Conquering 5 Common Healthcare Marketing Challenges
Healthcare marketing is hard. Healthcare marketers face a changing regulatory landscape, increased competition for awareness, and strains on internal resources. Let’s talk about how you can face some of these challenges head-on with health education content.
Challenge: Declining patient loyalty
Patients are less loyal now than they were in the past. For example:
- 45% of poll respondents ages 18 to 29 have no primary care provider.
- 80% of survey respondents reported they would switch providers for convenience.
- 90% of survey respondents indicated a good financial experience is a leading factor for loyalty.
- Provide valuable information. Create content that addresses your audience’s specific healthcare needs and concerns, like educational articles, blog posts, or videos. This helps establish your organization as a trusted source of information, which fosters loyalty.
- Personalize the content. Use data and insights to understand your audience’s demographics, healthcare needs, and preferences. Then create content that will resonate with your customers along various points of their healthcare journey. This personalized approach makes them feel understood and valued, leading to increased loyalty.
- Leverage email marketing. Use email to deliver relevant and personalized content directly to your audience's inbox. Segment your email list and regularly send helpful and informative content to keep your organization top-of-mind and reinforce loyalty.
Challenge: Trust and credibility
Many consumers are skeptical of marketing messages, and nowadays skepticism toward healthcare marketing can be even worse. Healthcare consumers today do not want to be sold. They want a credible relationship they can trust.
Solution: Leverage a holistic strategy to build credibility and trust. When you provide relevant, focused information, you become a trusted resource for patients and members.
- Provide transparency with patient testimonials and real reviews of your organization.
- Deliver evidence-based, clinically reviewed health education.
- Offer resources that treat the whole person, including their mental health and wellness.
- Participate in community-based health education activities.
Challenge: Competition for attention
Cutting through the noise is key for successful healthcare marketing. Delivering a personalized message through the right channel at the right time can help get your audience’s attention.
Solution: Targeted email is one of the best ways to personalize marketing. Use your list segments to send personalized information that meets patient and health plan member needs. As always with any personalized communication, be sure you are following all HIPAA and privacy regulations.
Challenge: Rapidly changing healthcare landscape
Shifting consumer expectations and changes in settings of care are just two examples of how the healthcare industry is continually evolving. Your organization may already be preparing to venture into new areas like specialty clinics, employee services, virtual care, or maybe even an acquisition. Healthcare marketers need to adapt quickly to these changes and adjust their strategies accordingly.
Solution: Use flexible health education to quickly adapt to consumer needs.
- Create consumer-centric health education. Healthcare consumers are looking for easy-to-understand information and they want it to feel personal. Your content strategy should include a library of multi-language and evidence-based health information that’s focused on the consumers you want to attract.
- Integrate flexible health education in a central location. Then it’s readily available no matter the care setting or location that patients visit. Having a centralized location for patient education will help attract patients across your service lines and marketing channels.
- Consider content as a service to support your needs. This kind of programmable content can be rapidly deployed to scale and support new services.
Challenge: Conversions
Attracting patients with your marketing content is only the first step. Converting them into patients who follow through and schedule appointments is the ultimate goal. If you’re attracting new potential patients but not getting results, you may want to rethink your strategy.
Solution: Provide clear and easy ways to engage with your organization.
- Leverage calls to action. Make sure your health information includes calls to action that encourage potential patients to engage with your services.
- Make it easy to connect with your services. Your marketing content should live side by side with services that are readily available, like information on physicians and clinics with immediate availability, or self-scheduling options.
- Match your content and calls to action. Make sure your calls to action match the content you provide. For example, if you’re educating a patient on diabetes, your call to action could be “Make an Appointment” alongside a list of endocrinologists with availability.
By combining a variety of these techniques, you can help overcome some of the most common challenges in healthcare marketing.
Need health education content to power your marketing plans? Healthwise® Compass, our new content as a service solution, is tailor-made for you. Request a demo to see how we can help.