Article Review: Review of Best practices for promoting healthcare

through Marketing

Cole, M. (2014). Best practices for promoting healthcare through

marketing. Modern Healthcare, 44(39), S010.

This article describes how an effective marketing campaign

called Get Covered Illinois allowed the Illinois Health Insurance
Marketplace, which is the official body in charge of promoting the
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in Illinois, to surpass federal
expectations in enrolling more than 622,000 residents for this act. This
act faced widespread political opposition due to skepticism that
residents would enroll in this act. However, this marketing campaign
was largely effective because it included an educational component
that broke down the new systems complexity (Cole 39).
This campaign is significant and largely influential because this
campaign and petition faced many number of challenges. One of the
main obstacles was that this campaign promoted a completely new
brand aimed at a broad audience (Cole 39). Furthermore, the article
explains how marketing was particularly difficult because the brand
didnt exist yet, there was a great deal of confusion surrounding the
brand and the target audience included the entire state (Cole 39). The
author also added that these struggles were on top of the already

existing struggles that exist for a marketing campaign in the

healthcare field.
The author outlines some key practices that allowed their
healthcare campaign to be successful. They are as follows:
1. Integrate healthcare specialists/experts into the healthcare
campaign and allow them to explain what they do more
thoroughly. This helps connect with individuals because it
adds a more personal touch.
2. Use language that is understandable to the target
audiences (Cole 39). The author added that in this
particular campaign, they used analogies and talked to
the audience like you would talk to your neighbor, rather
than focus on statistics and science (Cole 39).
3. Use positive language. This campaign focused on using the
positive impact of healthcare in respect to an illness rather
than focus on all of the negative aspects of having an
illness. This is an important because healthcare is in many
ways a very personal decision and a campaign needs to
move an individual on a personal level.
4. Use a variety of different mediums: digital media, TV, radio
this is also important since the target audience was the
entire state. This type of exposure was important since the
target audience for this campaign was the entire state
(Cole 39).

This article was a very important article because healthcare campaigns

are very difficult to execute properly and this particular campaign by
the Illinois Health Insurance Marketplace was vastly successful in
surpassing expectations for enrolling patients. One of the reasons why
this campaign was so successful was that this campaign made an
intentional effort to be connect with its target audience on an
emotional level and simplify and explain the complicated parts of its
plan in terms that any individual could understand. This article was
very useful to me because I will certainly use the key points
highlighted by the author about the successful/essential components
of a healthcare campaign when I am involved in marketing certain
healthcare services or trying to advertise a healthcare plan.