Looking for tips on healthcare marketing?
Curious about the latest trends in the industry?
Or are you just plain clueless and looking for an introduction to marketing in healthcare?
If you’re looking for the answer to any of these questions, you’re in the right place! This article will give you a rundown on healthcare marketing, including a list of strategies you can employ, common industry trends, and more.
What is healthcare marketing anyway?
Healthcare marketing is the process of reaching out to potential clients through strategic communication and outreach programs to promote your services and keep patients engaged throughout their journey.
Here are a few ways healthcare marketing is commonly done:
- Engaging potential clients through a social media page with relevant stories and news updates.
- Offering free health check-up’s.
- Providing information for a niche market through a healthcare blog.
Marketing for healthcare is typically done by PR specialists, healthcare marketing agencies, or healthcare consultants, depending on the type of setup the healthcare provider has.
Why do you need marketing in healthcare?
In today’s market, consumers have an endless number of choices. They’re flooded with information on through various channels every day, like social media apps or billboard ads.
For any business to survive in such a competitive environment, it has to be strategic about attracting and retaining a customer base.
This is where marketing comes in.
Here’s how healthcare marketing can help your business:
- Attract new patients through outreach programs.
- Educate the public through informative articles.
- Improve the patient experience with personalized communication.
- Establish credibility by actively building and monitoring your online presence.
- promote your healthcare business through link building process
Did that get your attention?
If you think those ideas are a good fit for your business, you should consider a healthcare marketing strategy. A marketing strategy is a long-term plan to achieve a company’s goals by understanding its customer base and their needs and devising a strategy to meet those needs and goals.
In this case, a healthcare marketing strategy would typically involve the following steps:
Identify goals
To come up with the right healthcare marketing strategy for your business, it’s essential to identify your goals. Are you looking to expand your business or retain an existing customer base? What does your business focus on? Depending on factors like these, you can draft a marketing strategy tailored to your needs.
If you’re looking to expand your business in a specific area, like asthma, your strategies will focus more on expansion – by creating more targeted ads for asthma, for example.
Decide on a target market
Every business has something they’re really good at. Identifying this and targeting customers in this area can help your business flourish. Do you offer a service that no one else does? Are you the best in the area? You should focus on the customers who would benefit the most from such services.
For example, if you provide the best solutions for diabetes patients in the area, you should highlight your diabetes care services.
Draft a Message
Once you’ve defined your goals and decided on your target audience, the next step in a healthcare marketing strategy is coming up with a message. This message will talk about the services you offer, target your specific client base, and how you’re different from the competition. You should make sure this message is unique and captures the essence of your business.
Define your budget
The next step is defining a budget. Every business has a unique set of needs, and not everyone can spend a million dollars on an ad campaign to promote their business. To make sure you don’t burn your money on a healthcare campaign, it’s necessary to define a budget.
You should choose a budget that is within your reach, at the same time, gives you enough finances to build a proper healthcare marketing campaign.
Choose your marketing channels
With a proper budget in place, you can go about deciding how you will reach your customers. There are several options available to businesses today, including:
- Email marketing
- Ads
- Social media marketing
- Blogs
- managed campaigns
For example, if your business caters to a younger audience, such as teenagers with ADHD, you could focus on a social media app like Instagram. Your marketing team could employ the following strategies:
- Post content regularly
- using the blogger outreach service to improve domain rating
- Promote events
- Encourage customers to post reviews
- Interact with followers by sending healthcare information
- Provide discounts for first-time or special occasions.
Track goals
The final step in your healthcare marketing plan is tracking it. Once the plan is in place, you have to make sure it’s actually working. Here are a few ways this can be tracked:
- How many people have signed up for your services after the launch of a campaign?
- How much have your sales increased?
- How many patients have you retained?
- How popular is a particular service?
And much more.
Don’t try to pull something shady, though!
Healthcare occupies a unique position amongst the services offered in the world, in that people rely on you in their most vulnerable moments. It is important to preserve the trust people place in your business by following ethical healthcare marketing practices.
Following shady marketing practices can have a negative impact on your image, which will result in lost customers and revenue. You could also end up being sued for it!
Here are a few dos and don’ts for healthcare marketing:
Be honest about what you offer
Ensure that all marketing materials, from billboards to brochures and social media content, are factually accurate and consistent. Don’t mislead customers with false advertising or by omitting information.
For example, claiming a skin treatment can reverse aging when it really doesn’t, is false advertising. Following such practices can result in your being sued for misrepresentation.
Empower patients with information
It is important to give patients the right to decide how they wish to be treated for an ailment. In order for them to make that decision, they must have all the information related to the treatment they’re considering.
Make sure you keep patients informed of the side effects of medication, for example, before they purchase it. Ensure patients understand the steps involved in a treatment plan. For instance, with a major surgery, make sure patients know what costs are involved, how long the surgery will take, complications that can arise during the course of surgery, etc.
Collaborate with healthcare professionals in the industry
In order to establish credibility and build a strong reputation, you could consider collaborating with healthcare professionals who work in the same field as your business.
For example, if you provide therapy services for teenagers with ADHD, you could talk to experts in the industry on guidelines to follow, have them speak at an event for your clients, etc. This shows that you care about your customer base and are making efforts to give them access to the best treatment in the industry.
Examples of marketing in healthcare
You may be tempted to say, “All this sounds great, but has this actually worked before?” That’s a fair question, so this section will give you a couple of examples to show you just how effective healthcare marketing strategies can be.
