Understanding Healthcare Marketing
Customers in the healthcare system have never had more power than they do now. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare workers had to change quickly to keep caring for patients. One way they did this was by switching to digital care. Telehealth went from being a side issue to the main way to see people who aren’t seriously sick.
Customers increasingly want experiences that are clear, reliable, and mobile-friendly, but most healthcare organizations haven’t kept up. Healthcare providers have more choices than ever before regarding how to spend their limited marketing funds, but many have stuck with tried-and-true traditional and digital marketing outlets, like TV, radio, and paper ads, and a digital presence that works for everyone.
These days, health systems want to build long-term ties with their customers just like any other business.
Leaders in consumer goods, retail, and e-commerce set the first bar, and they are still raising it. The results showed that happy patients are 28% less likely to switch providers.
It will be hard for healthcare providers who want to grow and keep continuity of care or who want to make up for what they’ve lost in recent years to change the way they sell themselves. Here are three things that need to be done to make progress: get the C-suite on the same page, build skills gradually through carefully picked use cases and quick wins, and keep track of what works. Our research shows that healthcare providers who made changes to improve the patient experience, such as through marketing, saw their income rise by up to 20% over five years, while their costs to serve dropped by up to 30%.
Big marketing goals can be reached by providers who can tie them all together. As part of its digital change, one regional healthcare provider set up a flexible marketing team whose main goal was to get more new customers to make appointments online instead of over the phone or in person. The service provider was able to come up with more than 300 test ideas that covered a wide range of goals and priorities, from making online ordering better to making sure that content on certain pages was optimised.
The team planned for half of those tests to go live in just 12 months, which led to an amazing test success rate of about 50%. When the healthcare provider expanded on tests that went well, the number of new patients coming from digital sources tripled compared to before the change.
Healthcare marketing is about building relationships based on trust and empathy, fostering a connection between providers and patients.