When you hear “reputation management,” what comes to mind? For some, it’s online review management, which is indeed a vital component. However, it’s just one piece of the puzzle. In today’s episode, Jenny dives into the second crucial piece: shaping the online narrative about your organization. This is often intertwined with PR as it dictates how people perceive your organization. To effectively manage this narrative, follow these steps:
- Craft and distribute surveys to gauge current perceptions.
- Develop a four-step strategy to manage your online narrative:
- Identify the core messages.
- Determine who the brand’s personality will be.
- Choose the best channels for content distribution.
- Plan your promotion strategy.
- Allow sufficient time to push and monitor your content to accurately gauge its impact and audience perception.
Connect with Jenny:
- Email: jenny@ec2-3-80-87-79.compute-1.amazonaws.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
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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 and I am your host today, as well as the CEO and founder at Hedy and Hop. Hedy and Hop is a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency, and we are proud to be the creators and sponsors of this podcast.
Today, I’m excited to chat a little bit about reputation management for a healthcare organization. I’ve had a couple of conversations with folks over the last few weeks around reputation management, and in general, it really falls into two specific camps. So we’re going to talk briefly about one, but then really focus and hone in on the second.
So, the first area for reputation management is really driving online reviews to be able to differentiate yourself and show yourself as a five star healthcare organization online in the online review sites. We’re not going to talk about that [00:01:00] today, but there are some great organizations like Press Ganey and Reputation and Raider 8 that offer those services.
You can integrate them into your online technology stack and they can automate the texting or emailing of links to your patients post appointment to ensure that you’re getting as many online reviews as possible. Whether it’s for a specific service line or business line, or for your entire organization, great platforms, really great service.
What I want to talk about today instead is the second type of reputation management, and that’s really owning the online story that people are saying about your organization. This can kind of be intertwined a little bit with traditional PR of, you know, how are people talking about your organization?
How are people framing up those conversations? Is it good? Is it bad? And there are some things you can do to help try to control that narrative. So let’s talk about it. So the first thing you’re going to want to do, [00:02:00] if you’re going to tackle reputation management or storytelling on behalf of your organization is to do a survey to be able to baseline perceptions.
This could be perhaps a survey of current patients or customers. It could be of current team members or it could be of your communities. There’s lots of different surveying tools. So you’ll have to decide what audience you want to survey, but really understanding the baseline of your organization’s perception will help make sure that you understand if your work is impactful or not.
So that’s the first step for the next step. You’re going to want to actually develop the strategy, and I’m going to break this down into four specific steps. The first is understanding your core messages. So before you go out and actually do any sort of reputation management or storytelling on behalf of your organization, you have to know what you’re talking about.
Are there specific service lines or business units that you’re going to be focusing specifically on? And if so, what’s the messaging behind and around that? Are you talking about [00:03:00] quality? Are you talking about outcomes? Really understanding and creating messaging guidelines around your campaign will be really helpful to make sure you’re consistent in the kinds of content you’re bringing out into your campaign and that you’re really reinforcing those core messages that you’re wanting people to hear in your community.
Next is understanding who the personality is going to be. When you’re thinking about content marketing through the lens of controlling your organization’s reputation, there’s got to be a face. There has to be a face. So, for example, with We Are Marketing Happy, I’m the face, right? Jenny Bristow. For your organization, it doesn’t have to be one person.
For example, St. Louis Children’s Hospital, we did a really big reputation management focused content program for them for quite a few years called Mom Docs, and they had a couple dozen physicians that were excited to build their own personal brands, and they participated in this content series and it really reduced the level of effort from each participant, [00:04:00] and it allowed St. Louis Children’s Hospital to really diversify. So they weren’t putting all of their eggs in one basket in case that individual left the organization or whatnot. So you have to decide as part of your strategy, who’s the face or how many people do we want to be the face and what are those guidelines? Do we need to make sure that they are big advocates of our brand? Do we need to make sure that they have a specific tone that they speak in, that they’re representing our brands in an appropriate way, whatever that is, as you’re developing the guidelines for personality, make sure that you define that clearly so you follow it throughout the life of the program.
Next, you have to figure out what channels you’re going to use to be able to distribute this content. I always recommend having some sort of a hub. Having a hub for the content allows you to really control where it lives. And then you can modify the other channels from a distribution strategy perspective based off of the ever changing social media and digital ecosystem needs.
So for [00:05:00] example going back to the St. Louis Children’s Hospital example, whenever we first launched, Facebook Live was a really big thing, right? But now it, I don’t even know if it exists anymore, but it certainly isn’t as popular as it was back then. Same thing for our own podcast. We Are, Marketing Happy.
You know, we have a Spotify hub. We’re It links out to all of the other podcasting channels, but then we promote it on LinkedIn and Meta an a variety of other channels. But our hub serves as a place where the content continues to live regardless of what other social media trends may be happening at that time.
So deciding about that and deciding if you’re gonna build it, leverage an existing platform that’s on the market or whatnot is definitely an important step. Next is understanding your promotion strategy and figuring out, you know, if you’re going to be promoting this and your goal is reputation management and storytelling, what audience do you need to hear it?
A big thing that we talk about with folks is, you know, your board may be thinking you’re not showing up in the right place, but is your board the right demographics of people that will actually be using your [00:06:00] service? It may be massively different. And if so, you have to explain to them, “Hey, you may not see our ads on Instagram because Sally, you’re not really our target demographic for our patients. We’re actually targeting people in their twenties and thirties for this specific service line. And you’re in your middle fifties.” So helping them understand that if you need to is important, but make sure that you’re actually building a promotion strategy based off of the people whose perception you’re trying to shift is massively important.
Another thing that you want to think about is for promotion is if you want to actually incorporate some traditional PR strategies. So when we think about content promotion through the lens of reputation management, really think about digital owned media content that you’re pushing out to be in the right place at the right time to hit the right person, but you also could go through the lens of traditional PR where you’re having an organization pitch your stories to show up in national or regional news outlets, and that can be a really beneficial way to build your reputation.
At that point, your strategy is done. Let’s start [00:07:00] launching. So launching and optimizing. I always recommend that you have a minimum amount of time that you kind of promise you’ll be creating that content for. Usually a year is the minimum I’d recommend any campaign go. Maybe you could do six months if it’s really narrow and focused, but you need quite a bit of time to be able to see if it’s actually working to shift the perception of your organization before you throw in the towel.
A month, two months isn’t going to do much. It has to be an ongoing effort, and at that point, you’re ready to resurvey. So let’s say you gave yourself six months as initial run, use the exact same survey methodology used originally and see if there’s a change in perception again, whether it’s organization wide service line availability, quality, whatever it may be resurvey and see if there was a lift.
If not, change your strategy. If there was, keep doing what you’re doing and double down on it. Congratulations. You have a successful strategy. This is a program or a general framework that really can be applied as large as an organization or as small as a [00:08:00] specific service line. So if you have a situation where maybe a service line isn’t super well known, maybe that’s not a reputation problem and it’s awareness problem, the same framework can really serve well to drive awareness.
So hopefully today was helpful. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me, jenny@headyandhop.com. I love to chat with you more about this or any of your burning marketing questions. Do me a favor and please rate and share this episode.
We are so thankful for how popular this podcast has become and how well listened to it is. So if you could please rate it, share it, we would absolutely appreciate it. Until next week, thanks for tuning in and we’ll see you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers.
