All Nurses Are Marketers

All Nurses Are Marketers?! Why would someone say that? Marketers are soulless hucksters who pollute the world with annoying ads, right? Well, perhaps some. But Marketing is a much larger concept than the lay conception of it as a professional role for generating revenues for a business. So let’s take a quick look at Marketing and why nurses benefit from viewing the world through Marketing Vision.

WHAT IS MARKETING AND WHY SHOULD NURSES CARE – AN ILLUSTRATION?

Wikipedia defines Marketing

Marketing is an integrated communications-based process through which individuals and communities discover that existing and newly-identified needs and wants may be satisfied by the products and services of others.

A general enough definition, but let’s expand products and services to include more than just the strictly commercial kind. For example, as a nurse, can you think of anything that you do as a service? Of course you can: that’s what you do as a nurse. Also, marketing involves more than just communications: it involves process, arrangement and distribution.

If you want an effective infection-control system, for example, you need a superbly integrated solution. This includes awareness of proper cleaning techniques; the right kinds of facilities (no paper towels & touching the faucets); the proper positioning of facilities (make it stupid-easy to funnel people into sanitary behavior); a system that never runs out of supplies; and educated staff to ensure the process is implemented. That’s all marketing. And this is just for hand-washing. Of course there’s far more to a complete infection-control system. Which is why we need excellent marketing approaches.

NURSING MARKETING

All successful marketing campaigns need champions – people who are wise and diligent and persistent enough to see the ways to better land. We desperately need more nursing involvement in championing ideas that make important differences in lives.

When you walk into your facility, what do you see? Do you like it? Do you think it respects your patients? How an organization presents itself to people is a key component of marketing. Nurses need to be a part of the design, don’t they? Imagine  if more nurses were involved in the official marketing process – what difference would that make? Do you think that the “customer” would have a better experience, talk positively about her experience and come back if she had to?

Hospitals spend money all the time on the tactics of marketing (printing glossy brochures of sick people smiling like fools). Do these things earn attention and return? Maybe. But does it do anything to wow people as much as a well-marketed nursing experience? More CNO’s, CMO’s and CEO’s need to ask these questions. Many don’t or won’t because they convinced that the 20th Century model of unilateral broadcasting is the foundation of marketing.

THERE IS NO ROOM FOR MEDIOCRITY IN HEALTH CARE

Nurses, you need to create a revolution in Marketing. You are the real Healthcare Marketers. You are the ones who understand what patients and family members need and how to deliver remarkably.

I know your jobs are tough (and you don’t often enough get the credit you deserve for your hard-work nor do you deserve the superficial conception of nursing that our culture typically encourages). But, if you can take that extra spare time and invest a bit in seeing things from a marketing perspective, perhaps you will, little by little, make huge differences – the ones that not only benefit the public, but also ease the burden of the unnecessary wars on stupidity and mediocrity you encounter in your work.

When it comes to the Web, nurses and doctors and other healthcare professionals are going to have to establish useful presences. Sure there are some healthcare bloggers and tweeters. But we need a lot more. There’s too much “patient advocacy” by people who really don’t understand what that entails. Nurses need to position themselves in the right places on the Web. And that takes marketing.

Know how you market what you do and improve it. There’s a reason why the words marketing and remarkable sound similar: they’re both about being re-marked on. Remarkability is the goal of all marketing. There is no mediocrity in health care – it must be remarkable or it’s not health care.

Nurses, be the best marketers in the world. Be Re-Markable.

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