Video can be powerful for a business.
This is true across the board, but can be especially relevant for hospitals and medical providers. Video is a superb tool not only for marketing your services, but also conveying your professionalism and quality and, most importantly, improving your patients’ experiences and outcomes.
Getting started can be daunting for some in-house marketing departments, so we've put together this guide for healthcare providers that want to boost overall marketing plans with great video. If you’re a marketing coordinator or manager at a hospital, please use this guide to help your department get started with video or find ways to improve your video marketing efforts. We recommend also checking out our video above, where we go even more in-depth.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us.
In the meantime....
Healthcare Video Strategy
Before we get to some video ideas, it's important to first understand why a patient would need care. By doing this, we can create objectives that our videos need to speak to. Typically, healthcare can be divided into three categories:
Emergency Care
Emergency care involves care that is unexpected. Two places for this would be the emergency room or department and urgent care. For emergencies, patients will almost always go to what is closest. For urgent care, patients often have more time to decide and will go to someone they trust. You can use video to help build trust and create awareness of your emergency and walk-in services.
Elective Care
Elective care includes procedures like knee replacements. Patients seeking elective care will often take their time researching their options, which makes video extremely effective in marketing your elective care services and communicating their quality. By integrating video into your marketing services, you can build the trust, awareness and reputation it takes to sway someone’s decision.
Preventive Care
Preventive care includes care like annual physicals and screenings. Patients in this category are often looking for a provider that makes them feel safe and comfortable. Video can help create trust with your patients by introducing physicians and “humanizing” them. You can also use video to encourage patients to attend annual cancer screenings such as mammograms.
Healthcare Video Marketing Objectives
In a traditional business, the marketing objective is almost always to increase sales. You usually do this indirectly by focusing on key customer motivators you identify in your customer profiling. Healthcare marketing is different.
By working through our patient profiles above, we can very clearly identify three goals that our videos should speak to for healthcare organizations:
- Build Patient Trust
- Create Awareness
- Improve Patient Experience
Video is fantastic at achieving all three of these objectives:
- You can build trust by demonstrating your expertise and showing the outcomes of your patients.
- Video creates awareness by leveraging the power of social media and local TV.
- You can improve your patients’ experiences through educational and instructional videos.
By first identifying these objectives we can better plan our video messaging.
Video Ideas for Healthcare Providers
We've put together the following list of 13 video ideas for hospitals and medical providers. Use this list to help your marketing team get started with video.
Need some help formulating a video strategy? Please reach out to us! Healthcare is one of our specialty areas, and we offer consulting and full production for hospitals and medical providers.
1. Meet the Doctor Videos
Meet-the-doctor videos are a great way to get started with video marketing. They help build patient trust and create awareness of your services and are relatively easy to make.
These videos are usually filmed interview style. During the interview, have the doctor describe who they are, why they went into medicine, their expertise and why they love caring for patients.
When onboarding new physicians, meet-the-doctor videos also are a great way to introduce new physicians to the community. We recommend their creation in conjunction with the onboarding process. When completed, hospitals and medical providers should use these videos on their websites, social media and in waiting rooms with TVs.
2. Patient Education Videos
Patient-education videos should also be a big focus of your medical marketing efforts. Patient education video topics vary greatly but usually focus on encouraging patients to be more proactive in their own care and giving them the information they need to do so. These videos can be filmed interview style, like meet-the-doctor videos, or created using graphics and animation.
We recommend filming patient education videos the same time you film meet-the-doctor video, but instead of asking the doctor to talk about themselves, ask them to explain a specific topic in their area of expertise.
The video above, which helps educate patients on the risks of delaying medical care, is a great example of a patient-education video from the Mayo Clinic. Examples of other ideas for patient education include:
- The difference between Type 1 vs. Type 2 diabetes.
- Sun safety tips for avoiding skin damage and skin cancer.
- How to recognize a stroke.
There really is no limit to the amount of patient education videos you can make.
3. Wellness & Nutrition Videos
Wellness and nutrition videos go along with patient-education videos. Hospitals and medical providers could create a series of healthy recipes to try out, for example. Or you could create videos encouraging patients to get more exercise and live an active lifestyle. Regardless of topic or idea, videos like this are an important complement and supplement to your overall marketing strategy.
4. Patient Testimonials
Patient-testimonial videos should be a priority for all hospitals and medical providers. It's a great way to highlight certain service lines and bring attention to the quality of your care. In addition, patient success stories act as social proof and can be critical in a patient's decision for their care.
The above example is a patient story we created for Holland Hospital. The video shares Kir's story of how he is back to life after two knee replacements.
Patient success stories perform very well on social media and service-line landing pages. Contact us today if you are part of the in-house marketing team at a hospital or medical provider looking to create high-quality patient testimonials.
5. Surgery & Procedure Prep Videos
You can also use video to help educate patients about their upcoming procedures, such as a knee replacement or baby delivery. These videos typically provide a step-by-step walkthrough of what will happen and how one should prepare. Videos like this do a great job of improving the patient experience and developing patient trust.
