Marketing to Hospital IT Executives

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the challenge of marketing to IT executives at hospitals. I’m sure much of this thinking comes from me planning the recently announced Healthcare IT Marketing and PR Conference. As the tagline for the conference says, there is a lot of noise out there and it’s key that an organization learns to cut through that noise.

We’ll be digging into this subject really deep at the conference, but I think most people underestimate what really resonates with hospitals. The value of trusted influencers has never been greater. Sure, the medium those influencers used has changed. We’ve seen that as many of the healthcare IT magazines have been shutting down and bloggers have been coming into their own (I might be a bit biased on this later comment).

What I find interesting about this shift is that in this new online world we have much better metrics on someone’s influence and the impact they have on their readers. Gone are the days of some third party validated distribution numbers. Online we can dig a lot deeper into what’s really happening.

I personally think we’ll also see another trend in marketing. Content is certainly becoming king when it comes to getting your message out, but I predict we’ll see a renaissance of display advertising on influencer websites. However, the display advertising won’t be about selling product as much as it will be a way to reinforce and remind the reader of content they’d read previously. I think this is a really exciting thing that few are taking advantage of right now.

Of course, it could very well be that I’m biased on this. As most regular readers have seen, I have a number of advertisers on this site. I’m so grateful to Doc Halo and Canon for their support of our work. Both of these organizations understand the value of content marketing and reinforcing that with display advertising.

For example, Doc Halo wrote this article titled “Should Patients Care About Their Doctors’ Text Messages?“. Canon sponsored this piece of content called “Scanning Is a Feature of Healthcare IT and Will Be Forever.” There are certainly many more examples that could be shared.

In many ways, what health IT companies use to market to hospitals is changing quickly. Although, at the end of the day, it’s not all that different from what we’ve been doing for many many years. We’re still just working to get the right message to the right people. As much as everything is changing, so much is still the same.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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