Elevating a Brand, Expanding Access
PRMC is a community-owned, nonprofit hospital in South Central Kansas that has served residents of Pratt County and surrounding areas since 1951. Its affiliated hospitals and clinics give patients beyond Pratt County access to quality health care. However, making patients outside Pratt aware of PRMC offerings is challenging for the organization. Rural residents are often unaware of the capabilities and quality of PRMC and, as a result, travel to bigger cities to seek care. The hospital came to Howerton+White for help elevating its brand, improving its website, and raising awareness so the organization could better meet its goal of improving the health and lives of all in the region.
Positioning a Non-Profit Healthcare Provider
The hospital was changing how it would go to market. Founded as Pratt Regional Medical Center, the hospital was transitioning to the acronym PRMC. An early step in building a solid brand foundation for PRMC was to equip the medical center with a positioning statement that would define and differentiate it from competitors. A keystone in this language is that PRMC is “professional and personal,” highlighting how local professionals are not strangers but community members who can provide closer attention than a faraway medical center. It aligns with a new brand promise for the hospital: “Excellent, Compassionate Care in Your Community,” featured on patient-facing materials and a new website. It communicates that PRMC is where patients can get high-quality care close to home.
Communicating Compassion With Brand Expression
Visual expression developed by Howerton+White helps tell the PRMC brand story at a glance. There was equity in the hospital’s logo, a golden torch. We refined the mark to make it more contemporary, befitting the evolution of the medical center and its digital channels and the digital needs of the medical center. Design elements created for the website and social assets communicate the brand’s essence of compassion and excellence. Images glow with warmth, and the soft backgrounds fall away, putting the focus on the patient. Graphics developed for the website help to communicate the myriad of capabilities, categories, and services the medical center offers. All work together to align the brand imagery across digital assets and social channels, telling a consistent story no matter where you see it.
Building a High-Performance Healthcare Website
One of the major goals for PRMC was to increase patient visits. To help achieve this, H+W designed and developed a website that offers an optimized user experience, allowing audiences to easily find the correct page to learn more and, importantly, make appointments. The website includes strong CTAs on pages, such as contact or click-to-call buttons, to encourage conversions.
To bring all of the different clinics under a single name, PRMC, the website now groups them under the category of “Locations.” This is a crucial step towards providing patients with unified and comprehensive services, as previously, the clinics were listed separately under clinic and specialty pages. This move supports the larger goal of establishing PRMC as a high-quality healthcare option and also helps to dispel any notions of it being too rural or small.
Creating content that would perform well in organic search as well as support digital marketing efforts was another primary focus. Keyword research, competitor reviews of top pages and searches, and enhancing the site’s architecture were significant parts of creating a high-performance product.
Strategic, Digital, Ethical Campaigns to Drive Traffic
Our competitor reviews and keyword research help PRMC increase visibility in Google search results, which leads to more visits to its website and more inquiries by phone. We applied that research to strategic copy and creative assets for a digital campaign that would deliver results because it was based on thorough audience research. Throughout the process, we applied our understanding and respect of health regulations and advertising policies to avoid breaking HIPAA regulations when targeting or retargeting the audience. It was critical to ensure the campaign was ethical and complied with all the required guidelines while still achieving our objectives.
