Abra Marketing’s Focus on Healthcare Marketing

Representing Abra's healthcare marketing agency focus, an abstract painting background with blue-gray colors with the text "The Benefits of Focus."

Abra Marketing’s Focus on Healthcare Marketing

A Journey in Marketing Since 1989

While Abra has been 50-60% mostly healthcare marketing from the beginning, it was in September 2021 that we became solely focused on being a healthcare marketing agency.

Since our founding in November 1999, Abra has constantly grown and evolved. The initial plan actually was to start a record label, pivoting from my (Abra founder Kurt Hoffmann) year as Marketing Director of a Bay Area indie label. As my co-founder and I traveled to Europe to scout bands and get other business essentials in place, I leveraged my 10-years of marketing and graphic design experience to take on marketing projects to support our financing.

The marketing projects were quickly consistently coming in. I had also met my future wife around the same time. Realizing a small family including my then 5-year-old future stepson was on the horizon, and weighing this with the risky music industry that also required a lot of travel, I decided to drop the label and focus on starting an agency which I named Abra.

A History in Healthcare Marketing Since 1989

Photo of medical center where Abra founder Kurt Hoffmann worked for 5 years prior to founding healthcare marketing agency Abra Marketing.

Mercy Medical Center where Abra founder Kurt Hoffmann worked for 5 years (in addition to a graphic design job and as Marketing Director for a record label) prior to founding the healthcare marketing agency in 1999.

I was really fortunate to have a great start in the marketing industry with my first job out of college being in the Marketing Department of a major medical center, St. John’s Mercy in St. Louis Missouri (where I started as an intern in 1989). We had a healthy marketing budget serving more than 20 departments and worked with some of the great St. Louis agencies. The 5 years of healthcare marketing combined with also becoming a graphic designer and working at the record label helped Abra grow quickly, particularly with healthcare clients which would become 50-60% of our work in the years to come.

Abra grew quickly into a full service agency, completely some really amazing projects: many websites, tv commercials, videos, branding, endless design projects. Abra was integral in helping multiple startups with everything they needed from a marketing standpoint to get off the ground. We also worked with multiple billion-dollar companies to support very large projects.

However, I found when the company hit our 20-year anniversary in 2019, it was not the celebratory experience it should have been. I just was not happy with the company and where we were at. I start doing some deep soul searching about what I really wanted to do with the agency. I wanted to get back to those early years when everything was hard, but really exciting and rewarding.

Finding a New Focus

One of the things that helped Abra grow so much over the years was our ability to take on such a wide range of marketing projects. However, I realized this was also holding us back. Constantly taking on custom projects takes a lot of time and energy. Over the years, I realized the services that were bringing our clients the most value were our mix of digital marketing services: creating website that were great on all fronts, helping clients build their online presence in search engines, and executing communication programs through social media and online advertising. I also found the most rewarding work – and the work we were best at – was working with local healthcare practices. I loved working with great providers and seeing our work connect them to people who could truly benefit from their care, in many cases truly changing the quality of their lives.

In addition to our healthcare marketing focus, Abra has highly specialized digital marketing programs tailored to:

Officially a Healthcare Marketing Agency

We started moving in this direction and I was really happy to make this official pivot in September 2021 with the launch of our new healthcare-marketing-focused website. This new focus has already been one of the most rewarding moves of the company. Every day we find new efficiencies in our processes our expertise in healthcare marketing is growing faster than ever.

If you own, run or work at a healthcare marketing practice, I’d be happy to talk to about how a healthcare marketing agency like Abra might be able to help you grow and help more people.

 

About Abra

Founded in 1999, Abra Marketing is a digital healthcare marketing agency based in the Bay Area of California serving clients across the US. Abra is also a HIPAA compliant marketing agency, certified by Compliancy Group.