Healthcare Marketing Strategies

Healthcare Marketing Strategies to Grow & Retain Your Patients

Patients’ expectations are changing with time. Physicians that offer an individualized medical marketing experience have a greater potential to improve customer’s satisfaction. Pandemic has transformed healthcare marketing for clinics, hospitals and organizations. Traditional ways of healthcare advertising are being replaced with new digital-based technologies.

The pandemic accelerated this shift. As a result, the traditional ways of healthcare marketing
are starting to fall short. For example:

  • A healthcare marketing strategy that’s designed for an “average consumer” results in a one-size-fits-all model that doesn’t always meet a patient’s individual needs.
  • Communication options with fixed hours and channels don’t reflect “patient first.”
  • Outreach messages blasted to an entire patient email list miss the mark for individuals who don’t speak the language or might prefer a quick text message instead.

83% of patients expect healthcare services and engagement to be patient-centric with a personalized experience.

Having a healthcare marketing strategy in place helps to build a 360 degree patient centric engagement approach to educate, communicate and enhance the patient experience across the care continuum.

What is Healthcare Marketing?

Healthcare marketing represents the communication and outreach strategies and ideas that aim to attract healthcare consumers, and make it simple for them to navigate across healthcare channels.
A personalized approach helps to improve consumer engagement within the medical system.Successful hospital advertising, and clinical marketing integrates fragmented systems into a highly systematic, omnichannel pathway. A targeted offline and online plan improves not only patient’s satisfaction but also enhances the organization’s growth.
Healthcare organizations evaluate the performance of the marketing efforts through some specified criteria that are in accordance with the key performance indicators (KPIs).
  • A more targeted personalized approach instead of a mass marketing strategy
  • A service marketing instead of conventional image marketing
  • Focus on building a long-lasting relationship instead of only providing care during a health episode
  • Adoption of digital technologies (market intelligence)

Why Healthcare Marketing is Important?

Healthcare engagement has become an integral part of any health system. The key advantages of healthcare marketing include:
Brand awareness: A website that has all the information regarding signs, symptoms and problems faced by the patient makes it easier for the patient to track the hospital or clinic.
Engaging communication: Personalization emails and messages provide relevant information to patients that enable better management of their medical condition.
Omnichannel presence: It helps to connect the consumers across different channels.
Patient retention: Hospital branding builds a sense of authority where patients regularly keep booking against the other available options for healthcare services. It develops loyalty, and long-term relationships with the patient.

Devise an omnichannel marketing approach

Medical marketing should create an omnichannel digital strategy. In order to accomplish this goal few strategies should be incorporated into the marketing campaign.

  • Understand the factors contributing to success of the brand
    An omnichannel marketing service helps to connect the clinic or hospital with the patients through different channels. Avoid using all the medium at the same time. Ensure to share relevant content across social media, apps, or websites to reach the customers.
  • Maintain uniformity in the messages
    An effective marketing strategy should deliver consistent information across all the channels so that patients find it easy to navigate through various platforms.
  • Track the target audience
    Healthcare professionals should interact with patients through the media that they find comfortable. Marketing techniques such as collaboration with local health-related functions, using healthcare apps, or getting published in popular medical magazines will prove helpful in medical practice marketing.

Create a personalized digital patient experience

Next, providers can enrich patient identities with originally sourced consumer data for a comprehensive picture of who their patients are. When providers can confirm who their patients are, what they need, how they spend their time and money, and how they like to communicate, they can build personalized outreach strategies to improve patient acquisition and retention.
A patient-centric experience can be created if outreach strategies understand the personality of their patients, their interests and communication preferences. It is a significant step in enhancing patient acquisition and retention.
Hospitals may provide telehealth services to the patient in preferred language. This will help to connect the patient to the right doctor. Creating a personalized experience restores their loyalty towards the healthcare system.

Automate recurring-events such as reminders or notifications

Healthcare providers can automate workflows so that patients can engage in recurring events. For example, marketing strategy can focus on reminding patients of their yearly health check-up. Health systems can be equipped with such date-based information to make it easier for the patients to follow their appointments.

Optimize execution with Digital patient engagement tools

Marketing channels can be used to educate, inform, and engage patients. Digital patient engagement tools provide various options to communicate with patients, family members and providers such as texts, email, and smart wearable devices. Patients can be informed about their disease condition much earlier with such technologies.
For example, artificial intelligence and chatbots can collect patient’s data to provide useful information regarding relevant communication to provide better care services, and superior management approaches during times of high patient volumes.
41% of healthcare marketing reports improved patient retention, and conversion after adopting artificial intelligence within the system.

Automate patient outreach

Automation improves patient engagement. It allows to retain patients, increase conversion rate, and minimizes drop-offs.

Drive a healthcare survey and campaign

To generate new leads, marketing teams can automate quizzes, campaigns and health surveys for their new and existing patients.
Share tips on a healthy lifestyle. Score the patients based on their health and dietary habits. Patients who appear to have a medical condition can be given a first free consultation. Once a patient trusts the hospital and the physician, they will be more willing to engage for further treatments.

Follow up with patient feedback in your marketing efforts

Valuing your patient’s feedback about the healthcare experience is critical to develop the brand. Patients who have a bad experience can leave poor reviews on digital platforms. In order to improve the clinical outcome in the future, providers and other staff members can follow up with the patient to show that their concerns are taken seriously.
Take immediate actions to resolve the issue. Patients will acknowledge the help and will be more likely to tell other consumers that the problem was solved efficiently.
Medical practice marketing should focus on services and plans that build their reputation. Negative feedback just shows that you need to improve the patient experience. It can be either upgrading the medical devices, or teaching effective communication skills to the staff.