Marketing in healthcare: Improving the consumer experience

Healthcare providers want to modernize their advertising and marketing strategies to fulfil the evolving needs of brand-new clients.

The COVID-19 pandemic has empowered healthcare customers, dropping mild on the significance of digital healthcare. In reaction, clients now assume transparent, predictable, and cellular-pleasant reports. However, many healthcare companies in Dubai need to be faster to conform to those expectations.

To foster, boom, and maintain constant care, healthcare providers need to take the following steps:

• Unify Leadership: The company should be devoted to improving what the patron revels in.
• Gradual Skill Enhancement: Build skills step by step by selecting well-thought-out instances and brief victories. Commence with small, viable projects that would substantially beautify the patronage.
• Track Progress: Continuously show your improvement and make critical modifications.

Healthcare companies that specialize in enhancing the customer experience via marketing and advertising can expect improved income, reduced expenses and better customer service.

What is hospital marketing?

Hospital marketing is about raising brand awareness and promoting services to target audiences through outreach, usually to the local community. Hospitals are only one part of the patient-facing facilities of a healthcare system. However, they require a specific marketing strategy due to the unique nature of their patient base and services.

Hospital marketing refers to the use of marketing strategies such as advertising, branding, and promotional tactics to improve population health by interacting with the community, building trust, and demonstrating expertise in care to attract new patients and build long-term relationships. Advertising in healthcare must be genuine. At the same time, it must demonstrate the clinic’s or doctor’s skills so well that patients come in large numbers.

According to the CDC, it is a multidisciplinary field of public health practice that creates, communicates, and delivers health information and interventions using client-centred and science-based strategies to protect and promote the health of diverse populations.

What is healthcare marketing?

People’s needs for healthcare services have changed over time. Customers want better services. This change means that people providing healthcare need new ideas and new ways of doing things.

As a result, healthcare professionals are using online services to communicate with patients more easily. They’re also using different healthcare marketing strategies to attract and keep customers.

So, what exactly is healthcare marketing? Healthcare marketing is the way healthcare professionals use communication strategies to attract patients, help them recover, and stay in touch with them. Here are some important things about healthcare marketing:

• Focus on getting referrals. The best way healthcare professionals find new customers is by getting referrals from other people. Referrals are hard to get, but they’re important because people tend to trust the advice of those who have overcome a similar challenge. You can get them from places like pamphlet stands, stores, or even from discounts or free samples.
• Building and keeping a good reputation. A medical brand’s reputation is very important. You can build and maintain a positive reputation by using advanced technology, providing quality care, and ensuring positive patient outcomes.
• Gain people’s trust: Patients usually trust services that they know. Customers trust a service when they see that other patients have reviewed it online. They might also have gotten the information from well-respected healthcare professionals. During marketing campaigns, healthcare professionals should use promotional strategies such as photographs. These photographs can make them look trustworthy.
• Be someone people listen to. Healthcare professionals need to show that they are experts in their field. This can be done by becoming an expert in your area of interest and sharing helpful content on reliable websites and publications.

Healthcare marketing isn’t intended to increase profits. Instead, it aims to promote health by sharing relevant information and teaching the public about healthcare services that can help. To meet these unique goals, a healthcare marketing strategy needs to stand out.

Evolution of hospital marketing

Hospital marketing has been in a state of evolution for years, and this evolution has accelerated recently. Fifty years ago, the US had more than 7,100 hospitals. Outpatient facilities were far fewer. Marketing wasn’t a high priority for most health systems. The channels used were typically print, TV, and radio.

Today, there are fewer than 6,200 hospitals in the country. There are many more ancillary healthcare facilities, such as outpatient and short-term care facilities. This means increasing competition for traditional healthcare systems and hospital operators.

Meanwhile, more marketing channels that any brand can easily use in a campaign have been created by digital technology. Digital marketing for hospitals is definitely on the rise, although channels such as TV and radio are still effective.

Healthcare Marketing History: Ways to Get New Patients

The history of healthcare marketing goes back a long time. Some of today’s modern marketing strategies started in the 1970s, when businesses and organizations in the healthcare industry started to compete for a larger share of the market. This is because the healthcare sector is becoming more competitive.

Today, effective healthcare marketing is an important part of growing, sustainable, and supportive healthcare organizations. In 2022, companies spent 15% more on healthcare marketing. They spent billions of dollars on these campaigns to reach new patients and customers.

