Will emotion help you engage prospective Patients with your healthcare marketing?
By Geoffrey Cooling
The generation of emotion may be the answer in your healthcare marketing. If something we meet in our lives stirs a strong emotion we usually remember it. Lets try it out, picture this, you are at a professional conference. I walk onto the stage, place a music player down, say “be with you in one moment”, play some particularly fetching music for thirty seconds while I dance on the stage. Stop the music and start my presentation.
You are going to remember that, in fact you are going to remember that for a while. Some of you have already been scarred with an indelible image! But why, why will you remember that moment and indeed that presentation? Because I will have engendered a strong emotion. Whether that be surprise, embarrassment, or amazement at the fact that the fat lad can dance! It will be an emotion that is driven home by an element of shock.
I don’t recommend that you dance for your prospective or existing Patients, but I do recommend that you surprise them. Because if you surprise them in a good way with your care, with your service, with your commitment to them, they will probably always be your Patients. But can we leverage this effect for our healthcare marketing? In order to do so we need to deploy imagery and text that generates emotion in the viewer. Imagery or text that may generate strong emotion.
I don’t necessarily think it is important which element of emotion we go for, happiness, sadness, amazement. I think once we engender that emotion with our healthcare marketing we are on the right track. If you doubt this think about some of the iconic and well remembered moments in your life. You remember them because strong emotions were involved. It is like the Kennedy assassination for one generation and the twin towers for another. You will never forget those moments, I can barely remember what I did last week. But I will never forget falling back onto my couch as the second plane went in.
Emotion is a powerful thing, maybe we should try to engender some with our healthcare marketing?
Regards
Geoff