Why Videos Are Hospital Marketing’s Secret Weapon

By Stewart Gandolf, Chief Executive Officer

video marketing To be fair about it, the general use of videos and visual content isn’t the secret part of this story.

The big brands and the not-so-biggies are all using some form of video content to tell their story. At least one assessment reports that video is, by far, the most popular and effective content marketing tool.

Some predictions have it that three-quarters of internet traffic will be video by 2017. In short, it’s big (and growing) because it works.

Video advantages for healthcare marketing...

The use of video harbors strong benefits and advantages for healthcare marketing, and it deserves to be a key consideration for every marketing plan. Some of the reasons include:

Human emotions are the main fuel of video storytelling, and hospitals and health systems are an enormous source of compelling, human interest content material.
Video is often underutilized in hospital marketing, which is a competitive advantage opportunity ready to be seized in the marketplace.
Video production and social media placement costs are extremely affordable. Even the most constrained budget can enjoy a strong return on a small investment.

Video content can be the secret weapon of hospital marketing when it is aggressively integrated into the overall strategic plan—and ahead of the competition.

The “Three-E” impact of video…

Respected Forrester Research crunched some numbers and calculated that one minute of video is worth 1.8 million words. Although that’s an attention-getting number, the psychology behind video marketing—and the battle for a prominent place in the mind of the audience—is mainly three-fold:

ENGAGEMENT: The combined impact of motion, images, color, sound, words, etc. connect the audience with the message more rapidly than other communications forms.

EDUCATION: Visual presentations interpret and reinforce ideas, often in ways that words alone cannot express quickly.

EMOTION: Highly effective video content will touch the heart and mind of the viewer, communication one or more feelings within an idea.

In addition, “videos” have branched out widely from YouTube or your website. The popularity and effectiveness of visual content has been fueled by integration with various online and social media platforms. The enormously popular Facebook enabled video content to be included in posts and it's already getting a lot of traction with users.. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg predicts that, in the near future, "most of the social network will be video."

The bottom line here is that hospitals have an enormous wellspring of emotion-laden potential storytelling material in their daily work. Most branded business don’t have this depth of human interest and visceral-story potential. Plus, there’s a strong possibility that you can seize a competitive advantage in your service.

As they might quip on TV’s Mad Men, “Facts tell, but stories sell.” Video has an unmatched ability to tell stories, inform convince, inform, persuade and connect with individual people in the audience.

For more on this topic, and some impactful proof about videos, see:

Janet Bowden