But now, the way patients are treated and what they expect is changing, so doctors’ offices are changing how they market themselves to better serve their patients. These efforts are often digital, and they meet patients where they are by providing interesting content and information that helps patients grow and take an active role in their care.

When it comes to selling and marketing healthcare products, there are no easy strategies to guarantee long-term business success. Instead, providers must stay flexible and build awareness to ensure growth and generate revenue.

Read on to learn about the history of healthcare marketing and how it affects healthcare providers who want to make the biggest impact in the future.

Healthcare Marketing: Lessons from the Past

We looked at the past 50 years of medical marketing to find good ideas and methods that you can use to make your marketing as successful as possible.

Here is a summary of the highlights from our study.

Marketing strategies for the healthcare industry during the 1970s and 1980s.

In 1965, President Johnson created Medicare and Medicaid. These programs now cover millions of people who did not have health insurance before. These changes greatly impacted the healthcare industry, leading to new ways of doing business and an increase in the importance of effective marketing to attract doctors and patients.

Medicare and Medicaid set a standard for reimbursement, which is how much hospitals and healthcare providers are paid. So, they used marketing to target doctors. They created strong relationships with doctors to get them to admit their patients to their hospitals.

However the way people market healthcare services has changed. Patient choice and autonomy became more popular. This led many hospitals to start marketing using popular media, like billboards, TV, and radio. The goal was to get patients to choose their facility.

In the 1980s, doctors had less influence. Because of this, hospitals started to sell things to people directly. They did this to improve patient care, make more money, and sell more.

Doctors, practices, and providers also found themselves competing for patients. This led them to invest in marketing like never before. According to one analysis, the 1980s marked a definitive shift in the history of healthcare marketing, as spending on healthcare marketing grew from $50 million to $500 million.

In an important development for marketing in general and medical marketing in particular, companies have begun to conduct consumer research to better understand patient satisfaction and engagement trends to refine their messaging when marketing healthcare services.

Healthcare Marketing in the ’90s & 2000s

Hospital mergers and acquisitions skyrocketed in the 1990s, doubling the number of annual hospital mergers from the previous decade and forever changing the history of healthcare marketing due to a confluence of factors, including the introduction of the Prospective Payment System, the expansion of managed care, and a decline in demand for hospital beds.

These M&As create much larger health systems with larger marketing budgets and more entrepreneurial leadership.

Meanwhile, consumers were more empowered than ever before, and the marketing of healthcare services was in flux. New campaigns that prioritize consumer needs while promoting specific products and treatments were informed by patient and consumer research.

Healthy people and the products and services that support their lifestyles were the focus of many healthcare marketing solutions during this period.

Overall, the 1990s and 2000s reflect a significant maturation in the history of healthcare marketing, the professionalization of efforts, and the rationalization of results in support of a more robust healthcare industry.

2010s Healthcare Marketing

As the networks of hospitals grew larger and more comfortable with and dependent on the marketing of health care services, so did the expenditures. Medical marketing spending increased from $17.7 billion to $29.9 billion between 1997 and 2016, according to an analysis by the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Part of the reason for this increase in spending was the rise of the pharmaceutical industry and the greater emphasis on direct-to-consumer marketing initiatives.

The 2010s also saw the introduction of social media marketing as platforms such as Facebook attracted large audiences, and the ability to target advertising allowed healthcare marketing to be more precise, more impactful and more digital.

The digitization of healthcare has created new opportunities for patient engagement and expanded the scope of healthcare marketing. As a result, online presence has become a critical component of healthcare organizations’ customer engagement efforts.

COVID-19 Healthcare Marketing

The pandemic ushered in a new era in the history of healthcare marketing, disrupting the daily lives of many healthcare marketers as the need to continue to digitize and provide more robust online patient communications went from being a nice-to-have to a must-have for most hospitals and other medical providers.

Additionally, healthcare providers and their marketing partners needed to evaluate their messaging to ensure tone and content were appropriate for the unprecedented and disruptive pandemic environment.

For example, ads for elective surgeries or on-site procedures needed to reflect local realities. The pandemic also accelerated efforts to expand telemedicine and integrate mental health services.

Marketing the Healthcare Industry Today

Many hospitals and medical organizations are updating advertising and other promotions to reflect changing processes, values, and outcomes, applying lessons from the history of healthcare marketing and their unique experiences during the pandemic.

