Sometimes in healthcare marketing you need to do something unique to stand out from all of the traditional, boring, and safe campaigns.
Our creative team recently executed one of the most memorable healthcare marketing campaigns that I have ever seen in my career. We are calling it the Zombie Wound Care Management Company campaign.
Sometimes in healthcare marketing you need to do something unique to stand out from all of the traditional, boring, and safe campaigns.
Our creative team recently executed one of the most memorable healthcare marketing campaigns that I have ever seen in my career. We are calling it the Zombie Wound Care Management Company campaign.
We work in the wound care management company niche of healthcare, which means that we help hospitals build and run outpatient wound centers.
I believe that the campaign showcases our passion for the work that our clinical and management team do on a daily basis, while pointing out that we offer the best customer service and dedication to our clients in the wound care management space.
The campaign was brainstormed in the beginning of 2014, and originally started out with some print advertisements in industry trade journals.
Nicole Walker, our director of PR and marketing, and the rest of our creative team accelerated campaign efforts surrounding the recent Becker’s Hospital Review Annual Meeting in Chicago, held May 15-17.
“Zombies are a rare sight in wound care, but when it comes to the administrative side of things—they share multiple similarities with other wound care management companies” Walker said. “Zombie management companies feed on hospital revenue, are notorious for poor communication and are unresponsive to the hospital and wound center’s needs. This is when Wound Care Advantage comes in with our bug out bags, ready to save your center and maximize your profit.”
Wound Care Management is a Serious Topic
The business of wound center management is an extremely serious and important topic. If the proper care is not given at a wound center, patients can suffer long-term complications from non-healing wounds including infection, amputation and even death.
There is zero room for a lackadaisical attitude in this field. We wanted to create a campaign that showcased how passionate we are about being the best partner for hospitals in wound care management.
“Our display relied heavily on zombie imagery. We gave away zombie stress relievers and zombie cookies—which set us apart from all the other medical companies exhibiting at the conference,” Walker said. “During the meeting, attendees and speakers searched for our booth to find our zombie swag.”
The Campaign Components
As with all of our marketing campaigns, we believe in a strong mix of graphics, videos and social marketing. We started by brainstorming the core idea or concept. Zombies are a fun and cool topic, but we also found a lot of similarities with zombie characteristics and the approach taken by traditional wound management companies.
We created strong tag lines around the concept including:
-Don’t let zombie wound management companies eat your wound center alive.
-Zombie management companies are unresponsive to hospital and program needs.
-Zombie management companies feed voraciously on hospital revenue.
-Zombie management companies are difficult to remove once in place.
-Zombie management companies are notoriously poor communicators.
-Zombie management companies are inflexible and unconcerned about your program.
As our home base for the campaign our web team created a slide that was added to our homepage with a link to Wound Center Zombie Management survival tips, which is a scrolling micro page.
Additionally, our art department created awesome cartoon zombie graphics to use with all aspects of the campaign. And our video team created a series of outstanding short promos to promote what it is like at a zombie wound management company.
Our President Nancy Zeller wrote a blog about the campaign titled Why the Zombie Approach to Wound Center Management is Failing.
Social Media Push
During the Becker’s Hospital Review meeting we started a robust social marketing push. We created custom zombie graphics to be spread across our Instagram and Facebook pages. We used keywords and hashtags on our Twitter page to attract the attention of c-level hospital executives. We also used our Google+ page to help drive up our SEO traffic to the website. On LinkedIn, we were able to use both our company page and our group page to cross promote our efforts with the campaign.
Our team is currently working on some additional efforts to extend the life of the campaign and penetrate markets that have yet to see or hear our messaging.
