most exciting and transformative in the history of healthcare. My agency has not only weathered these tumultuous times, but prospered in them.
Amendola is the recognized industry leader in promoting visionary organizations driving technological change across healthcare delivery and life sciences. We have earned billions of media impressions for clients and received numerous awards from industry organizations honoring the firm’s innovative content generation, media relations and marketing programs.
Our success is not due to anticipating every development, but to being prepared for them.
I built the agency around the principles that I value in PR and marketing: creativity, continuous learning, collaboration, and a deep commitment to customer service and delivering results. With those as our bedrock we have been able to meet each new challenge and help our clients find their footing in the new digital landscape.
From early-stage startups to publicly traded companies, Amendola has helped drive company recognition, revenue growth and wider implementation of cutting-edge IT solutions across healthcare delivery organizations, health insurers, pharmacies and numerous other entities. Amendola has also helped clients pivot their messaging and content during changes in healthcare, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic when care delivery began a greater shift from brick-and-mortar institutions to patients’ homes through telehealth and virtual care.
I want to thank the many clients who have hired Amendola multiple times, bringing us with them as they have moved from company to company. Many of them have become friends over the years, which has been an unexpected bonus.
Of course, most of the credit for our success goes to my team. I make a point of hiring only experienced professionals with deep backgrounds in healthcare, health tech and life sciences. They share my principles, are committed to evolving as healthcare does, and their fine work and dedication have allowed the agency to grow and prosper.
A 20th anniversary is a chance not only to reminisce, but to look ahead. And my crystal ball is no more finely tuned than it was when I founded the agency. I don’t know exactly what will happen over the next decade or two; no one does. I will stand by two predictions, however: The years ahead will be at least as exciting and unpredictable as the past 20.
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