SEO dominance and digital content are key priorities for marketing healthcare services today, as an estimated 7% of all Google searches are healthcare-related.

Healthcare marketing is trying to make an impact by using consumer-focused materials to help engage patients.

Breaking through the noise with compelling brand messaging and product awareness takes innovation and ingenuity in a crowded marketing ecosystem.

Hospital Marketing vs. Healthcare Marketing

So what is the difference between these two types of healthcare marketing?

The focus of hospital marketing is on raising awareness of a relatively narrow range of hospital services. These services, ranging from routine surgery to accident and emergency (A&E), are largely based on the skills of doctors and surgeons. Some hospitals specialize in just one area, such as cancer or heart disease.

Healthcare marketing strategies, on the other hand, cover the full range of healthcare services provided by a healthcare system, from wellness and prevention through surgery and treatment to palliative and end-of-life care.

Now that we’ve set the stage for how hospital marketing differs from healthcare marketing, let’s look at some of the steps you can take to develop a strategy that will meet the needs of the modern patient.

Types of hospital marketing

SEO services for hospitals

Your website is central to your overall hospital marketing strategy, and search engine optimization (SEO) is essential to driving traffic. Strategies for optimizing your website to achieve a higher ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs) include the following:

• Easy to read
• Quality content
• Use of relevant keywords in a natural way, both organic and local
• Strong internal and external links to reputable sites
• A full profile on Google Business (GBP)
• Ease of website navigation

Social media for hospitals and clinics

Social media adoption has been slow in some hospitals. Goals, objectives, and methods are not defined in some medical facilities. They simply open accounts on Facebook or Instagram in the hope that they will be of use to their marketing needs.

Healthcare organizations understand the value of social media. However, many are unsure how to take advantage of it. However, creating a robust social media presence that supports all facets of your marketing strategies and engages your patients is not something that happens overnight.

Video marketing for hospitals and clinics

Videos are another useful instrument for healthcare marketing. In one study, 78% of marketers reported an increase in sales as a result of their use of video, and 86% reported an increase in website traffic as a result of their use of video.

Marketers can use video to take a behind-the-scenes look at your healthcare environment and share stories and testimonials from patients. This is how you can add video to your marketing strategy:

• Social media channels for capturing, uploading, and promoting video content. Platforms such as Facebook place a higher value on video than on static or image-based content.
• Web search rankings can be improved by blog posts that use video to illustrate blog posts.
• Email messages that simply use the word “video” in the subject line can increase the open rate of the message.

Content marketing for hospitals and clinics.

Creating content is important. But it has to be the right kind of content. Your audience wants informative, relevant content that they can use. They want information, not a sales pitch.

Again, effective content marketing takes time. Don’t expect today’s blog post to generate 100 patients tomorrow. However, if you are consistent with the creation of useful and informative content, you could increase the number of followers who become patients.

PPC and display advertising solutions

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an organic marketing strategy for the improvement of online visibility. Even if your site ranks number one for a search term such as surgeon in Dubai, there might still be three or four paid advertisements listed above your entry.

PPC (pay-per-click) or paid search advertisements are targeted to appear first on search engine results pages when people search for specific terms. You can decide how much you’d like to spend to keep your site at the top of these results listings. By tracking this amount, your return on investment could be clear and measurable.

Reputation management in healthcare marketing.

Healthcare consumers often want to see if others have had good experiences before scheduling their healthcare services. Online reviews can sway prospective patients and influence current ones.

How persuasive are these discussions? Surveys have found that 93% of consumers claim that internet reviews had an impact on their decisions to purchase, while 91% of consumers from the ages of 18 to 34 reported that they trusted online recommendations just as much as personal ones.

Some healthcare consumers only leave reviews when superior or extremely poor experiences motivate them to do so. That’s why it can be helpful to be proactive and ask for reviews to find and highlight positive consumer feedback.

Use a platform that includes response solicitation, monitoring and verification features. The platform should allow you to respond easily to online reviews. Also, be careful not to post or buy fake third-party reviews.

Here are some examples of healthcare marketing:

For example, a nearby healthcare company prioritized elevating the percentage of recent patients who scheduled appointments digitally. By evaluating and implementing successful strategies, the employer was able to triple the number of new patients through online channels.

Here are a few particular tips for healthcare businesses to improve patient satisfaction through advertising:

• Embrace Digital Marketing: Given the increasing fashion of patients and the usage of digital channels to search for and schedule healthcare offerings, your internet site ought to be cell-pleasant and easy to navigate. Invest in search engine marketing (SEO) and paid advertising to reach your intended target audience.
• Transparent Pricing: Consumers are in advance searching for readability in healthcare offerings. Ensure your website prominently presents fees and offerings, allowing patients to estimate costs before scheduling an appointment.
• Simplified Appointment Booking: Provide convenient online and cell scheduling options, enabling patients to find suitable appointment instances and places without problems.
• Regular Patient Communications: Keep patients informed of the latest offers and health advice.
• Collect and Apply Feedback: Solicit feedback from patients concerning their studies and make use of these comments to beautify your offerings.

Healthcare companies can enhance the consumer experience by adhering to those hints, attracting and retaining more patients.

Healthcare Marketing Transformation

Align the C-suite

The chief marketing officer (CMO) is a key member of the healthcare providers’ C-suite. However, the CMO needs active support from other C-suite leaders to deliver modern marketing efforts.

The top executives are the CTO, CDO, CIO, and CFO. The CTO is the Chief Technology Officer.

The CDO is the Chief Digital Officer. The CIO is the Chief Information Officer. The CFO is the Chief Financial Officer.

When the top executives agree on the significance of marketing, the Chief Marketing Officer will receive backing to propel growth and ensure consistent care. This shift moves the CMO role away from basic brand and communication activities and towards more sophisticated marketing capabilities.

Build sophisticated capabilities by choosing use cases wisely

Today, many healthcare providers cannot create personalized patient journey maps from start to finish. These challenges include:

• A disjointed consumer experience and lack of personalization
• Siloed healthcare systems
• A lack of consumer-centric data

Marketers now need immediate access to technology for hands-on use. Advanced healthcare marketing relies on a strong, integrated technology foundation. The focus of these tasks is scattered data. There is a growing need for marketers to have immediate, direct access to technology. Advanced healthcare marketing relies on a strong, interconnected technology infrastructure.

Nonetheless, no marketing operation functions with an infinite budget. Chief Marketing Officers ought to concentrate on executing use cases that can improve the department’s abilities and propel advancement.

From our perspective, prioritizing patient scheduling often serves as a key driver for expansion in hospitals and healthcare systems. Feeling capable and making appointments are important steps in a client’s healthcare journey.

Other precedence use instances should consist of higher patient conversation control to facilitate compliance with care.

Healthcare providers can increase their customer base and grow by aligning the C-suite and developing advanced advertising and marketing skills. Collaboration between the advertising marketing and generation groups marketing and era businesses need to paint intently collectively to create an unbroken healthcare patronage.

Collaboration between the marketing and technology teams

Marketing and generation groups have to work closely together to create an unbroken healthcare patronage.

Advertising and marketing techniques help patients throughout their healthcare journey. This includes finding a provider, scheduling appointments, and receiving follow-up care. To provide a seamless experience, advertising, marketing, and technology teams must collaborate effectively and use an integrated technology stack across all digital and traditional channels.

In other words,

Marketing and technology groups should work together to create an easy and smooth experience for healthcare clients.

The way people study, schedule, and receive healthcare is changing. Marketing and sales teams aim to create end-to-end customer satisfaction.

To achieve this, advertising, marketing, and technology teams should use a unified technology platform across digital and traditional channels. This method uses consistent branding to control all aspects of the customer journey, from advertising to online portals.

When advertising, marketing, and technology teams collaborate efficiently, they can create a seamless healthcare purchasing experience that is both convenient and efficient. This can result in improved affected-person delight, increased loyalty, and higher business consequences.

Marketing attribution in healthcare

In advertising, attribution measures the impact of marketing on patient behavior and desired results, such as new appointments. While consumer consequences aren’t the simplest degree of return on investment (ROI), attribution may be a vital indicator. For instance, marketers can examine the click-through rates of marketing emails to determine the most effective messaging.

Attribution analysis is crucial for measuring the economic ROI of virtual advertising and marketing in healthcare. However, most companies and structures are nevertheless growing their advertising and marketing attribution skills. This often causes the CFO and CMO to have different opinions on effective advertising strategies. This disagreement can affect how money is allocated for ads.

Successful attribution requires cross-departmental collaboration, especially between advertising, marketing, and IT. IT can use advertising to track which channels and media drive new patient appointments.

Advertising Attribution Techniques in Healthcare Marketing

While healthcare facts must be anonymized to comply with industry policies, this doesn’t prevent them from being measured. Here are three of the most common advertising attribution techniques and their applications to healthcare:

• Last-touch attribution: This version attributes the conversion to the final touchpoint that the customer interacted with before changing. When a customer clicks on a paid ad and schedules an appointment via their smartphone after visiting the issuer’s website, the conversion is attributed to the ad.
• First-contact attribution: This version attributes the conversion to the primary touchpoint that the customer interacted with. If a client clicks on a hyperlink to the issuer’s website from a social media post, the conversion can be attributed to the post.
• Multi-touch attribution: This version attributes the conversion to all of the touchpoints that the purchaser interacted with earlier than changing. When a customer comes across a social media post or blog post about a service provider, then visits the provider’s website by clicking on a link, and eventually schedules an appointment through a phone call, the conversion can be attributed to both social media marketing and the website.

Healthcare professionals are increasingly seeing advertising as a growth driver. Today, CMOs can use techniques and teamwork to shift the focus of advertising from a cost centre to a profit generator. This can be done while also enhancing the healthcare customer experience.

Healthcare marketing challenges and tips

Healthcare carriers come across various obstacles within the realm of advertising. These challenges encompass:

• HIPAA Compliance: Healthcare carriers should strictly adhere to privacy and protection rules, like HIPAA when amassing and using affected personal data. This may also limit their capability to tailor marketing messages and target unique audiences successfully.
• Public Perception of Healthcare: The healthcare enterprise regularly faces a poor public notion, visible as hugely priced, impersonal, and difficult to navigate. To set up, agree with and entice new sufferers, healthcare vendors have to confront those perceptions of their marketing efforts.
• Tight Marketing Budgets: Limited marketing budgets are a not unusual constraint for healthcare carriers, making it difficult to compete with large healthcare agencies and pharmaceutical groups.
• Leveraging Online Reviews: Online evaluations have gained prominence in affected-person selection-making. Healthcare companies need strategies to inspire high-quality reviews and effectively control terrible feedback.
• Crafting Effective Copy: Healthcare marketing copy necessitates readability, conciseness, and informativeness at the same time as preserving engagement and persuasiveness. Providers should successfully convey the advantages of their offerings in a manner that resonates with sufferers.

Additionally, healthcare companies can also face unique challenges contingent on their speciality or target market. For instance, a pediatric clinic should target parents in their marketing efforts.

On the other hand, a geriatric clinic should focus on marketing to older adults. Each clinic should tailor their marketing strategies to their target demographic. Clinics need to understand their audience to effectively reach them.

Summary:

Marketing attribution is important for measuring the ROI of digital marketing in healthcare. Healthcare providers can make better decisions about marketing budgets by analyzing advertising’s impact on client behaviour.

There are some distinct marketing attribution models available, each with its strengths and weaknesses. Healthcare providers should pick a version that is appropriate for their patients’ precise wishes and desires.

Collaborative systems and modern technology can improve healthcare advertising attribution and patient experience.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Healthcare Marketing aim to achieve?

The goal of healthcare marketing is not to make a profit. Instead, it promotes health by sharing information and educating the public.

What are the benefits of marketing in the healthcare industry?

Healthcare marketing helps build brand awareness and reputation. It also helps build trust with patients. Another benefit is the increase in patient-provider interaction that can help providers understand areas for improvement.

What are some of the strategies used to market to the Healthcare Industry?

Building a consistent brand and creating a superior patient experience are some of the marketing strategies that can be used in healthcare. This includes personalizing campaigns to address patients’ unique needs.

What is Hospital Marketing?

Hospital marketing refers to marketing strategies such as advertising, branding, and promotional tactics that are designed to improve the health of the population by interacting with the community, building trust, demonstrating expertise in care, attracting new patients, and creating long-term relationships.

What is patient commercialization?

This practice, also called DTC (direct-to-consumer) healthcare marketing, involves providers like doctors’ offices, health systems, and medical device manufacturers marketing directly to patients instead of through third parties like insurance companies or pharmacy benefit managers.