CDC
The Center for Disease Control (or CDC) is a government organization under the Department of Health that is responsible for preventing the spread of disease and ensuring the overall health of the American public.
It has been around since 1946 and regularly publishes guidelines to prevent the spread of dangerous diseases. This is done through various channels, like social media posts, awareness campaigns, posters, etc.
Most Americans recognize the CDC due to its extensive healthcare campaigns. The reason their marketing worked is because:
- They use catchy, easy-to-follow instructions while issuing directives to the public.
- They employ channels that are frequently used by the public, like subway advertising spaces.
- They employ multiple channels for advertising, like TV infomercials, social media reels or ad campaigns, physical advertisement like posters in public places, etc.
The “Know Your Lemons” campaign was designed by the CDC to promote awareness of breast cancer. This campaign works because it uses a simple infographic to educate people on the symptoms of breast cancer. A visual aid makes it easy for people to understand, and something colorful like lemons are easy to remember.
It is well known that detecting breast cancer early is key to treating it, as later stages of breast cancer are difficult to cure and have a higher mortality rate. So this campaign addresses this key statistic and helped increase awareness.
The Mayo Clinic is the largest non-profit organization in the world. It provides treatment for several diseases including cancer, heart disease, and digestive disorders, among others. The Mayo Clinic’s healthcare campaign is comprehensive and employs multiple strategies, including:
- Regular posts on Instagram.
- A full-fledged website with the latest information.
- Patient communities to provide support.
- Videos of surgeries on YouTube.
The Mayo Clinic has used every possible marketing channel to spread awareness on their work. They also stay up to date by adopting new marketing channels like Instagram. Their marketing strategy has clearly worked, because they are so well-known worldwide.
Too much to handle on your own?
If you find all this overwhelming and have a lot on your plate as is, you could benefit from hiring a marketing agency. A marketing agency typically handles the complete healthcare marketing process, from defining the company’s goals to marketing on various channels and tracking the performance of these tactics through various metrics.
Depending on the specific needs of your company, you could hire a healthcare marketing agency to represent your company on all future projects, or hire an agency for a single project. Depending on how your experience with the marketing agency goes, you can decide if you want to employ them on a more permanent basis or not. Healthcare marketing agencies offer a range of services and each agency could focus on a specific area. You should hire an agency based on how well their offerings match with your needs. An agency could offer services based on different marketing channels like Instagram and YouTube or based on marketing tactics like email marketing or SEO.
The goals you defined for your marketing campaign can help you understand what kind of marketing you should focus on. For example, if your target audience is younger, you could benefit from social media marketing, as the likelihood of it reaching a younger audience is higher.
Hiring the right marketing agency for your needs can get quite tricky. So, here’s a list of factors that can help you decide on the right match for your business:
Experience with healthcare marketing
As marketing agencies can work with a wide variety of clients, you should ensure that the agency you’re considering has experience with healthcare marketing. This could include SEO for a small clinic, coming up with an ad campaign for a hospital or social media marketing for a pharmacy chain.
Marketing for healthcare requires a specific tone and sensitivity to the patient’s health problems, so an agency that’s worked with healthcare providers should be good at it.
Credibility
Before you hire an agency, you should check that they’re legit. There are several ways you can do this. Most marketing agencies have a heavy online presence as this is their portal to new clients. You can have a look at their online social media profiles, their portfolio of work to see if it seems up to snuff. You can also google the agency to see if there’s any bad news circulating about them and what kind of reviews people have posted. This will give you a very good picture of the state of their business and whether they can be trusted.
ROI
Any proper marketing agency will be serious about ROI. No amount of fancy marketing can make up for good ROI. After all, how is a company to run without revenue?! Usually, marketing agencies will give you a plan detailing how they intend to carry out your marketing campaign and their how they measure results. For example, there should be optimal balance between the cost of acquiring new patients and the revenue the patients bring.
Make sure you don’t make these mistakes:
- Don’t be ambiguous about your requirements.
- Don’t hire an agency that doesn’t have the expertise you’re looking for.
To conclude, here are the latest trends in healthcare marketing
Artificial Intelligence
AI has taken the world by storm, impacting everything from farming to computing. Marketing for healthcare is no exception. Content creators use AI throughout the content creation process, and it has significantly reduced time and costs.
AI is also used for marketing analysis, where you can identify trends, predict patterns, and optimize your campaigns faster using the right tools.
Short-form video content
Marketing professionals are increasingly focused on a digital-first approach, specifically short-form content to cater to a younger cohort. Videos on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok generate the highest ROI.
Community building
Consumers value the authenticity of a brand. So, building an authentic brand voice is more important than ever. Using brand identity to create an connection with the customer base and build communities around the brand is a trending strategy. This helps create a loyal customer base.
Personalization
Personalized marketing leads to a huge increase in the volume of sales and helps build customer loyalty. AI can be used to generate highly personalized marketing content by using augmented reality or personalized recommendations.
Take away
While this guide is far from comprehensive on marketing in healthcare, we hope it gives you enough information to start a healthcare marketing strategy for your business.
Marketing undoubtedly plays a vital role in the success of businesses today, as:
- It establishes credibility.
- It keeps customers engaged.
- It drives sales.
So, be sure to follow the best tactics in healthcare marketing to reach your client base. Good luck on your marketing journey!