Experiential marketing and the healthcare industry.

By February 2, 2017General

Health care companies are suddenly starting to look towards experiential marketing strategies in a bid to unlock their true potential.

Health care businesses have always had a tough time generating a substantial ROI from their marketing strategies.

Traditionally, they seem to have preferred using radio, outdoor, print and digital campaigns. But the effectiveness of these strategies is debatable. These results of taking these routes seem inconsistent.

Enter experiential marketing.

Experiential marketing is all about capturing the attention of the consumer. And if there’s one market where consumer activity is ever changing, it’s health care.

Whether we’re talking about vitamins or moisturizer, toothpaste or shampoo, when you have a product that can actually improve someone’s life, it’s vital that they can experience it in some form.

For starters, it allows companies to get instant feedback on their products, which in turn can see them able to iterate and improve their inventory.

But experiential marketing strategies carry plenty of other benefits too.

It can maximize reach, create brand awareness and generate a buzz.

Take OhioHealth, for instance.

OhioHealth is a non-profit organization of hospitals and healthcare services in Columbus, Ohio and surrounding areas.

The company sponsors a number of health-related events and recently devised an experiential marketing campaign that targeted mums.

They identified a 5,000m race that was about to take place. Because there were hundreds of families attending the event, they used a display to promote its range of maternity and women’s health services.

What’s interesting is that there was real interactivity with this campaign. For example, they had a giant greeting card. Mums, dads and kids were asked to write notes of encouragement to new mums and pin them to the inside of the card.

These handwritten messages were subsequently sent to the delivery rooms at OhioHealth hospitals.

So, on the one hand, the campaign saw many new families received incredibly positive, morale-boosting messages. However, equally, the messages generated an incredible amount of brand awareness for OhioHealth.

It was an exercise that created a lot of good feeling for OhioHealth, so this experiential marketing strategy paid off.

What were their alternatives?

They could have tried to communicate the benefits of their business by using a posted, radio ad, TV commercial or flyer. But would that have actually done any good? It would have taken a lot of money and effort, but the ROI would surely have been a lot smaller.