How Medical Centers Should Market Themselves
The primary concern of any business is the business of simply staying afloat. Now more than ever, businesses are grappling with challenges that threaten their ability to grow a customer base and thus any ability to help the customers that the business was created to serve. Nowhere is this more true than in the medical field. Medical centers, having a strong patient focus, are often unprepared for the tough fiscal realities of the marketing world. Marketing departments are not immune from the need to show a positive return on investment, or ROI. Here are some ways that a medical center can market themselves effectively and profitably.
1. Utilize Social Media
Possibly the most important factor in contemporary marketing campaigns is the use of social media marketing. Being entirely online and requiring minimal overhead costs, this method offers one of the highest rates of marketing ROI. A successful social media marketing campaign must be both eye-catching as well as professional and engage potential customers across multiple media platforms. It’s nearly unheard of these days for a healthcare provider to not have a Facebook page, but other interactive online media platforms (such as the multiple web-based video services and photo-sharing platforms available) can be very efficient ways of reaching out to potential consumers. These sites should be regularly updated especially during any public health crisis.
2. Engage in Content Marketing
A recent poll suggested that four out of five Internet users search online for answers to their healthcare questions. That’s a staggering number, and the figure underscores why it makes good sense for healthcare providers to have that information ready at hand for potential patients. If a patient is searching for local clinics to address a specific ailment that they have or even just think they might have, it makes good sense for that provider to have health information ready to access on their own personal site at a the click of a mouse. Providers must also have a good feel for their target audience in a marketing campaign and tailor their message to the specific audience that it is intended for.
3. Care About Patient Experience
Being responsive to patient experience is one of the most important and most empathetic ways in which a healthcare provider can interact with its customer base. One simple idea is to ask for reviews from the patients following a visit to the medical center. Automated reviews where the patient uses a tablet or computer at the facility to rate the quality of the experience are an efficient and quick method of achieving this goal. The questions used in these reviews should be both broad-based and individually focused so that the facility can use targeted improvements to effect specific quality increases. The marketing staff of the facility should also be sure to follow up on these reviews personally. Healthcare providers can’t afford to be passive in their gathering of customer feedback. Actually engaging with individual patients and getting their feedback, even when it takes the form of harsh criticism, can be invaluable to charting a more effective path forward.
4. Use Physical Marketing Strategies
One side-effect of the current focus on purely online marketing strategies is that advertisers often forget the human touch. In an age where everyone is so focused on the online aspects of advertisements, businesses like healthcare providers often forget the impact that physical experiences and products can have on the thought processes of the consumer. This can be anything from planning and hosting events to utilizing traditional methods of advertisement like highway billboards and catchy jingles. This can be the most costly form of marketing, but also has the potential to create a large return on investment through successful and memorable branding.
Effective marketing campaigns can certainly involve large costs during implementation, but with a few simple strategies, a campaign can be made to pay dividends. Especially now in an age of online advertisement and branding, there are multiple tools available to streamline the process of successfully branding a company to make sure that the right messages are being conveyed to the people the organization intends to serve.
