Our Client Success Team shared the most common pitfalls hospital marketers encounter when launching a campaign. They also provided their recommendations on how to navigate these situations to ensure you get the best results.
1. Corporate Approval Delays Campaigns
Some marketers struggle with the multiple layers of red tape that often come with being part of a larger health system. A lot of times, marketers are required to submit their articles and other pieces of content to corporate for approval, and the turnaround time can be incredibly slow. We’ve had campaigns delayed for months because our partners couldn’t get an answer from corporate. We have found that the best way to navigate this is to put campaigns together as early as possible to allow time for approval and revisions.
2. Getting Featured Physicians Onboard
It can take new hospital partners a minute to figure out the best way to get a physician engaged as Featured Physicians for a Colleague Connect® program. We help our partners craft the communication to the physician so that they understand Doximity (if they don’t already) and secondly, understand what is being asked of them as a Featured Physician. Oftentimes it’s a conversation that marketers are hesitant to have because they have to ask the physician to invest a bit of time. We like to remind them that it’s in the physician’s best interest: an effort to increase their patient referrals.
3. Physicians Not Engaging As Expected
In addition to one client's selected targets, they included seven of their own physicians in a DocNews® campaign. Because these seven physicians are highly engaged on the platform, they sent out an email to them saying, “Be on the lookout for our article on the Doximity platform. If you go and engage with the article, it will amplify the success of the campaign. We would really appreciate it.” Even though 6/7 of those physicians logged into the platform during the 28 day period and saw the article, none of them engaged with the piece. We recommended that they ping those doctors again about the second DocNews® piece deployed, in an effort to ensure amplification opportunities the second time around.
4. Content is Consumer-Facing
Often we hear that marketers don’t think they have any content that would appeal to physicians when they likely do! We advise them to send over any content they have so we can work with the editorial team and have our medical writer finesse it for a physician audience. A key ingredient is creating a compelling headline that will stand out in the Newsfeed. We will also take a look at their website to find content that we know can be leveraged on the platform or look at data they can pull in to support the content (data on outcomes, clinical trials, methodology of procedures/protocol).
5. Not Knowing What Will Resonate with Physicians
Hospital marketers often don’t know what physicians want to hear about. Our in-house editorial team is dedicated to content curation, reviewing over 50k articles weekly across all specialties. We work closely with our editorial team to gather and formulate learnings from all of the DocNews® campaigns. This way, we’re able to provide a list of trending topics that truly resonate with physicians. Our team also does research to find content in a client’s newsroom or we recommend they look at past physician newsletters. Oftentimes there are a few gems just waiting to be discovered.
6. Front-Loading Content During Survey Season
A handful of our partners think they need to focus on having all of their content out and use all of their targets up prior to key regional and national award milestones. In order to truly elevate brand awareness, we recommend having content in the Newsfeed year-round and retargeting physicians that engaged with that content so the brand will stay top-of-mind.
7. Assuming Brand New Content is Best
Some hospital marketers think they need to produce brand new content for Doximity. If they have a topic in mind that is more time-sensitive, we look to sourcing third-party content and promoting it on Doximity with the 5% rule (when a client utilizes third-party content, they can take 5% of the article as is and publish). We’ll also include a unique featured image. This works so well, in fact, that three third-party journal pieces ranked in the top ten performing DocNews® pieces in March.
Have questions about your Doximity campaign or how to create the right content that resonates with physicians? Contact Us.