Daniel Brian Advertising

Traditionally, patients were referred to specialty care by physicians or their insurers. There was no need to employ customer service or hospitality because the patient had little to no choice in the matter. However, with the rapid increase of web-based access to medical information, patients have moved toward self-referral. Acting more like scrutinizing customers, they expect a retail-like experience from their healthcare providers.

This change raised the bar in marketing success metrics. Brand awareness is no longer a sufficient measurement of success. Consumer advocacy is the new indicator of brand health. If a brand can win consumer preference by building emotional connections, its best advertising will come from its consumers, who will passionately promote and truly co-create the brand. Trademarking the term, ‘irrational advocacy,’ Daniel Brian Advertising employs emotional intelligence into this new form of patient relationship marketing for its clients.

New data indicates there is merit to DBA’s approach. In fact, a Forrester Research study on 4436 U.S. online adults, reports that for current customers, half of the brand engagement was attributed to emotion, and for non-customers, it was 75 percent. Building a study around irrational advocacy and applying it to healthcare is Daniel Brian Advertising (DBA), a data-driven marketing agency specializing in healthcare. “To drive emotional engagement with patients, DBA offers consulting on every touchpoint of the brand experience, specializing in patient referral and advertising,” states Dan Cobb, the CEO of Daniel Brian Advertising.

Analyzing the patient journey, DBA builds empathy maps to understand each touchpoint with the healthcare provider, starting with advertising, media, social media, and uniquely focusing on the patient experience. This way, DBA enables healthcare providers to be more personalized and helps them emotionally engage with patients, multiply patient referrals, combat aggressive competition, increase revenue consistently, while creating a more positive and healthy environment for patients.

The agency also works with the discharge communications with patients and deploys enabling technologies to ensure the patients stay compliant to their care plan, improving their health, and reducing readmissions.

“Our team has rich work experience on both the client-side and the agency side of healthcare marketing,” says Cobb. The resulting familiarity with their clients’ requirements, empowers DBA with the unique ability to create and deliver impactful marketing strategies. The agency caters to all sizes of physicians and medical practices, hospitals, and health systems. DBA offers them a powerful combination of breakthrough local digital marketing, health system and hospital advertising experience, and integrated creative solutions that deploy emotional intelligence.

DBA’s consultant level expertise can also provide monthly reports of the analytics, which include relationship scores, net promoter scores, and a composite score that includes actual advocacy tracked by social media and shares. These show the results of DBA’s advertising and helps create true ROI for the client. “We have reduced the cost per acquisition of a new patient from thousands of dollars down to below $50 per patient,” says Cobb.

DBA encourages their clients to deploy enabling technologies such as online pharmacy, physician referral, and more that automate patient management. The agency launched a system, pharmacy advantage for Henry Ford Health System in Detroit that caters to needs previously outsourced to local retail, Walgreens drugstore, CVS or Rite Aid. The system offers a reminder app to help patients remember to take their medication, which reduces readmissions and patient cost, significantly.

Setting DBA apart from their compeers, are their customer data platforms whereby they track client data in terms of views on the advertising to the number of appointments and follow-ups. The agency continues to learn more about patient personas comprising firstly the younger audience interested in healthcare; secondly, those searching for a referral, position, or medication; and thirdly, the chronic patients. DBA also understands those patients who already have an ongoing relationship with the system to which they have been referred. The agency continues to strive with a belief in ‘better brands for a better human condition.’