Marketing Advice That Matters
The landscape of the healthcare industry is changing. Patients play more active role in their care choices and you are required to provide them better information to help them make informed choices. But, how would they know until someone tells them? This makes marketing more important for your medical practice.
Medical marketing is not only about advertising your services. It also involves patient communications, fine tuning processes that will improve patient experience and adding a non-clinical perspective of patient care and services. Here are some tips for medical marketing services providers to develop a strategic marketing plan that will help medical practices.
Important Elements of Strategic Medical Marketing Plan
Your strategic medical marketing plan should have the ability to interact with your patients and potential customers on different platforms. Multi-channel marketing is the best way to communicate with your audience. Here are some important elements of the medical marketing ( http://www.ehow.com/list_7232478_medical-marketing-strategies.html ) plan you should focus on.
Responsive Website Design
A responsive website design means the site should respond to a user’s behavior and the device environment that includes platform, screen size and orientation. Today’s user accesses the internet from various devices that includes laptop, smartphones and iPad. The website should be able to automatically switch to suit the screen resolution, scripting and adjust image sizes accordingly. In other words, the website design should have the ability to adjust to the user’s preferences. The website should be easy to navigate even on the small screen.
Social Media Marketing
Hospitals need to take a deeper look at social media marketing to meet their target patient demographics. Several leading healthcare organizations are already using social media to successfully connect with patients. As per the Journal of Medical Internet Research, around 95% of hospitals are having a Facebook page while 50% hospitals have Twitter account.
The healthcare industry can learn a lot from the hospitality industry about using social media effectively and engage their customer base in conversation. There are several examples of using social media effectively to reach and resolve patient issues.
One such example is of Ohio State University Medical Center, which monitors Twitter and other social media platforms for posts by patients referencing their hospital and/or doctors. In one instance, one of their patients had posted complaint about wait time to see the physician. A staff member of the Ohio State University Medical Center responded directly to the patient on Twitter and contacted appropriate hospital staffer who arranged for a medical representative to meet the patient and diffuse the situation.
Email Marketing
Email lists are powerful tools of marketing for the healthcare industry. You can easily grow your hospital brand by offering content rich email marketing program on a regular basis. Your audience mainly includes patients, referring physicians and donors. The email marketing program can be effectively used to drive prospective patients to your clinic/hospital. It helps to inform and make people aware of the services you offer and stay visible until they need it.
Paid Advertising
Paid advertising aka PPC are good ways to save time and also effective to gain patients. There are several paid advertising tools such as Google AdWords, Facebook Local Awareness Ads, and LinkedIn Ads that bring more recognition, referrals and patients as well.
One of the good thing about PPC is you can always control the costs. Depending on your marketing strategy, costs can be as low as $1 per day with Facebook and $0.30 using AdWords.
Postcard Marketing
Postcards can be effective medical marketing tools. Direct mail marketing still holds importance in this digital age of marketing. The simple reason is today’s consumer is bombarded with too much digital marketing content and postcard come across as a unique marketing tool.
One plus-point of postcard marketing is despite inflation; postage rates are still affordable. Postcards are direct in their message delivery as there is no envelope masking the contents. You can easily gain the attention of the targeted consumer base by designing attention grasping, friendly postcards.
Marketing is important for every business, including healthcare and medical practitioners. And Medical marketing when done in the right way can have a direct influence on patient’s choice and also help in hospital branding.
