I just finished spending a few days at the Healthcare Internet Conference. It was a fascinating event that mainly featured website, social, and marketing teams for hospitals and health systems. That’s a unique group of people that have a really challenging job.
One interesting discussion I heard at the conference was the right way to approach mobile. Someone put out the shocking number that 1/3 of major hospitals don’t have a website with a responsive design. In this increasingly mobile optimized internet, that’s amazing to think that 1/3 of hospitals are that far behind. In the healthcare B2B marketing world, I think that the need of a responsive design or at least a mobile optimized website is overrated, but in the B2C hospital world that’s crazy.
In another discussion I heard someone talk about how so many attendees at the conference had to jump on the latest trend. I met people at the conference that were in charge of their Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, blog, and then they managed their website in their free time as well. It was crazy.
The reality is that one person can’t manage all of these things effectively. However, when their boss heard that millenials were all on Snapchat, they had to hop on board and fall in line. It was sad to see how few of them had a real strategy when it came to which platforms they’d use and how they’d use them. Instead, so many of them were following the latest shiny object while all of these platforms were transgressed.
Turning back to mobile, one of the beauties of using these various social media platforms in your health system marketing efforts is that each of them have been optimized for mobile. In fact, some of them are mobile first platforms like Instagram and SnapChat (I guess it’s mobile only).
No doubt there’s a huge potential for health systems and hospitals to engage patients on mobile. However, I think it’s underutilized.
