The Chief Marketing Officer of a large Northeastern health network was vexed.

The network had over ten-thousand employees, but nowhere near that many social media followers. The network’s doctors and nurses did a top-notch job of caring for patients. But they didn’t seem to know about their colleagues’ accomplishments. It didn’t matter how many tweets the marketing department sent out- much to the Digital Marketing Director’s dismay.

And that’s when the Chief Marketing Officer and the Digital Marketing Director talked to Viddler.

If you don’t know what engagement-marketing is, you’re not alone.

To be frank, we coined the term ourselves to describe a trend we’ve seen among our clients in the last year. In a nutshell, engagement-marketing programs encourage hospital staff to share marketing messages with their communities. But unlike traditional brand ambassador programs, engagement-marketing programs focus first on helping hospital staff stay engaged at work. The idea is that staff who feel inspired by their organization will want to refer it to people they know.

Our clients are hospital leaders of HR and Communication. They’re consistently engaging over 50% of employee headcount – bi weekly. That’s more than double the prior best for them. How?

Start with 4 steps to boost awareness, pride, and the culture of your hospital:

1.  Build an engaging rewards program – to encourage participation, sharing, and connection (culture).
2.  Create engaging content with interactive video
3.  Feature patients and employee acts, examples , and compelling stories
4.  Keep it interesting, open and real with a steady flow of new material

We’d all agree that employee pride/awareness in the brand is good for retention….and even better for referrals and business development.
Additionally, client employees willing to promote their own hospital are proven to increase the amount of new patient referrals. All of us will consider the experiences and endorsement of trusted people within our personal networks when making critical health decisions. That just makes sense.

We recently looked at the data of a top 100 hospital client of ours and saw that for the past five months, over 50% of their 10,000 employees are engaging with the hospital’s informational and promotional videos. Why is this important?

Because over 5,000 employees engaged and informed, shared hospital success stories, allowing them to tap into a huge marketing asset – their own employees. Now there’s over 5,000 people in house who are equipped to share success stories within their personal networks.