Every touchpoint, from emails to waiting room screens, either builds confidence or erodes it. And when the appointment ends, the story doesn’t. Patients keep remembering, comparing, and deciding whether they felt seen and supported. In this edition of Vital Signs, we’re sharing our playbook on how healthcare marketers can help their brand create meaningful patient touchpoints before, during, and after the visit.

Technologies often lack the human touch that comes with face-to-face interactions with a physician. This is where storytelling plays an important role in enhancing current trends and everyday marketing efforts. In this edition of Vital Signs, we will explore how organizations can humanize their brand and differentiate themselves through sharing stories.

In today’s digital age, bad news can go viral in minutes. A single misstep—a social post gone wrong, a supply chain hiccup, a partnership backfire—can quickly spiral into a crisis. Without preparation, these moments can be disasters. With the right strategy, they can instead showcase resilience, authenticity, and creativity. In this edition of Plain Talk, we explore how brands can move beyond crisis management to build trust and long-term loyalty.

Effective patient engagement means delivering clear, empathetic, and actionable communication that builds trust and drives patients to act. This edition of Vital Signs explores how to improve messaging with personalization, the right tools and timing, and trust-based strategies, and how to measure the real impact of your communication efforts.

In times of economic uncertainty, smart brands are shifting from broad awareness to focused, measurable tactics that influence buying decisions. In this edition of Plain Talk, we’ll give the humble trade show its due as B2B marketers flood back to this time-tested selling tool.

Long gone are the days when people whispered about a healthcare provider’s reputation while sitting in their waiting room. Now, all you need is Google and a computer or cell phone. In this digital age, trust in healthcare is shaped by online reviews, social media, and a provider’s ability to communicate with empathy and transparency. In this edition of Vital Signs, we’ll explore how reputation shapes patient confidence and trust, why digital perception matters more than ever, and what healthcare providers and systems can do to earn (and keep) that trust in a review-driven world.

Customer retention is more critical than ever for banks and credit unions, especially as acquiring new clients can cost significantly more than keeping existing ones. With 13% of retail banking customers likely to switch within two years and ongoing marketing challenges, financial institutions must take a strategic approach. This playbook outlines five proven customer retention strategies for banks to boost engagement, reduce churn, and increase customer lifetime value.

Most organizations don’t write marketing requests for proposals (RFPs) very often, and that’s understandable. When you do, it usually means your business is facing a moment of change. Whatever the reason, the goal is the same: to find the partner that can help you move your brand forward. However, sometimes that’s where the trouble starts.

Because most teams are unfamiliar with the RFP process, they often write documents that are too vague, too rigid, or too focused on the wrong things. In this edition of Plain Talk, we’ll share some practical steps to help you write better marketing RFPs—the kind that lead you to the right agency partner.

There was a time, not so long ago, when healthcare marketing meant making sure your hospital had a good billboard and your practice showed up on Google Maps. But those days are over. Today, healthcare decisions are shaped less by proximity and more by trust, experience, and emotional connection. Today’s patients aren’t just looking for care, they’re looking for care they can believe in. And that has changed everything. In this edition of Vital Signs, we’ll explore how the rules of modern patient engagement have changed, what healthcare marketers need to do differently, and why empathy, authenticity, and personalization aren’t just nice-to-haves anymore-they’re the price of entry

In this edition of Plain Talk, you’ll learn how to work more effectively with your marketing agency. We’ll go over how to kick things off with clarity, communicate without confusion, and build a partnership that gets better over time. On your mark, get set, let’s go!