Healthcare marketing is a process of strategic outreach and communications designed to attract healthcare consumers, guide them through their healthcare journey, and keep them engaged with the health system.

Sophisticated healthcare marketing strategy integrates multi-channel, highly-segmented and targeted online and offline tactics to drive engagement and support the attainment of enterprise goals. Health systems measure the success of their marketing efforts through specific metrics that are aligned with key performance indicators (KPIs), and/or marketing return on investment (ROI).

• Find prospective patients with business objectives in mind, i.e. a healthy payer mix or high-value service line growth
• Increase strategic advantage to attract patients in a hypercompetitive landscape
• Keep patients engaged with relevant, personalized, and timely outreach throughout their journey  
• Retain patients long-term and improve loyalty in your healthcare community
• Drive more qualified leads, generate revenue with healthy margins
• Connect with patients across multiple channels
• Evaluate productivity and re-align strategy with comprehensive data analytics

 The ever-evolving healthcare landscape can present unfamiliar challenges to even the most seasoned marketers. Marketing teams need to keep up with the latest industry tips and trends to ensure they’re crafting an engaging and effective strategy that maximizes their impact on the health system’s bottom line.

Use Analytics to Secure Budget: Marketing teams often receive their budget from upper level management. Unfortunately, assigning budgets in this way typically results in over or under-spending, which can diminish the marketing team’s impact on the health system. Instead, marketers should analyze previous campaigns, determine how much budget is needed to reach key demographics, and present findings to executives for buy-in. 

Align Marketing with Organizational Objectives: Marketing needs to have a seat at the table when determining the health system’s overall business strategy. Opening up a two-way dialogue between marketing and upper-level management will enable marketers to understand that organization’s overarching goals. Then, they can use analytics to set a realistic budget to achieve these goals.

Analyze the Competition: Competing health systems will have similar target markets and strategic priorities

Conducting a competitive analysis and gaining a better understanding of their strategy (including what worked and what didn’t) will help build a roadmap for your team’s own success.

Evaluate the Best Channels: Marketers have a seemingly endless list of channels to advertise on, and a single marketing budget to distribute. Making the most out of countless marketing channels can be overwhelming – but with a business intelligence solution, teams can use data to discover the most influential marketing channels for different geographic areas and service lines.

Build Your Brand: Consumers don’t buy products or services they don’t know or trust. Similarly, consumers won’t choose a hospital or care team that they’re unfamiliar with. It’s recommended that new health systems spend anywhere from 30-40% of their total marketing budget on branding initiatives to reduce the spend required to acquire and retain patients.

Build Relationships with Personalization: 

Despite the personal nature of healthcare, many marketing strategies have not integrated personalization. Marketers should leverage the behavioral and demographic data contained in their electronic health records (EHRs) and their healthcare customer relationship management (HCRM) software to laser-target patients that need their services.