by Jodi Amendola | Jan 22, 2025 | Blog
One of the great pleasures of my job is watching members of the Amendola team – the A-Team – demonstrate their knowledge and expertise about public relations and marketing. I see this during staff meetings, on calls with clients and prospective clients, and in the work the A-Team produces for the many companies we represent. I go to sleep every night knowing I hired a team of senior level experts that truly shine.
Over the past year, A-Team members have offered their collective marketing and public relations wisdom through the Amendola blog. As I look back on 2024, I wanted to share with readers some of the blog posts that resonated most with me. Honestly, I could have made this list three times as long! I urge you to click on the links and check out some of the other Amendola posts. They are filled with actionable advice for healthcare technology companies seeking a competitive edge.
Spotting PR opportunities hiding in plain sight
Healthcare technology clients hire Amendola to help them raise their profiles in an exceedingly competitive business environment. And while many clients envision lavish write-ups in the Wall Street Journal or prominent healthcare media – something we’re all for, by the way! – coverage by smaller news outlets can be useful in building brand awareness among potential customers and investors.
“Though often overlooked, local news outlets can be valuable resources for public relations professionals and their clients,” our Senior Content Director Brandon Glenn notes in this blog post from January. “Whether they are general interest dailies, weeklies, or business publications, these media outlets are often interested in milestone topics that don’t necessarily appeal to trade or national media, such as hiring plans, headquarters’ expansions, acquisitions, and other factors that may affect the local economy.” See the opportunity, seize the opportunity.
Take the trade show by storm
Trade shows can cost healthcare technology companies a lot of money, especially if they have a booth on the show floor. It’s important, then, to get the most out of a trade show – otherwise you’re wasting time and funds that could be used elsewhere.
In addition to providing a forum for education and professional networking, trade shows can enable healthcare technology companies to build relationships with the media. In a February blog post, Account Director Kim Mohr offers some best practices for executives seeking to establish relationships with journalists from a variety of publications and mediums. These include preparing for scheduled interviews, being prompt (the journalist’s schedule will be crammed) and having a clear message (more on that later).
Fortune favors the bold – and creative
Amendola clients want to be noticed by investors and prospective customers. Yet they don’t want to stand out for the wrong things. As a result, many of them fear that expressing a strong opinion or point of view will distract from their message and cost them business.
But as Account Director and Media Specialist Grace Vinton warns in this May blog post, “Healthcare technology companies that hide in the herd and play it safe get ignored.” A far more effective strategy, Grace writes, is to “inject your marketing and PR initiatives with a strong storyline framework that employs passion, humanity, humor, and a distinctive voice.” This can be done through social media, bylines, podcasts, and (as discussed above) speaking at conferences. Humanity sells because we’re all human.
Simple sentences, clear messaging
To build brand awareness and grow revenue, healthcare technology companies need clear, concise messaging. That can be difficult when you’re in the business of applying advanced technologies to complex healthcare challenges.
Still, language that is “direct, straightforward and, above all, clear and free of unnecessary jargon” will pay off in the long run. In an August blog post, Amendola Senior Account and Content Director Jim Sweeney explains, “Keeping it simple means your message will be better understood and your busy readers will be grateful for not having to decipher your writing.” Couldn’t have said it better (or simpler) myself.
Compelling lead magnets
Strong customer leads are the refined fuel of the sales pipeline. Healthcare technology companies can use lead magnets to capture and nurture promising leads by offering value in exchange for their contact details.
The best lead magnets are tailored to your target audience’s needs, deliver the value promised, are easy to consume, and can be readily shared, according to Senior Account Director Janet Mordecai. But that’s just a partial list; read about more characteristics of winning lead magnets in Janet’s October blog post.
Conclusion
2024 was an amazing year. In fact, we are bigger and better now as we are part of the Supreme Group. My crystal ball tells me that 2025 will be even better. The A-Team and I can’t wait to continue working with clients whose technologies will help transform healthcare to save and improve lives. We’re in this together.
