This sponsored article was written by Christina Millett, National Brand Manager – Strategic Healthcare Accounts, at ReachLocal/USA Today Network. Christina has worked in marketing for more than 13 years with a concentration on digital marketing for the past nine years. Her professional career has been focused on national, multi-location brands in healthcare, education, and the wellness industries. She brings a deep understanding of the patient journey grounded in her ability to synthesize data and insights as she works to humanize her brands through relevant and engaging marketing solutions. She is passionate about helping healthcare brands deploy strategies that are meaningful and drive results.

We’re constantly being bombarded with new ways to get information, and it can be difficult what keep track of what’s hot and what’s not. 

Staying in the know and leveraging industry data to your advantage is important. If done well, keeping up with trends of the moment can, in fact, show that you’re more relevant and savvier to today’s needs than others who aren’t paying as much attention, which can reflect well on overall brand perception around modern healthcare.

Listen and Watch for Signals

When you read a statistic about an overwhelming number of people participating in a trend, it’s hard to overlook. It’s a signal that people’s behaviors are evolving, and you need to evolve with them.

Many people, for example, have been skeptical about chatbots in recent years, questioning whether they were just a fad. Now, over 1.4 billion people interact with chatbots per year, and it’s expected they’ll save the banking and healthcare industries $8 billion annually by 2022. HIPAA compliance is obviously a concern and a key consideration as you evaluate vendors.

Tech is changing constantly, and marketing evolves and innovates along with those changes. Listen and watch for signals and be open to looking at what’s going on in other industries. You may spot things which are adaptable to healthcare.

Leverage Industry Data on Trends

Taking advantage of tactics proven to be popular and highly effective in the current marketing climate can show patients how you stand out against other similar medical providers.

If you’re looking to capitalize on something a bit more familiar than chatbots, but still a current trend, YouTube is a good place to start. Though video itself feels as old as the hills, YouTube has led the change in making it an accessible medium to more and more marketers this decade. Based on a study we conducted around the modern patient consumer journey, 56% of people are using YouTube to guide their healthcare decisions, using it to learn about the recovery process, investigate treatment options and view testimonials from others.

And it makes sense: when people watch video, they retain 95% of what they see, compared to just 10% when reading it in text. Visualizing what healthcare providers can do is more reassuring to people — that’s precisely why YouTube traffic for hospitals increased 119% year over year in the current decade.

Learn from Trends

If the trends you see have patients flocking to them and are already rooted in something that people are familiar with, there’s no reason not to leverage industry data. It’s all about learning from what’s going on whether that’s improving the patient experience or new ways to connect via marketing channels.

About ReachLocal

As part of the USA TODAY NETWORK, ReachLocal now offers even more complete marketing solutions. We have experience assisting thousands of healthcare and wellness providers with more than a decade’s worth of data insights and digital marketing expertise. USA TODAY NETWORK can help you cut through the noise and uncover the smarter way to reach local consumers and grow your business.