What’s In It For Health Professionals?
Pulse Health & Wellness has been helping healthy brands engage and build relationships with healthcare professionals and practitioners for more than 20 years, but we still often get the following question:
Why do healthcare professionals opt in to your PulseConnect network to receive information from brands? What’s in it for them?
It is a fair enough question for those unfamiliar with what we do at Pulse, and the answer goes back to the earliest days of our business when we made three key discoveries:
Healthcare professionals are in desperate need of high-quality educational materials to share with their patients and clients. You may be surprised to learn that healthcare professionals are often encouraged to pay for patient education materials. Most don’t have the resources or budget to do that, so instead they print off a few pages from a website on the office printer or continue to photocopy the worn handout they have been using for years. Receiving high-quality, colorful, easy-to-understand and credible educational materials from healthy brands is a boon to these professionals. They are eager to receive anything that can aid their counseling interactions with patients and clients about common nutrition topics. And the fact that they are free of charge, makes it the proverbial “no-brainer.”
Healthcare professionals are being asked for brand recommendations on a daily basis. Whether patients and clients have done their own research with “Dr. Google” before the office visit or simply ask for a recommendation during a counseling session, consumers want their health professional (their most trusted source of nutrition guidance) to recommend products they should buy. To meet this need, healthcare professionals feel a responsibility to be knowledgeable about products on the market and what their patients and clients face at the grocery shelf. Receiving information, resources, product samples, and coupons from healthy brands gives these professionals the information—and often, the personal experience—they need in order to recommend a brand to a patient or client. Brands that are adding value to counseling interactions with educational and brand materials are earning those recommendations.
Healthcare professionals want a voice with the food industry. Time and time again, healthcare professionals in our PulseConnect network tell us that they want two-way communication with food brands . They appreciate and value the materials and information they receive, but they want to be able to interact with the industry as well—informing food manufacturers about their needs and preferences when it comes to resources and product development. This collaborative, push-and-pull approach to health professional engagement and outreach is critical to success. Give healthcare professionals the voice they seek and you will benefit.
When you look at these three insights together, the idea of healthy brands engaging with healthcare professionals makes complete and obvious sense. These trusted sources of information and guidance don’t need financial incentives to engage with your brand—they simply need quality education, a deep understanding of your brand, and an opportunity to share their perspective with you. In our current trust economy, healthy brands that don’t engage with healthcare professionals in this way are leaving a dangerous gap in their marketing plan. That is why at Pulse we focus on helping healthy brands build trust and credibility with healthcare professionals. It is essential marketing.