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 Elizabeth Schwartz | Nov 24, 2021 | Blog
When I was a little girl, I always wanted to be a pediatrician. And a writer. I had no idea as an idealistic young lady that there wasn’t really a career that combined the two disciplines.
And when I learned how long I had to go to school to be a pediatrician, I leaned in a little more on the writing.
It wasn’t until I had leaned way into writing and four years of Journalism school that I got my first job at a multi-hospital research health system. I learned quickly that I could combine my three passions—helping people, healthcare and writing. I was not the one performing the lifesaving transplants, but through my writing I got to share the stories of two sisters who shared a lifesaving kidney transplant and encourage others to be organ donors. It was a great fit. I thought of it as writing. I had learned in Journalism school how to write a lead, a body and a close. I never thought of what I did as storytelling.
Then, as if it couldn’t get any better, I got a job as a writer at a pediatric hospital. I met awe-inspiring families struggling through unimaginable heartache but taking me along and allowing me into their lives to tell their story and show how they battled adversity with strength, bravery and grace.
I got to see the loving way nurses and doctors approached children and their families. I got to see the way parents looked bravely at their children and told them it was going to be OK even when they weren’t sure. I was humbled and grateful for each and every family. I remember thinking that I was so glad to be able to tell their stories but could never imagine being in their shoes. I had found my place: healthcare and writing. But then something happened that changed my perspective completely.
The Tide Turned
About two years into my job, I had children. My son and daughter are 18 months apart in age. When my daughter was six months old, she began to have seizures. We spent weeks in the hospital trying to find the root cause—from a brain tumor to epilepsy—what we found was that she had a stroke at birth and had cerebral palsy. When my son was two, he was diagnosed with autism. What had been unimaginable to me about the lives of those parents had become my life. We spent many days and nights with doctors, nurses, therapists—my colleagues—and now my child’s caregiver. I was the one of the parents that I had been writing about.
Why It Matters
My children have been a consistent source of joy and inspiration to me. I know that doesn’t make me unique as a parent, but when they were young, we journeyed through a lot together in ways I never thought I would experience. All the times I wrote those patient stories, I never knew one day it would be me.
I’m happy to report they are both thriving, active teenagers now. What I learned is that in some way for all of us, healthcare is personal. Whether it’s an aging parent, your own health challenges, or a child, when we walk through our healthcare system as a patient or a caregiver of a patient, it changes us.
For me, it changed the way I write. It changed the way I tell the story of the latest innovation in EHRs. It changed the way I appreciate the passion and selfless care that every single position in the healthcare ecosystem puts into what they do.
I think it’s easy as PR and Marketing professionals to get robotic and apathetic in the way that we amplify a brand or write a blog. What we should remember is that at the end of that journey is a real person with a real story. And you never know when that might be you. Write with your heart. Bring your own story in the passion you have for what you do. It will never steer you wrong.
by Jessica Smith | Sep 29, 2021 | Blog
In healthcare, we’re always talking about improving patient outcomes, clinical and financial outcomes, or even the mind-numbing phrase ‘operational outcomes,’ whatever that means. Recently, I’ve been thinking about the intersection of language and performance anxiety, and I keep circling around the concept of what I’ve been calling outcomes anxiety.
Our inability to control the future often manifests in an urge toward excess—the desire to subdue all unknown variables with an overwhelming volume of material. It’s the opposite of a strategic approach, and it’s unfortunately fairly common. Many healthcare companies err on the side of quantity rather than quality, assuming that whatever sticks to the wall will function just as well as an intentional choice.
I’ve seen 15-touch email campaigns delivering 18 assets on 11 disparate products; product lines with 85 fact sheets; website rebrands of hundreds of pages doomed to start over again in six months’ time. When you don’t know what will work, you try everything, right?
Wrong. This is always a bad idea, both for your company and your career—not to mention your mental health. Let me explain.
The Anxiety Spiral at Work
Most of us have at least a passing familiarity with the anxiety spiral when it comes to our daily lives. One asks oneself a reasonable question, which is immediately answered with the worst possible outcome and escalated to ever more dire hypotheticals. What if my child’s cough is a symptom of Covid? becomes she’ll miss school for two weeks and morphs into all the grandparents could die before you’ve even removed the thermometer from its case. The literature calls this catastrophic thinking.
