Kindred Healthcare

National Acute-Care and Home Health Provider Seeks to Utilize Social Media to Advance Direct-to-Consumer Marketing

Client

Kindred Healthcare is a healthcare services company that operates long-term acute-care hospitals and provides rehabilitation services in a variety of settings.

Location

Louisville, KY

Services Provided

• Social media assessment
• Social media strategic roadmap
• Internal infrastructure, process, and operational plans
• Content strategy and activation plan
• Social media platform optimization plan
• Influencer activation roadmap
• Employee advocacy program pla
• Measurement framework for social media
• Social media executive positioning recommendations

Overview

How does a Healthcare company that has focused mainly on B2B marketing to grow shift into speaking directly to the consumer to educate and empower? Kindred Healthcare sought to understand how to effectively utilize social media to scale its B2C marketing efforts to empower individuals and their families with the information that will help them to make an informed decision about their care.

Kindred Healthcare long recognized the opportunities of social media, but the team wanted to connect social media practices to business goals and understand how they could effectively build their marketing team structure and processes to deliver on the concepts that make social media work. They also wanted to optimize the current channels so that each channel had a distinct role but were all working together to drive success.

Situation

With a deep history in marketing its acute-care services to other healthcare businesses, Kindred had begun ramping up efforts to communicate directly to the consumer to empower and educate them and their families about care options. The majority of these efforts to date had been done via traditional advertising campaigns and some social media, although the bulk of existing social media efforts centered on customer service. Across the organization, there was ambiguity in terms of social media’s purpose, its opportunity and how to measure its success. Kindred needed a social media strategy and associated content approach with a phased plan on enhancing the internal infrastructure to support those efforts.

Challenges

• Kindred had low brand awareness and was trying to communicate a subject matter that can be difficult to discuss.
• Content efforts to date had been center on traditional advertising with long-lead times for creative development.
• Healthcare is continually ranked as one of the least customer-friendly industries.
• The marketing team structure was not built for the quick and nimble needs of a successful social media strategy.

Solution

Convince & Convert performed a rigorous assessment of how the various teams across the institution were reaching consumers today, understood the various ideas on the role and purpose of social media and studied how the competitive set was using social media to reach consumers. With no competitor successfully utilizing social as a scalable lead tool, Kindred had the opportunity to take advantage of this space using a combination of paid and organic tactics.
Convince & Convert build a social media roadmap with the two expressed goals to build brand awareness and preference and drive referrals and admissions. In order to do that, five key areas of focus emerged that drove the tactical execution plan:

1. Plan informed and integrated content throughout the consumer journey that can be utilized across social media based on what we know about the consumer./li>
2. Optimize the priority of social media channels to more effectively distribute the right content to the right audiences.
3. Empower and partner with employees and customer families to help share the heart of Kindred Healthcare to bring an increased relevance and trust to the content.
4. Align the marketing structure for social media excellence moving from siloed departments to an active content company.
5. Build a measurement framework that delivered a better understanding of social media’s business impact.

Tactical concepts and execution instructions were delivered against these five key areas of focus. Sample recommendations included:

• A crawl-walk-run approach for building an integrated digital content and reputation team with corresponding org charts, job descriptions, process and technology recommendations
• A content strategy with five content pillars driving all social media stories
• A topic archeology process to uncover the key consumer questions that will provide the underlying content for those pillars
• A plan to develop an employee advocacy program to champion Kindred in their own network
• Instructions on conducting an influencer assessment to identify potential partnerships with influencers

Results

• Counseled Kindred through the implementation of the updated social media strategy facilitating cross-departmental alignment conversations that resulted in the increased effectiveness of social media.
• Delivered master social media tracking framework template that was then integrated into a technology system to automate social media metrics and more effectively tied back to business objectives.