After bringing together two large legacy healthcare systems into one unified organization, a leading faith-based health system serving the Chicagoland area was focused on building system-wide awareness of its service lines to promote growth. But in doing so, the health system had a number of challenges in bringing to market a cohesive messaging structure. Movéo was asked to develop unified messaging platforms for a number of priority service lines, from heart & vascular and cancer to orthopedics and neurosciences.
The initial crucial step in the process was ensuring key clinical leadership for each service line were in alignment on key programs and differentiators to promote that were consistent across the enterprise. After conducting a thorough audit of each service line within the legacy systems, members of Movéo’s Consulting and Engagement team as well as its Strategy and Planning team conducted in-depth interviews with key stakeholders. This interview process was critical for decision makers to come together to discuss their respective program strengths to promote within each service line’s programs. At the same time, an online research audit was conducted to assess competitive claims in the marketplace.
Through the collaboration in the interview process, the next step for the Movéo team was drafting individual in-depth messaging frameworks for each of the 10 service lines. Keeping the system’s new overarching brand positioning in mind, these messaging maps provided focus on audience needs and competitive differentiation, and gave concise understanding and verbalization for external targets (patients/families, referral sources) and for the system’s marketing and communications team. It ensured consistency of messaging for specific markets and audiences across various channels and established a basis and context for the development of marketing and communications tactics.
The messaging frameworks contained an introduction and purpose, how-to-guide, and message platform in the form of a hierarchy of key messaging pillars with support points driven by the overarching value proposition. The frameworks also included samples of consumer-facing copy to illustrate the use of messaging in real world examples. The messaging frameworks serve as a consistent guidepost in the development of copy for various marketing tactics–from headline creation to overall tone and sentence structure for specific services.
To help track the potential impact of the new messaging strategy, Movéo deployed in-depth quantitative research to take key measures, including awareness and familiarity, of the health system’s brand. In spite of a significantly lower media spend, familiarity with the AMITA Health brand remained near 20% year-over-year, while ‘likelihood to recommend’ increased to 57% and respondents’ overall opinion of the health system increased significantly. With communication dollars continuing to support various service lines, both Movéo and the client believe the more cohesive messaging strategy will engender higher familiarity for the health system overall.