Influencer Marketing in Healthcare

Jenny: Hi friends! Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy – A Healthcare Marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow and I’m your host, and I’m the CEO & Founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I am so excited to introduce you today to Marissa Gurrister. Marissa is our brand new Director of Growth here at Hedy and Hopp, and she joins us with over a decade experience in-house on the system side, coming to us from systems such as Ascension and Duly.

Welcome, Marissa. 

Marissa: Thank you. I’m excited to be here. 

Jenny: Well, you are going to become a familiar face on the podcast. So I’m so excited to kick off the first episode with you. And as we were brainstorming topics to cover, one of the things that we’ve had a lot of folks want to chat with us about, both to understand the technical details of how to do it, but then also talk about the fun strategy side is … influencer marketing. And you have quite a history with influencer marketing. So why don’t we kick off by having you talk a little bit about what influencer marketing is and what it looks like in health care? 

Marissa: Sure, yeah. So I know usually when people hear influencer marketing, they’re thinking of all those social influencers, all the fun folks that we follow online, on Instagram, selling us all of the things, you know, but really in healthcare, I feel like a few ways. We can have patient advocates can be used as influencers. So, like parents or family members of patients. We can use physicians as influencers. So that can be really fun if we’re looking for physicians to share more, in depth, you know, research based, details about particular services that they offer. And then, of course, we have micro influencers, and we can still use our traditional influencers.

So it’s really fun. A few different ways you can do them. But it’s a little bit different obviously, than social influencing. So in healthcare we typically see organizations using influencers to promote health and wellness services or encouraging preventative services. More educational type content and less selling of a product like you would on social influencing.

Jenny: Absolutely. Let’s talk a little bit about case studies. Let’s make it real for folks. So what examples do you have? What kind of campaigns have you participated in or you’ve seen in the past? 

Marissa: Yeah, so a few really exciting ones come to mind. We’ve used influencers for a fun children’s hospital out in Texas. This is kind of a tactic that we laid on to a full multichannel campaign that we were rolling out. So it was a smaller tactic in a full campaign. But we used parents and patient advocates of the children at the hospital to share testimonial videos. So we went into the families’ for the kiddos, into the house, and we just had them share what it was like to receive care at the hospital that we were promoting and how it really impacted their life.

And so that was a fun one, because they were well-known influencers and well-known families in the community, and it just brought some, you know, some a humanizing element to the care into the services that the healthcare was providing. It’s always nice to hear about these stories from someone that you might see, like at the grocery store or in the car line pickup at your kid’s school, right? Someone that you know and you can trust. So really having that trusted, authentic voice really helped in that particular campaign.

And then we’ve done other big ones. So we’ve used traditional influencers like you would see selling you something cool from Amazon. We can use them in healthcare as well. So in Tennessee, we did a fun event called Mammos at the Mall. That was like one of my favorite influencer campaigns we’ve done, and we used traditional social influencers, women of the age to be getting mammograms. We contracted them and they took us through their full experience so they would document getting their mammogram, walking us through the steps of scheduling and then going and then the follow up, all of the things.

And it led to a big event at the end of October where we had a mobile mammography bus at the mall, and these influencers invited their followers to come meet them at the mall and get their mammogram same-day. So it was really fun. We had a full event and the influencers were there. They shared like tidbits all leading up through the month of October. And then women could mingle and literally like go get their mammogram same-day, no appointment necessary, which made it extremely convenient as well. 

Jenny: That’s amazing and really takes some of the fear or the hesitancy of self-care away, which is phenomenal. One of my favorite campaigns that we ran here at Hedy & Hopp was actually in collaboration with St. Louis Children’s Hospital. And, what they were trying to do was actually fight back. They did a big consumer study to be able to understand how people perceived the hospital. And overall, people perceived it as, you know, if my child has cancer or they need a transplant, I’m going to Children’s Hospital. Otherwise I’m going to go somewhere else because the parking garage is scary, it’s downtown, all these things. Right? 