Of course, given the pandemic, we’re all trying to grant ourselves extra leniency as we cope with our anxiety; after all, there are real consequences at stake. For my friends with clinical anxiety, however, the spiral is triggered a thousand times a day by the most mundane concerns: a meeting conflict, a late payment, an unreturned email. As a healthcare writer with generally deadline-driven anxiety, I try to stave off stress with the usual preventative measures: deep breaths and long walks.
At work, I notice that my worry tends to coagulate around long-term outcomes. I don’t have time to research this byline today becomes nobody will like what I write and morphs into this whole week will be a firestorm of horror before I’ve written the first paragraph. As the things we tell ourselves are mostly subterranean, it can be tricky to diagnose yourself with outcomes anxiety.
For me, it starts with the language.
Marketing Speak: The Original Social Distancing
Whenever I think about healthcare jargon, I remember listening to intake calls with one freelance writer who routinely strung together industry phrases without apparent concern for their meaning (or lack thereof). He asked questions like this: “So we leverage clinical intelligence efficiencies to thread the needle of those at-risk enterprise social determinants and optimize technology-enabled solutions to close the gap, right?” The subject matter expert he was talking to would pause for a moment, frown ever so slightly, and resume her explanation.
Even more puzzling was the reputation this writer had among marketing management. “He knows his stuff,” I heard time and again. This could not have been further from the truth, at least not in my opinion. While the final product of these intake calls was serviceable, particularly as SEO fodder, it wasn’t very good. His copy did not help readers understand a new concept, or elucidate product intricacies, or address how the company could help clients. It just put all the relevant jargon in a blender and served it up like an ambitious smoothie: empty calories, suspicious taste, but certainly filling.
Why do so many people talk this way on calls? I think they suffer from an acute case of outcomes anxiety, one that’s particularly endemic to marketing. When you don’t yet know what you need to, you worry about the ultimate outcomes of your work. Will the piece miss the mark? Will the audience click on your links? Will any of this result in sales?
That misguided writer was trying out all his phrases at once, hoping the cumulative effect would be impressive. Although he thought he sounded knowledgeable, he was too insecure to ask the useful questions, the kind that might be perceived as too simplistic: “So, how does this product help patients? How does it work?”
When I edit copy for a client, I try to eliminate marketing speak, and I often get pushback. People tend to believe that dense language sounds more professional, and it can be a struggle to help them understand that jargon is the enemy of clarity. By its nature, marketing speak is an agent of exclusion: it alienates readers who are unfamiliar with the terminology. This is not for you; this is for those who can decipher this code. What a pernicious myth! Readers should not have to decipher meanings, at least not in professional writing. It’s the writer’s job to deliver the message with grace and clarity.
Circumventing Your Own Outcomes Anxiety
In my experience, extra fluffy language is motivated by insecurity about the real value of what is being produced, and it shows in the piece. It’s also the first indication that you might have outcomes anxiety.
So, the next time you sit down to write, and your first paragraph is hogwash—or when you’re in a meeting, and everyone’s talking about peeling the onion on customer buy-in—try these tips:
Ground yourself in the practical. What is the point of this piece? What do we want this campaign to accomplish? Whenever you find yourself tempted to overcomplicate things—when you’re wrestling with how to deliver 18 assets in a logical order—it’s a sure sign that you need to go back to basics. Ask simple questions. People will thank you.
Insist on a plan. One of the best healthcare writers I know routinely frustrated the teams she worked with by refusing to write before a plan was in place. And not just any old plan, with a wishy-washy “we’ll use this later, definitely” rationale, but a good plan, with strong strategy, clear tactics, audience definition, a timeline, the whole shebang. Paradoxically, your outcomes will be better when you spend more time on the inputs, as that planning process eliminates the creep of outcome anxiety from infecting your work.
