Woman using a stethoscope on a woman

Why Healthcare Marketers Should Return to Purpose to Drive Strategic Goals

Watch the 2022 Healthcare Marketing Trends Replay Video

What a couple of years we’ve had!

A pandemic. 

Social unrest and a racial reckoning.

Political divisiveness.

Oh, and a massive upheaval of the healthcare workforce.

Healthcare organizations are seeking a return to stability. 

And that desired stability is rooted in your organization’s guiding principles, mission, and purpose. 

After all, it’s why your staff and providers were first called to their work. 

To help.

To heal.

Even if you’re in marketing, communications, or strategy, you, too, were called to help and heal in your way. It’s why you chose healthcare over other industries. Because you wanted to do mission-driven work.

That’s why to return to stability means returning to your organization’s purpose:

Why does your organization exist? 

What is the change you seek to make, for your patients, customers, and community?

The answer to those questions becomes the rallying cry for unification: a vision that your employees, providers, patients, and customers can agree upon, and take action.

Isn’t it time your staff returned to purpose? To recalibrate their focus and perspective? 

The last two years have scrambled our brains. Living in a pandemic is no easy feat. We’ve made sacrifices. We’ve all known people who have been seriously ill or died due to COVID-19, or have felt the effects of virtual schooling and lockdowns.

It’s time to regroup and return to purpose.

As a healthcare marketer, your gift is communication and storytelling. It’s time to help your organization to heal. Leverage your gifts and help your organization move forward in unity.

Three Steps to Helping Your Organization Return to Purpose

Step 1: Healing

Address the mental, physical and emotional toll the pandemic, and caring for patients, has had on your staff. 

Step 2: Reinspire

Reclaim your organization’s purpose, champion the patient care in your organization, and celebrate teamwork. 

Step 3: Cast Vision

Renew the commitment to your organization’s vision and key initiatives that will support better health for everyone your organization serves.

 

Person in medical scrubs and masked

 In the early days of the pandemic, your front-line healthcare workers were heroes. They represented safety and protection against the novel virus. 

But as time marched on, those same healthcare workers became burned out. Seeing so many people hurt by COVID-19, and working around the clock, without any relief in sight, impacted them. They went from heroes to victims of the pandemic: if not impacted by the disease, then certainly impacted by the never-ending need to care for others. 

 

Medical person in scrubs and masked

 Marketing can’t provide the necessary emotional and mental health support so many healthcare workers need. But marketing can help communicate the purpose and vision of the organization, and how healthcare workers are instruments of that purpose and vision.

 And why they matter. 

 

Picture collage

 At Hailey Sault, in addition to our performance marketing campaigns, we’ve also been developing branded stories and messages for our healthcare clients to help their internal audiences return to purpose. 

 Reminding them they are still heroes, even if the media has moved on to the next story.

 Reminding them why they matter and the lives they impact.

 Reminding them of the vision of where the organization is going, and why their contributions are helping to achieve that vision: day by day, patient to patient.

 RETURN TO PURPOSE: IN ACTION 

  • Recommit to brand storytelling. Share your brand purpose as a tool to bridge the divide, and move your audiences beyond the last tumultuous two years.
  • Retain your best talent by reminding them of why they got into healthcare to begin with, and why your organization is poised to help achieve their personal purpose.
  • Create campaigns that cast your brand’s vision for better days.

 We’ve all endured dark days and fears that tomorrow won’t be any better. It’s time to shine a light on what hope and enduring optimism can do for lifting spirits. It’s the only way human beings have made things better: by believing in better.

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