So we actually did an influencer campaign with some lead physicians. And so we actually had the physicians, going through and talking about their areas of care. We had one of, actually the marketing person, at the hospital was pregnant. So we followed her through her pregnancy journey, meeting with different physicians.

And it became really interesting because any time there was a new physician or a physician who had openings, we would put them in this series, and within a week their books were full because that’s how much people were really tuning in and engaging with it. So there’s lots of different angles and strategies, whether you’re trying to build consumer trust, trying to really get specific positions or specialty areas name out there, really can be layered with all of these other tactics to have it be a really comprehensive campaign.

But let’s talk about the challenges and the risks of doing influencer marketing, because it’s not exactly the same as on the consumer side, but we have our own set of concerns in health care. 

Marissa: Of course. Yeah. So obviously HIPAA still applies to all of the things that we’re doing, regardless of our campaigns. So generally, if it’s a patient sharing their own testimonial or the parent of a minor sharing their child’s testimonial, as long as you have your consent form and all of your legal paperwork signed, HIPAA is not generally a concern for those particular cases. If we’re having our physicians, like you mentioned, be our influencer, they still have to abide by all of the HIPAA regulations, sharing any sort of patient information or any sort of details like that—no, no. 

And then if they’re being paid. Right. So a lot of the times if we’re using, for instance, Mammos at the Mall, we used traditional influencers who do that for their living. So we did pay them as part of our campaign, as part of our tactic. And that just has to be all documented and disclosed upfront. I would say generally best practices, if it is a patient testimonial or like a, patient advocate testimonial, paid is probably not the best practice there. Like, you want those to be genuine and authentic and you would like them to come provide those without compensation.

So I would just kind of keep that in mind for payment. But yeah, all of those compliance regulations still remain. 

Jenny: Great point. Excellent. Let’s talk a little bit about best practices when you’re developing the strategy or implementing an influencer campaign, what are some of your thoughts? 

Marissa: Well, you know I think like number one best practice to me would be vetting and making sure that we’re selecting influencers that are aligned with our brand’s vision and mission and values. Right. Like you don’t want someone who has posted or is posting on their social feed about things or services that you don’t agree with or align with. And I think that also just kind of kills the reputability of the campaign, right? You want someone who is in line with your brand and your brand voice. So I think that’s important.

I think it’s also important to make sure that they stay authentic, that they’re sharing their own version of the story, or they’re sharing their own version of the services. So for, going back to like the Mammos at the Mall, we of course give them some talking points because at the end of the day, it is still our marketing campaign, right?

Like we still have to have consistent messaging and we have a story that we want to share through them. So we did provide talking points, which I think is fine, but as long as they’re sharing these things through their own voice and through their own filter, I think that that keeps it authentic while still sharing your message that you want to convey.

Jenny: Absolutely. And one other thing that I would share, based off a different influencer campaign that we ran, is we are working with a system, and they had a specific doctor, a physician, an employee physician that they wanted to promote. And a couple of months into the campaign, that physician, two things happened: First, they said some really negative things online on their personal account, but then they ended up leaving the system.

And the system did not diversify and have multiple faces out front. So when you’re thinking about building the strategy and number one, research, and understand, you know, this person’s behind the scenes and then also diversification, it should never be about one face. It should never be about one person. Because then that makes sure that regardless of what happens and what pivots you have to do in the future, you’ll have that ability to do so.

Marissa: Yeah. Totally agree. Great points, great points. 

Jenny: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for tuning in today, folks. We hope that if you are considering an influencer campaign, this gave you a couple of different campaign ideas or ways that you could perhaps structure it for your organization. If you want to talk, shop and brainstorm, give us a call. We’d love to chat. We have lots of other examples of successful things that have been done, both on the patient and on the employer brand side. Influencer marketing is a fabulous thing to layer into a campaign to make sure it’s successful. 

Marissa: Yep, it was great having me. Thank you. 

Jenny: Yeah, thanks so much for tuning in today, everybody. Be sure to tune in next week for another episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers!