UAB Medicine’s Healthcare Marketing Gets Personal

The oft-repeated phrase of supposedly stoic businesspeople (and of The Godfather’s Michael Corleone) is, “It’s not personal.  It’s strictly business.”  When our business is healthcare, though, it is always personal and so it should be for a public service organization like UAB Medicine.  UAB Medicine is the primary brand for the clinical facilities and services provided by faculty within the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) School of Medicine through the UAB Health System.  We spoke recently with Adrienne Steading, UAB Medicine’s Director, Marketing and Digital Strategy, to learn about UAB’s approach to attracting and engaging the right constituents on a very personal level.

Personal Messaging

“One of the marketing dynamics that is noticeably different now is the increasing shift from the broad to the specific,” Steading told us.  “Ten years ago, hospitals were still promoting bricks and mortar, their size, their awards, their research and their hospital’s overall presence.  Today, everything is becoming much more focused on the individual consumer or patient and gearing our marketing message so that it feels like one-to-one marketing.  For instance, the brand we emphasize is UAB Medicine rather than UAB Health System because the word “system” is too often viewed as cold, corporate and impersonal.  We found, too, that it is essential to get our marketing from the system level to the service line level.”

In recent years, UAB Medicine has run a series of service line marketing initiatives for areas such as heart, women’s services, and cancer treatment that are tied together under UAB’s umbrella message:  Knowledge That Will Change Your World.  Take a look at how the approach plays out on this UAB Medicine site: http://bit.ly/1hZ9s2x   It also plays out in the copy of UAB’s service line advertising.  For instance, a UAB Medicine Women & Infants Services advertisement uses you-centric copy that speaks personally to the reader:  “For where you are now…and where you’d like to be down the road.”

UAB Medicine’s marketing is also personal in a one-to-one marketing way.  At a time when personalizing and delivering targeted content to the right audience at the right time is an essential differentiator, UAB is an early adopter.  “We are very active CRM users,” Steading said.  “We use Microsoft Dynamics and Click Dimensions as primary tools to communicate directly with our audience.  One of our communication goals is to drive individuals back to our website where we can capture some type of engagement – such as having them download a book or view an infographic – through which we can also capture information for the CRM system that lets us continue to communicate with each patient along the path of their health journey.”

Personal Accountability

UAB Medicine’s marketing group has also embraced a vital role in managing readmission rates:  the creation and distribution of educational materials that empower personal accountability for medical care.    “Whether it is a piece that helps patients comply with taking recommended medications or teaching new dads and grandparents about the importance of breast feeding so they can support new mothers, we are wanting patients to play a more active role in their own care,” Steading said.  “And, we are applying technology wherever possible to make the information available whenever and wherever needed.  A patient may or may not be using a computer but they are definitely using their smart phones so whatever we are developing is mobile friendly.”

Late in the book, The Godfather, a wizened Michael Corleone revises his statement, “Don’t let anybody kid you.  It’s all personal, every bit of business.”   The embrace of personal marketing, personal accountability, and personalized medicine by hospital marketers like UAB Medicine are a sign of both a more human and humane approach to marketing and a more effective approach to delivering medical services.  Personally, I’m all for it.

Posted on March 7, 2014 in Blog, Healthcare

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