In today’s episode, Jenny shares her top three reasons to spend energy and resources toward submitting for awards: for recruitment, for credibility, and for ego.
- For recruitment. Recognition of your workplace culture can definitely help with recruiting language, both for your marketing team and for other positions that you might be helping recruitment fill, such as nursing.
- For credibility. Winning awards that recognize your facility or a specific service line can help with patient acquisition for that facility/service line AND can sometimes help with recruitment for that facility/service line also, as folks love to work in highly ranked places.
- For ego. These include any award that gives a pat on the back but patients and staff don’t necessarily care. You can use these awards strategically to get that grouchy Doc, who is awesome on camera, to participate more often (he may be grouchy but will love winning an award for a podcast/video he was in and will definitely say yes more often after winning).
Mentally categorizing award submissions into these three buckets each year helps her understand where her energy is going, and if it matches her goals.
Connect with Jenny:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi, friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am the host of the podcast and I’m also the founder and owner of Hedy and Hopp, a full service healthcare marketing agency. I am excited to hop on today to chat with y’all about a topic that actually came up in a SHSMD forum.
So for those of you that have attended SHSMD in the past, you’ll know that there’s an awesome forum that folks within the industry hop on, ask questions, and then other folks in their field could then answer questions and give advice or recommendations. One of the questions was from a marketer within a healthcare system, and they were really toying with the idea of, should they spend the energy and the resources to apply for one of those “best places to work” for their organization? As healthcare marketers, y’all wear many, many hats and one of them sometimes can be [00:01:00] deciding on and submitting to awards. At Hedy & Hopp, we actually have a philosophy about awards. And it also kind of leans into speaking opportunities as well.
So I thought I would share that here. So there are really, in our mind, three reasons to spend energy and resources on either award or a speaking opportunity. And the first one’s for recruitment. So for your organization, if you are on a hiring spree, if you’re trying to fill a lot of difficult to fill positions I know the nursing shortage has eased a bit, but a lot of y’all are still really trying to fill some of those really difficult to fill positions.
“Best places to work” awards can be a good solution to be able to give yourself some third party credibility for being a place of employment that’s candidate friendly. So for recruitment is one of them. I will say that you usually have the option of looking at things like your local business journal.
They usually use a third party organization that [00:02:00] you have to pay a few thousand dollars to do surveys for your team members. There are also other “best place to work” awards that don’t require expensive third party survey process and you can just do your due diligence and figure out which one makes the most sense.
You definitely wanted to be one that has credibility within your own geography, so it could be a industry-specific, a healthcare-specific one as long as you have the ability to really leverage and utilize it and intertwine it with your open position promotion that you do. The second one is for credibility.
So again, first one for recruitment. Second one for credibility. So, um, a lot of organizations once a year kind of spin up the big initiative to be able to apply for the best children’s hospital in the nation award, or trying to win awards for specific service lines
For your marketing campaigns, for example, there may be a situation where you want to actually [00:03:00] apply for some awards to be able to get credibility for some of the work that you’re doing. Perhaps to validate it for your boss that your work is good. So credibility could be for internal or for external purposes. So you kind of have to use a filter and figure out when it makes sense to apply for something for credibility.
Usually it’s going to be through the patient’s lens and that it gives your facility or your service line or your physicians additional credibility. And then that’s something that you can intertwine throughout your annual marketing strategy as far as figuring out how to really maximize it. The third one, and this is a reason why or this is a reason a lot of people overlook, but it’s for ego.
Right? So the first one’s for recruitment, second one is for credibility, and the third one’s for ego. So you cannot overlook ego. Maybe there’s a doc within your organization that’s really great on camera, but they’re kind of grouchy and difficult because they don’t really see the value of doing content marketing.
Maybe submit them for an award for a [00:04:00] podcast they were on or for a content series that they did. Sometimes an ego boost by being recognized by peers can be enough to get somebody to shift their point of view to be more willing to do a part of the process or engage in your work in a way that can really help the entire organization.
So this isn’t one that you want to leverage very often, but it’s definitely one that you want to keep in your back pocket as a reason to apply for something. So again, as you’re thinking about your year, the awards that you want to actually spend energy and resources to apply for, because again, awards not only cost the time to identify them, prioritize them, and fill out the application.
Sometimes those applications could be meaty and could take hours, but they all always have a cost associated with them that can be hundreds or thousands of dollars. And especially for those of you with shrinking budgets, you got to figure out how to prioritize it. So again, as you’re thinking about your award strategy for 2024, I strongly recommend that you create an Excel [00:05:00] spreadsheet with a couple of columns and one of those columns needs to be what’s the purpose?
Why are we applying for this? Is it for recruitment for credibility or for ego? So hopefully that was helpful. Thank you for tuning in this week. And we look forward to seeing you on a future episode of We Are Marketing Happy. Take care.
