Even the most informed startup begins its journey with the greatest of ambitions, whether it’s to transform patient care and create a whole new world for people with many maladies or to make a whole new approach to patient care. The reality is that healthcare organizations tend to suffer from the same overarching issue: they operate within a very specific bubble. This is not necessarily due to ignorance but is more about operating with limited resources and knowledge.
Many healthcare providers have limited budgets, which translates into lacking resources that inevitably filter through to the patients. They don’t get the care they deserve, and it also creates a chasm between the patient and the healthcare provider that arises from overrunning appointment queues, all stemming from that aforementioned lack of resources.
This is why, in the modern world, healthcare providers need to have so many different tools at their disposal, not just to deliver what the patient demands but also to ensure that they, as healthcare providers, are offering a competitive service. Marketing is one of those things that is not necessarily considered to be an essential practice for generating business, but this is why a variety of different healthcare provider marketing methods can invariably make a big impact in creating the right customer base.
Here’s a number of things that modern healthcare providers need to have:
Consistent Branding
Modern marketing strategies are all about establishing a strong and consistent brand across all platforms because this is what will build trust and recognition among potential patients. Branding is something that can very often be an afterthought, and it’s easy to see why: healthcare providers shouldn’t be in the business of branding but actually solving patient problems.
However, if you recognize that trust is a major issue, particularly among patients who quickly become former ones, you then need to address the concept of building trust and recognition. This is where something like pharmaceutical packaging companies can provide a very useful insight. When we look at the concept of recognition and slowly build upon the trust that is so pivotal for patients, you don’t just create brand ambassadors in the form of a patient, but you also facilitate a dialogue between yourself and your patients.
Branding is something that needs to be focused on in healthcare provider marketing because reiterating the key touchstones of logos, colors, and iconography will begin to mean your healthcare service is emblematic of those things that are so important to customers and patients, especially in the realm of trust.
Addressing Your Technological Shortfalls
While there’s been a lot of talk about digital technologies improving the patient experience, we have to remember, from a promotional perspective, that you can deliver better services. Developing or promoting mobile health applications can offer users convenient access to healthcare resources. When you look at personalized health tracking, medication reminders, appointment scheduling, as well as more heavily ingrained practices like wearable devices, these can all help to improve the patient journey.
As a business, you may struggle with a high volume of patients on any one day, and therefore, the more autonomous you can make the patient experience, the better. Telemedicine is one excellent example that goes a long way to improving relationships while also helping healthcare providers reduce their workloads and remote monitoring and virtual consultation enhances the overall patient experience.
Transparency and Trust Building
One of the most obvious aspects of delivering an excellent service is through transparency and building trust. But we have to remember that it’s also an excellent marketing method as well. We should remember that costs and treatment options are limited from time to time, and if we can provide clear and accessible information about our services, pricing, and policies, this sense of transparency will build trust with patients. To be different in a competitive healthcare market means focusing on the components that make you different from all those who already try to over-promise and under-deliver.
As healthcare providers become aware that they’re not able to deliver on all fronts, the temptation can be to oversell, but the problem in doing this is that we will get found out eventually. It’s always essential to look at how we can deliver the things that we promise at the very outset without making enemies of our patients. This is why it’s so important to be aware of the perils of overselling something, especially in the world of healthcare.
We need to ensure that we deliver an excellent service by helping patients understand what we can and cannot do, but this also means being aware of what our actual limitations are. We can mitigate these by incorporating more autonomous practices, but we can also benefit from being a sign-posting service as well.
Healthcare practices provide general practice, which means that when we look at how to help patients who are at the very beginning of their journey, or sometimes a few steps in, we focus on seamless service, particularly when we have to pass them on to hospitals that operate on people. We also need to be incredibly empathetic, which can be tough because when we have a job that we need to do, there is a sense that we must separate our heads from our hearts, but for the sake of delivering a proper service, there are little things that we can do to ensure that we always focus on transparency:
- Focusing on soft skills, particularly with front-of-house employees.
- Recognizing the importance of person-centered planning rather than thinking about what is best for us as an organization, and being aware that a customer is always on a journey and will interact with us at various points throughout this helps us deliver consistent service.
- Ensuring up-to-date notes on patients through electronic records that don’t just stay in-house but can be delivered to other providers and services effectively. This is particularly important because one of the biggest issues is a lack of solid administrative practice. If healthcare providers had a far better tool in which to access patient health records remotely and across any device, this would certainly make things far more consistent.
- Of course, in order to be trustworthy, we need to differentiate ourselves, which means doubling down on the bare basics. Clear and accessible information is something that many healthcare organizations can fall flat on because there is a tendency to become over-complicated, and this can be due to that aforementioned bubble. Medical professionals can easily become intertwined with various tools and terms that mean nothing to the layperson. When a patient is looking for information about your practice or the result of a test, we must remember the very simple acronym “KISS,” which means “Keep It Simple, Stupid!”
Prioritizing Patient Experience
We’ve talked about how patients can interact with a business and come away almost feeling more confused. We must remember that patient experience also spans from online interactions to in-person visits. The goal is to create a seamless and engaging experience, but there are so many different ways to do this. This is where so many digital components make a massive difference:
- A responsive website that is easy to navigate and provides comprehensive information about the services, team, and contact details. It’s amazing how many websites for healthcare providers are not mobile-friendly!
- If you want to attract patients in your specific local area, search engine optimization (SEO), and particularly local SEO, is an excellent place to cover some of the bare basics of getting to the top of Google’s page 1.
- Patient testimonials, by showcasing real-life examples and success stories, will demonstrate the benefits of your care.
- Content engagement, such as developing blogs, articles, and videos that can potentially explain complex medical concepts while also showcasing facilities and staff, helps to build that bridge.
- We also need to remember that an active presence on social media platforms will, over time, build brand awareness. Implementing a content marketing plan will invariably make all the difference. Additionally, collaborating with influencers in the health and wellness sectors can help us to reach a wider audience, but it’s important to be aware of the type of influencer you plan on engaging with, particularly if those influencers have an iconoclastic streak and will question every aspect of modern healthcare, which can easily put your business in the wrong light.
- Finally, we must remember that we should stop and assess the experience. Implementing the right tools to measure the effectiveness of any marketing efforts will allow for continuous improvement.
Breaking out of the bubble of one-track thinking is tough, and it’s easy to become daily with providing patient support without necessarily thinking of how you can promote your services in various ways. Any healthcare organization needs to remember that patients come first and that everything else can be supplementary to building that concept of trust over time.
Marketing is something that naturally many healthcare providers can shun because it can easily seem like window dressing that gets in the way of delivering the right type of service, but we must think that in the modern age, there are so many providers willing to undercut the competition. By understanding that healthcare provider marketing delivers, you could get the best of both worlds by knowing how to promote your services, while actually delivering a service that’s not bluff and bluster.
