Healthcare marketing is a process of strategic outreach and communication, built in a way to make healthcare consumers aware of your services, guide them through their healthcare journey and keep them engaged with your particular system. In a highly saturated space, it is your attempt at standing out.
Find prospective patients with business objectives in mind, i.e. a healthy payer mix or high-value service line growth.
Increase strategic advantage to attract patients in a hypercompetitive landscape.
Keep patients engaged with relevant, personalized, and timely outreach throughout their journeys.
Retain patients long-term and improve loyalty in your healthcare community.
Drive more qualified leads, generate revenue with healthy margins.
Connect with patients across multiple channels.
Evaluate productivity and re-align strategy with comprehensive healthcare data analytics.
At UI Medical Marketing we believe teams need to keep up with the latest industry tips and trends to ensure they’re crafting an engaging and effective strategy that maximizes their impact on the health system’s bottom line.
Today’s consumers expect to engage on their own terms. A high-quality healthcare marketing strategy must pay close attention to the patient experience and allow them to enter your health system through their preferred channels. Start by identifying the many places the patients typically begin engaging with your health system. These introductory touch points, collectively referred to as the digital front door, could include channels like your health system’s website, third-party physician listings, or your engagement center—just to name a few.
Outline the path a patient is most likely to take after their first engagement with your health system, whether it results in a conversion or not. This practice, called patient journey mapping, will help you understand which actions lead to conversions, and which actions may cause a patient to exit the journey. Ideally, you will want to map multiple journeys across service lines, working with clinicians, revenue cycle specialists, and other patient-facing staff to capture entire care episodes and identify friction.
Consumers don’t buy products or services they don’t know or trust. Similarly, consumers won’t choose a hospital or care team that they’re unfamiliar with. Building a strong brand and promoting brand awareness helps reduce overall cost-per-acquisition, so make sure to allocate an appropriate budget to brand building.
Think about what makes your health system unique, and what draws customers in. Is it high-quality care? Caring staff? Cutting-edge technology? A high degree of trust? Find one crucial factor that attracts patients, and design marketing campaigns to spread awareness and activate your brand. Promoting your hard-won quality achievements is one of the most effective ways to build a trusting brand image.
Despite the personal nature of healthcare, many marketing strategies have not integrated personalization. Marketers should leverage the clinical data contained in their electronic health record (EHR) system and consumer and behavioral data in their healthcare customer relationship management (CRM) software to laser-target patients who need their services.
High-quality hospital websites help optimize the patient journey in a few key ways. They constantly collect important consumer data used for a variety of marketing purposes, like remarketing campaigns or fueling personalization in digital spaces. Modern websites are also great vehicles for delivering personalized experiences through dynamic copy and creativity. Finally, they provide a central location for your content, which makes it easy for patients to learn more about your health system and quickly find the right doctor and location for their needs. Additionally, the SEO value of a strong website should not be overlooked. A good website provider should tout benefits like optimized site speeds and responsive design to ensure search engines look favorably upon your health system. This is crucial to help patients find your health system’s official site with ease.
Healthcare marketers juggle a variety of channels for marketing purposes, including organic search, paid search, social media, display ads, and more—and a single marketing budget to distribute. Making the most out of countless marketing channels can be overwhelming. A business intelligence solution will help your teams use data to discover the most influential marketing channels for different geographic areas, personas, and service lines.
Research has uncovered that 59% of Americans find patient reviews to be very important or somewhat important when choosing a physician. It’s clear the majority of patients want to see others have had a good experience with you before they entrust you with their own health. For this reason, it is crucial that health systems solicit positive reviews from satisfied patients.
However, receiving a few negative reviews is inevitable. Health systems that wish to maintain a favorable reputation must respond to these reviews in a way that is HIPAA compliant and empathetic. Even if a patient assesses their experience in a way that is brutally honest, remember to thank them for their feedback, address their concern directly, and communicate how you plan to resolve their concern.