How to thrive in 2025: focus on creating ‘distinctive value’
It was recently reported that, in the run-up to the Autumn Budget, many organisations were taking a ‘wait and see’ approach to confirming their own 2025 marketing budget.
Now it has landed, we know that the Chancellor’s Budget will increase the cost of doing business for many private healthcare businesses, although that will be offset for others by the increased investment in the NHS and support for life sciences and innovation. Wherever your organisation sits on this, one thing is certain, you will have the best chance of being successful if you can ensure that your marketing efforts are focused on increasing effectiveness.
So how can you ensure that your marketing budget is spent in the right way?
Brand reputation
Effectiveness expert, Les Binet, suggests you should spend 60% of your budget on brand building and 40% on activation or performance marketing.
With a recent report finding that 40% of the market valuation of healthcare businesses is driven by their corporate reputation - more than any other sector - it’s clear that, in the health industry in particular, being known and credible is vital.
As the graph below shows, the financial value of investing in your brand delivers greater returns and increases further over time. Binet says that it also makes your performance marketing more effective, since the audience is already ‘warmed up’.
The term ‘brand’ is defined by the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) as “a set of characteristics that [a product or service] will use to differentiate itself from its competitors and ensure it remains relevant to its customers.” The key terms here are differentiation and relevance as brand building activity needs to offer value and be distinctive. But who to?
Think audience-first, not channel
If you have worked with Evergreen PR, you will know that we are the healthcare PR agency that’s focused on achieving measurable outcomes - we use our proprietary MERTO Framework to identify the “most effective route.”
Our years of experience have shown us that outcomes are only achieved when specific people or audiences take specific actions. Therefore, any healthcare PR or marketing campaign should start by identifying all of the audiences who are involved in driving the behaviour/s you want to see.
Once you know who they are, you can prioritise them - based on their Power to influence your goal and (likely) Interest in supporting you. This distils your focus and you can deep dive into your priority audiences to really understand them - thinking about their barriers, drivers and the external context within which they operate. Structured research tools like PESTLE (political, economic, social, technological, legal, environmental) and behaviour science frameworks like COM-B (capability, opportunity, motivation - behaviour) can be a great way to organise your insights.
All of this up-front research will give you a solid foundation for what comes next.
Focus on creating ‘Distinctive Value’
We have often been asked how we have been so successful in driving audience behaviours such as:
140,000 people signing a petition for more tinnitus research funding (case study)
800% more GP practices signing up to get ‘veteran friendly’ accredited (case study)
100+ NHS Integrated Care Board decision-makers signing up for commercial webinar (case study)
The Department of Health and Social Care setting up a working group to discuss funding for a charity cause (case study)
10 Private Medical Insurance and Occupational Health businesses signing large virtual physiotherapy contracts (case study)
Multiple Ministers to support our charity’s call for a National Sleep Strategy (case study)
3,500 people signing up to share their personal and health data for a proposed biobank (case study)
The answer is our concept of ‘distinctive value’, which sits at the centre of our MERTO Framework.
Once we have used MERTO to identify the priority stakeholders and build an understanding of their barriers, drivers and external context, we start thinking about how our client can use its expertise to offer value in a (distinctive) way that other organisations in the field would not be able to.
The selected area of value should tie directly into the organisation’s purpose, including the community it supports, the value it creates and its areas of advancement. The key question is ‘what subjects does this organisation have a right to discuss that would offer value and that few others could compete with?’ The work we do with MERTO makes this decision very straightforward.
Executed through breakthrough health campaigns
A breakthrough is defined as “an important discovery that helps to improve a situation or provide an answer to a problem”. We create breakthrough health campaigns that feel exactly like that to the people they are targeted at.
Our campaigns can bring a health organisation’s purpose to life, igniting momentum, building recognition of their authority and driving priority audiences - whether that’s the public, healthcare professionals, politicians or NHS decision-makers - to take decisive action.
The stories we create are like the front-end of a campaign, bringing to life a problem in a way that speaks to the emotional and rational sides of the brain. They are the distinctive postcard that wins attention and demonstrates expertise, creating enthusiasm for the prospect of solving the challenge.
At the back end, are the opportunities we create for interested audiences to engage more deeply. They have seen the story and, if the opportunity for deeper engagement is distinctive enough and valuable enough, then they will be compelled to dive in.
In between the two are user journeys, funnelling interested people who consume the story to engage more deeply with the distinctively valuable resources we have created. There are usually enabler audiences - journalists, community managers, website editors - who sit in between and who, therefore, must also see the value you are offering, in order to support the user journey you have designed.
If the work you create is distinctive enough and valuable enough, then those stories will land, those user journeys will be supported and those audiences will engage. Once they have done so, they will remember your organisation. They will feel connected. They will come back. That’s what distinctive value delivers.
Case study
Meddbase: Diabetes referrals at-scale
Meddbase is a healthcare management software solution that had ambitions to expand its customer base from GP practices, occupational health and private healthcare to include NHS Integrated Care Boards.
The company had no customers in the space at the time and wished to use a pilot project it was conducting with an NHS Integrated Care Board to build its brand in the space. That pilot was testing how its clinical software could be used to increase sign-ups to the NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme (NDPP).
Using our MERTO methodology to inform our approach, we developed a narrative around how, while the NDPP is proven to be clinically effective, its impact relies on patients activating their referrals. We worked with the ICB to uncover data showing that Meddbase supported this, and developed impactful media and stakeholder materials to capture attention.
This is where most PR agencies stop, giving themselves a pat on the back for generating 16 media articles, including in the likes of Digital Health, National Health Executive and GP Online. However, media articles alone will rarely generate the kind of action needed for large enterprise sales.
We needed to help Meddbase to create ‘distinctive value’.
As well as a media and stakeholder campaign, we also developed a series of valuable education materials - including a free-to-access report and, in partnership with the client, a bespoke webinar, featuring key staff from the NHS Integrated Care Board, who discussed the practicalities of the project and what they learned. This was high value, since it would allow ICBs to learn how they could implement a similar programme and it was distinctive because it was facilitating a look behind the curtain of this individual programme.
The impact was tremendous. More than 100 NHS decision-makers attended the webinar - with no paid activity behind it at all - and Meddbase received five enquiries from ICBs, including one during the webinar Q&A itself. Tangible revenue was generated within 3 months from a standing start - meaning an excellent ROI for the client and more people now likely to access the NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme.
About the author:
Leigh Greenwood is the founder and managing director of Evergreen PR, the healthcare PR agency that makes health happen. He is a chartered PR professional who has been working in healthcare PR, public affairs and communications for the last 20 years. He has worked across the whole spectrum of healthcare and has won more than 40 industry awards for effective health campaigns that generated measurable outcomes.
Find out more about Evergreen PR: about us, our services, our work.