What’s the first step you take in creating communication initiatives for your organisation?
If your answer isn’t “develop a clearly defined strategy” then it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
A marketing and communications strategy is the “why” of your organisation. It encompasses why you are creating content, who your target audience is, where you are going to reach them and how your business can help them.
Many organisations skip the important first step of developing a strategy when creating their healthcare marketing and communications initiatives. This can result in an activation-based approach, which focuses on creating a broad range of content in the hopes that it might be “activated” by its target audience.
This makes it difficult for organisations to identify their communications and marketing objectives, how these deliver to broader business objectives, their target audience and even the call-to-actions to use so that it motivates their audience to act in favour of the brand.
A lack of strategy is one of the biggest factors in the failure of communication and marketing initiatives. Without proper planning and development, you can have misaligned objectives that are immeasurable or unrealistic. As a final result, the content you create can come across as vague and generic to the audience.
Are you investing time and effort into healthcare marketing and communications with little return?
Without a strategy, you might find yourself jumping from one activation to another in the hopes of boosting engagement or sales, with little return on investment. This can result in hit-and-miss marketing initiatives. At the same time, an activation-based approach also makes it difficult to measure the performance of your marketing and communications because there’s a lack of a documented strategy on hand.
Unsurprisingly, 64% of the most successful B2B marketers have a documented strategy in place. The majority of communication professionals are actively investing in developing strategies because of the results it brings: Increasing sales, building connections with customers and boosting brand awareness.
By implementing a clearly defined marketing and communications strategy, your team can measure concrete objectives and adopt changes as the campaign is rolled out to ensure continuous improvement.
3 reasons you need a strong strategy for your healthcare communications
Developing a clearly defined strategy will allow you to address weak points in your marketing initiatives and enable you to accomplish measurable, realistic goals that ultimately contribute to your organisation’s success.
We’ve shortlisted three key benefits of having a solid marketing and communications strategy.
1. A strategy can boost your branding
Developing a strategy will help you cultivate strong branding for your organisation, allowing you to build a unique voice and personality online. This ensures that your target audience can quickly identify and recall your brand as soon as they see your marketing and communication campaigns and initiatives.
You can integrate your branding strategy into your overall communications planning. Branding strategy tips you can incorporate are:
- Integrate organisational purpose into your content – Aligning your branding with your organisation’s vision and mission ensures that your content reflects your purpose.
- Learn your customer’s insights about your brand – Knowing how your customers perceive your brand will enable you to identify any areas of improvement that you can work on.
- Showcase your unique selling proposition (USP) – With so many available options to your customers, it’s crucial that your branding highlights the organisation’s USP, explaining why your services can address your potential customers’ needs.
2. A strategy can encourage consistency
Creating a strategy allows you to develop an editorial calendar as well as a line-up of content to post daily, weekly and monthly. This ensures that you’re regularly creating content that aligns with your branding and business objectives, and it keeps you top of mind with your target audience as they see more of your content.
You can also create more consistency within your communication strategy by prioritising your content distribution plan. Content distribution focuses on how you can use each marketing initiative or piece of content to connect and engage with your audience. This ensures that you’re actively maximising the usefulness of each content that you produce, increasing its effectiveness in reaching your target audience.
3. A strategy can improve resource management
Once you have a strategy in place and you have clearly defined marketing and communication initiatives scheduled for several months, you can get a clear overview of the resources you need to allocate to effectively manage your campaigns. A documented communications strategy enables you to quickly assess upcoming initiatives, and identify which staff members within your team to assign to each project, which can increase efficiency and productivity.
Why you should consider implementing the QUAY Communications approach
Using QUAY Communications’ proven approach of IDENTIFY, ENGAGE and MOTIVATE can help you develop a robust strategy that ensures measurable results and return on investment.
QUAY Communications leverages its understanding of the current trends, updates and research from the healthcare sector you specialise in to create a marketing and communications strategy tailored to your needs.
Each step in QUAY Communications’ approach encompasses relevant areas that need to be developed:
- IDENTIFY – QUAY Communications will work with you to clearly define who your target audience is, researching the type of content they prefer to engage with as well as the communication channels they actively use. Knowing the target audience will allow the QUAY Communications team to create content that motivates them to act on the CTA of the marketing initiatives you create.
- ENGAGE – QUAY Communications creates relevant and meaningful content that engages your ideal customer, building connections and nurturing existing customer relationships.
- MOTIVATE – In the development phase of the strategy, QUAY Communications will work with you to identify what success entails for you, your brand and your organisation.
Creating a strategy is the first step you should take before producing your marketing and communication initiatives so that you can define realistic and measurable objectives as you build targeted content for your target audience.
As the leading communication specialists in the healthcare and lifestyle sectors, we can help you develop a marketing and communications strategy tailored to your brand using the QUAY approach. Contact us and let’s create great content together.
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