Elizabeth B. Pellegrin – Chief Marketing Officer at Charleston Area Medical Center
Elizabeth serves as the chief marketing officer at Charleston Area Medical Center, the largest tertiary hospital system in West Virginia and is one of our guest speakers this coming Wednesday at the Charleston event. She supervises the marketing and public affairs team. View Elizabeth’s full speaker bio here.
1. What has been the biggest change you’ve seen in marketing ____ [e.g. since you joined CAMC, over the last 5 or 10 years]?
In 20 years, without question, the biggest change has been technology. The pace of the creative process has quickened, the pace of communication is at light speed, and there are new mediums to communicate over everyday.
2. How are you moving CAMC forward in terms of new methods of advertising, marketing, public relations, and measuring their effectiveness?
We have a goal every year at CAMC to create or utilize at least one new space/medium for our advertising messages every year. For instance, one year it was the banners on our campuses, one year it was wrapping our delivery trucks that go hospital to hospital, etc. This year we are exploring web driven advertising more than ever before. We continue to drive for more targeting marketing using direct mail, e-mail and other sources. As for ROI, we are always looking for ways to align our market research and our ability to put campaign effectiveness with patient revenue.
3. Do you see these new methods enhancing or replacing the more traditional means?
Enhancing. To abandon traditonal media completely is to abandon a huge part of our audience. New and old must work in tandem.
4. Which Web 2.0 / social media / new marketing applications are most exciting to you?
Probably Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and the likes because they often disguise marketing as “discussion, gossip, or cool video”. Brilliant. Marketing always works best when the audience does not realize it is being marketing to.
5. What do you think are the benefits of holding conferences such as Next Generation Marketing in West Virginia in cities like Charleston?
These conferences are a great and affordable way for people with expertise to come togther and share their knowledge. Also a wonderful way to network with other people in the business (and we are fun group overall!).
If you’d like to hear more from Elizabeth on these and similar topics, you can catch her at the Charleston leg of the Next Generation Marketing tour this coming Wednesday, May 14th.
Sign up now if you haven’t already.
I do not necessarily agree with the statement “Marketing always works best when the audience does not realize it is being marketing to.” I do believe that users of social media sites know when they are being marketed to and judge accordingly. I don’t believe you are giving enough credit to people’s intelligence who use these sites and gain value from them. Sure they know they can track back to your web site and find the sponsor in this case the hospital and learn more. But they know that. There is a fine line between using these sites as intended and going in with a mindset of they don’t know any better. Thanks for letting me comment. I do agree with the rest of your approach.
Anthony makes a great point… certainly we cannot ever devalue the intelligence of our audiences. Let me clarify – I think marketing works best when it is so fun, interesting and individual to the audience that the receiver willingly “enjoys the mystery”.
Clearly, they know the overall wizardry behind the curtain – but if it is good enough… they may not care!