The above example is an animated video we produced for partnership with Lead Marketing. This video gives expecting parents all the information they need to know before giving birth at the birthing center. If your hospital or medical organization is looking for a video like this, please contact us today!
6. Instructional Videos
Instructional videos are very straightforward videos that aim to improve the patient experience. For example, instructional videos can tell patients where to park or how to access the patient portal. Keep these videos simple – often a voiceover with some corresponding footage is all you need – and include them in any email communications to patients.
7. Service Line Videos
Service-line videos are high-level videos that describe the services of a particular service line, such as your orthopedics or cardiology department. These videos are highly polished and created by an outside video marketing agency. Service-line videos are generally run as advertisements on local TV and digital advertising platforms.
We love this example from Ascension Health that stars Peyton Manning. The light-hearted humor keeps the viewer hooked while Peyton highlights the quality in the pediatrics department. This is just one way to do a service line video. More traditional ways can include voiceover and be more informational in nature. Ask us about creating service-line overview videos today..
8. Social Media Live Videos
Live videos for social media can be a great way for medical organizations to connect with the community. Some great uses for live videos would be physician lecture series, community events and question-and-answer sessions. The ability to answer questions and respond to comments live makes for one-on-one engagement that is difficult to replicate.
Make sure your sound quality is exceptional when filming a live video. Viewers are more forgiving to poor video quality but poor sound quality will almost certainly deter them from watching. We recommend a LAV microphone that connects wirelessly to your phone or video camera.
9. Community Outreach Videos
Being active in the community is extremely important for hospitals and medical providers. This builds trust with patients and helps create awareness of your services. Videos of community outreach events, like staff volunteering at a food pantry or a 5k fundraiser, are great opportunities to highlight the events and motivate people to attend next year.
10. Promotional Advertisements
Local TV and digital advertisements present numerous opportunities for hospitals to get in front of new patients. You can use promotional videos to advertise your hospital as a whole or highlight individual services. These videos are usually very polished and created by an outside video marketing agency.\
The commercial above for the Mayo Clinic is one of our favorite examples. It sets Mayo Clinic apart from all other hospitals by demonstrating to viewers that Mayo has the solutions they need. The combination of voiceover, animation and sound design creates a lasting impression on the viewer.
11. 3D Surgical Videos
3D surgical videos are animated videos that explain how a surgery works. These help educate patients on how the surgery will happen and what they can expect. Typically these videos would not be used in outbound marketing efforts and are more reserved for specific patients. 3D videos are usually created by an outside animation company with help from the internal marketing team.
12. Recruitment Videos
If you work in healthcare marketing, you know how hard it can be to recruit new talent. Recruitment videos can help show the culture of a workplace and how great it is to work there. More often than not, employees value the culture of an organization in addition to the compensation. By using a video to demonstrate the company culture, you can attract more qualified candidates.
13. Employee Recognition
Recruiting employees is important; keeping them is even more so. Beyond the traditional retainment efforts of bonuses and compensation, video can be a great way to show the importance of your staff. You can use video to recognize specific instances of employees going the extra mile or to highlight years-of-service milestones.
Our above example is a part of service awards campaign we created for Holland Hospital. Holland used this long-form video to headline its annual service awards ceremony.
Where Healthcare Providers Can Use Video
The other side of video marketing, once they’re created, is using them. How will they be seen? By whom? When? Where? Answering these questions is just as important as the production of the video, so be sure to take time to create and implement a plan for distributing your videos.
YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine behind Google.
We recommend hospitals use YouTube for your primary video player. First upload the video to YouTube and then embed that player onto your website. You can embed videos on landing pages, About Us pages and places like the patient portal. A rule of thumb is the more you can use video, the better your ROI and results will be.
In addition to serving as a video-hosting platform, YouTube videos can rank in search queries if they are well made and informative. You might find this as an effective way to attract new patients for specialized services like knee replacements or cancer care. Check out our blog post on YouTube vs Vimeo for an in-depth look into video hosting platforms.
Almost all of your videos should go on social media.
In addition to YouTube, upload your videos directly to each social media platform. Facebook particularly does well with an older demographic, so you can get great engagement with your community by focusing on Facebook. LinkedIn should be where you promote recruitment videos, as well.
Video works great in waiting rooms.
There’s often a TV in a practice's waiting room. This is a great place to screen the meet-the-doctor videos, which can help first-time patients feel comfortable before their appointments.
Healthcare Video Production
We hope this guide was valuable to you, and we invite you to return to it often. If you have any questions about any of the information here, please feel free to reach out to us! If your hospital or medical practice needs help with video marketing, we offer consulting and full video production services. Set up a free discovery call today by filling out our form.
If you enjoyed this content, we encourage you to check out our blog and subscribe to our YouTube channel. As part of our ongoing content marketing strategy, we're creating content to educate marketers and business owners on the best ways to use video. Thanks for reading!
