For more than a decade, JONES helped West Corporation promote its TeleVox healthcare solution, shifting the brand from “just a technology company” to a trusted partner in helping healthcare providers improve patients’ lives.
I recently talked with Allison Hart, the head of marketing and communications for this division of West, about the Healthy World campaign and West’s partnership with JONES.
JONES: TeleVox undertook its Healthy World campaign and rebranding several years ago, as content marketing was just entering its current level of prominence. What led West to take that approach?
HART: Our customers are healthcare providers and systems. We know that doctors want to help people get better; they are healers. We wanted to help inform our customers about different ways to engage and activate their patients.
The Healthy World/Insights and Impact Research was conceived by the JONES team and designed to show that our technology does much more than function as a reminder system. Every healthcare provider has a reminder technology in place; they don’t have to do other things to institute patient engagement—they already have it.
All of our competitors were all saying the same thing. When we explored different messaging options, JONES developed “Connect. Engage. Activate.” as a secondary message, and recommended Healthy World as our mission: create a healthy world one patient engagement at a time.
One of the main reasons for doing this research is to empower the current customer base with information, showing them there is more they can do by maximizing the technology they already have in place.
JONES: What made West’s approach to content, driven by original research, unique?
HART: What’s unique about the West approach is that it really is fully integrated. Some companies will do a study and use it only for PR or for a single report. At West, it is actually integrated all the way down to product development. We are talking with product development to make sure the questions we are asking in our provider research and consumer research is relevant to products that are actually in development, even if they aren’t yet available.
We also focus on maximizing the research findings. We aren’t conducting research for a single campaign. We are using it in all departments, and we have committed to continuing the research over the long term. West launches five reports a year.
That level of integration is something that many businesses don’t reach—their structure is so siloed, they don’t think about how all of these things can be tied together. That's where our relationship with JONES is critical. As an integrated full-service agency, they have experts in every area: strategy, research, brand and demand, content creation, design, PR and sales enablement.
JONES: Could you have created compelling content without the surveys?
HART: We can always create compelling content, because that’s what we do, but I think the surveys fit our strategy for a lot of different reasons.
Even though we are a B2B company selling to providers, the patient still matters. In healthcare, the human element is essential and cannot be sidelined in favor of purely financial considerations.
With these surveys, we are putting a patient perspective into the communication process, and compared and contrasted it against the providers’ perspective. This is how we identify the expectation gaps between patient and provider.
The program would not have been nearly as successful had we not used those surveys. Research is a key part of our strategy. And, we couldn't have done this without JONES.
JONES: Did the results from the surveys change the plans for using that content in marketing and public relations?
HART: No. Many agencies do surveys inefficiently. They conduct poorly-planned surveys and then develop strategy from there.
JONES, instead, understands our brand and strategy, then outlines the reports and key statements we want to make. Then, they craft survey questions to support those reports. They are strategic in creating the survey questions. Their approach supports all levels of our strategy, including product development.
JONES: The first reports were published 5 years ago. Is that content still being seen by your prospects? What is the key to creating “evergreen” content that remains relevant?
HART: Our reports touch on major issues that aren’t going away any time soon. Some of the problems we’re trying to solve have been around for years. These are problems patients and providers have been dealing with since the beginning of healthcare.
Thought leadership is a bigger vision. It's 5-10 years out. It is very different from news. Product announcements go stale very quickly.
Using our research for thought leadership content goes back to changing the conversation and having something that is big enough to talk about. We're changing the way patients and providers interact, and that conversation is going to be relevant for a long time.
They key to creating evergreen marketing and PR content is picking a big enough topic and looking at a major problem in the industry, rather than just selling a product.
JONES: What have you learned in the last five years that has changed your approach to content marketing?
HART: One of the things we’ve learned is how to implement inbound marketing. We have always worked to use the material developed for PR in our marketing, but as a team with JONES, we’ve become more integrated and started to think beyond news announcements. We’ve become, as a team, a more integrated full-service team.
Our use of the information gathered has grown from thought leadership articles, digital reports and blog posts to include video, infographics, and more interactive content.
What has driven that is a focus on continuous improvement and trying to drive bigger and better results by becoming more strategic from the beginning and trying to really closely align PR, marketing and sales enablement campaigns.
At a recent Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference, we were able to use our most recent report far beyond the media interviews. We implemented trainings with our sales team and used the material right there at the show, with help from JONES.
JONES: How are you adapting your newest surveys and content development efforts to changes in media and consumer habits? What new content formats are you introducing? (video, etc.)
HART: We are definitely shifting into infographics and video. We shared those in the booth at HIMSS and with media. We also adapted a short-form one-pager to help promote the full report.
Of course, we have also extended it over our blog, social media, and more, whereas it started with just media outreach and occasional outbound emails. We are doing a lot better job of sifting that information down, repurposing it, and putting it out across multiple channels.
JONES: How has the involvement of JONES as an agency partner improved your content marketing efforts?
HART: JONES introduced us to HubSpot and helped us strategize our marketing campaigns. They helped us internalize the concept of the buyer's journey and develop full campaigns that touched every stage of that journey. Over the last few years, they've helped us accelerate our sales funnel.
JONES brings a mindset of planning content for every stage of the funnel, supporting our content development in ways that move prospects to conversion more quickly.
JONES: What problems has JONES helped your marketing and communications team solve?
HART: With staffing changes, we've been strapped for in-house resources. Our partnership with JONES has been able to expand and contract to provide the support we need. Because they already know our strategy inside and out, their team can jump in quickly to keep our plans moving on schedule.
Working with Allison and her team has been a privilege for me and the entire JONES team, especially celebrating successes with them at events such as the HIMSS conference (see my thoughts on that event here).
See more details on the Healthy World reports and the marketing results they have driven in our case study on West here. Or visit our client profile page for West to download a content package sample.)
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