Kindly do the needful. At a former company, I had a lovely coworker from Bulgaria whose English was refreshingly creative. When she sent me an article to edit, she’d close with this line: “Kindly do the needful.” When you catch yourself beginning the anxiety spiral, try to focus simply on the task at hand. Do the needful. And then do the next needful. And so on.
Reclaim your joy. When we stop worrying about uncontrollable outcomes, we remember why we enjoy the work we do…and then we do it better. When I stop wondering whether a client will like what I write, I suddenly realize that I’m enjoying myself, and that I actually like to write. Who knew! Give yourself permission not to focus on the deadline, the reception, or the ultimate outcome. For thirty minutes at a time, focus on the fun.
by Chris Nerney | Jul 7, 2021 | Blog
Successful marketers are persuasive. Whatever their medium – print, audio, video – the content and messages they create consistently prompt their target audience to take action.
There are multiple schools of thought about effective marketing, not to mention plenty of marketing and copywriting “experts” (legit or self-proclaimed) willing to offer you their insights through books, online courses, subscription newsletters, and other revenue-generating vehicles. Many of them offer excellent advice.
But there also is a seemingly unlimited amount of free online advice offering sound tips and strategies for writing deeply persuasive marketing copy. The advice ranges from the theoretical to the practical. I’ve pulled together five that jumped out at me for one reason or another. They are in no particular order. Let’s get going.
Know your audience
OK, right off the bat I lied, which admittedly isn’t a great long-term marketing strategy. The truth is, this first item – know your audience – actually is the most important piece of advice on the list, which now (so far at least) has a semblance of order!
You simply can’t hone an effective marketing message if you don’t know who it’s intended to persuade. One copywriting advice guy I read says “the key to great copywriting is to like your audience.” I understand where he’s coming from, but I would instead suggest it’s better to understand your target audience, particularly their needs and pain points that could be addressed by your company’s products or services.
While liking them might help get you there, doing some research would be even more illuminating and productive. Another way to help sharpen your understanding of the target audience is to create a profile or persona based on demographic data.
Know your message (and tighten it)
You can’t market effectively if you 1) don’t know what you’re marketing and 2) how to explain it in various levels of detail. The latter can be particularly challenging for healthcare technology companies that have complex platforms or services. There’s a lot to explain! One cofounder I know told me he knows the exact moment when he loses potential customers as he tries to explain his startup’s technology: “I can see their eyes glaze over.”
Eye glazing is never a good sign. Make sure you can explain your technology – and, more importantly, what problems it can solve – clearly and concisely. That’s a struggle for some technologist entrepreneurs, which is why many of them hire marketing and PR professionals to help them shape and deliver their message.
Write about your audience (not about what you’re selling)
Your content needs to read as if you’re personally addressing your target audience, as if you can read their minds and are on their side. The best copywriting puts the focus on the needs of the audience, not the merits of a product or service. Yes, those eventually will have to be discussed, but only in the context of solving a problem for the potential buyer. At all times, it is about the customer. A lot of “you” in your marketing content goes a long way.
Write for your medium
How you write content for a 2,000-word white paper will be dramatically different than how you would write 150 words of web copy for a home page. People who sit down to read a white paper they downloaded have different expectations than those who are surfing around looking for something to interest them – or a solution to their problems.
For the former, you have room to delve into how your technology works, how it applies to various use cases, etc. You can geek out. In the latter case, your mission is to capture readers’ attention and keep them on your site. That requires the equivalent of emotionally hard-hitting ad copy that leads to data capture, lead generation, and potential customers.
Invite a conversation
Granted, you can’t do this with every marketing asset. But a steady social media presence can enable you to have an ongoing dialog with members of your target market. There may not be an immediate revenue payoff, but social media is about the long game. It’s for building relationships, encouraging engagement, learning about your customers, and establishing a consistent voice for your brand. Writing for social media should be relatively informal and conversational.
Conclusion
Marketers have more tools and channels than ever for connecting with existing and potential customers. To get the most out of your marketing strategy and efforts, you must understand your target audience, know how to talk to them (depending on the medium), know what to say to them, and be eager to listen and learn.
