How to Market Hospitals or Healthcare Providers by Ajeesh Thomas Thayyil
The primary elements of a successful plan…
A marketing plan is a strategic document
to achieve specific business goals and objectives
over a specific time period.
Healthcare consumerism has drastically changed the way healthcare professionals need to market and deliver their services. Today’s consumers expect a healthcare experience as innovative and digitally advanced as any other industry. Hospitals, health systems, and medical practices must evolve to meet these changing needs to remain competitive or risk falling behind.
As
more healthcare professionals provide accessible online services and shorten
the red tape between physician-patient communications, consumers no longer feel
the need to visit the closest option. Instead, they’re empowered to choose a
healthcare business offering a consumer experience that meets or exceeds their
expectations.
Even
if you’re happy with your current patient volumes, healthcare marketing can’t
happen without a planned medical marketing strategy to keep your healthcare
brand at the forefront of people’s minds. Think of all the reasons someone
might decide to switch healthcare providers:
Relocation:
Ø Providers are no longer accepting their healthcare
insurance.
Ø Higher costs for the same service.
Ø Limited or no access to same-day appointments.
Ø Limited or no access to direct communication with their
physician.
Ø Limited or no access to virtual care appointments (e.g.,
telehealth).
Ø Limited or no access to secure online appointment
scheduling, bill pay, or medical records.
Ø Dissatisfaction with wait times.
Ø A negative consumer experience.
Ø No access to remote patient monitoring capabilities
That’s
why it’s so important to have a planned, budgeted healthcare marketing plan to
reach new and returning consumers in your area at the right moment.
Planning
Your Healthcare Marketing Strategies
Doctors
tell patients that an ounce of prevention beats a pound of cure. The same holds
true for marketing. It’s better to have a marketing strategy in place now than
wait until your consumer marketing CRM database is nearly empty.
What
is healthcare marketing?
Healthcare
marketing is a process of strategic outreach and communications built to bring
in new healthcare consumers, shepherd them through their healthcare journey,
and keep them engaged with the healthcare system, service, or product.
Today,
virtually every type of healthcare business markets, including health systems,
hospitals, multiplication providers, solo practices, pharmaceuticals, medical
device manufacturers, health plans, consumer brands, and more.
The
best healthcare marketing plans integrate multi-channel, highly-targeted, and
specific online and offline efforts to drive growth and engagement. All of
which are focused on market-specific key performance indicators and return on
investment.
When
done properly, healthcare marketing can:
Ø Enhance the patient experience
Ø Keep healthcare consumers engaged with relevant,
personalized, and timely outreach during their journey
Ø Empower consumers to make smarter, healthier decisions,
leading to better outcomes for healthcare brands and consumers
Ø Increase your consumer base, retain existing consumers
long-term, and improve loyalty in your healthcare community
Ø Drive more qualified leads and generate more revenue
Ø Increase local physician referrals
Ø Position your physicians as thought leaders in their market
Ø Evaluate your productivity and re-align the strategy
Ø Increase your strategic advantage to attract healthcare
consumers in an increasingly competitive marketplace
Ø Improve your online reputation
Ø Build your brand
Rapid
changes in the healthcare industry markets require agility and focus. You may
need to hire a marketing agency and plan for a larger budget than you have in
the past. But in the end, it’s worth it for that peace of mind—and to see your
bottom line grow faster than ever before.
To
help you along, we offer here our always up-to-date 15 strategies to include
with any well-planned healthcare marketing plan.
Related:
6 Ways to Market Any Healthcare Organization
1.
Use consistent healthcare branding
You
might feel confident your expertise sets you apart from other healthcare providers
or businesses. But let’s face it—to a healthcare consumer, one white coat looks
just like the next, and consumers are famously unwilling to buy a product or
service from someone they don’t know and trust.
When
you build a strong and recognizable brand and promote awareness of it, you go a
long way towards reducing your overall cost-per-acquisition and growing your
ROI. First, you’ll need to determine what your brand is all about.
In
other words, what’s unique about your healthcare business? Is it the way you
treat healthcare consumers? Your family-friendly office? Your spa-like
environment?
There
is at least one thing that makes your medical team unique, and that’s what
helps consumers remember your healthcare organization’s name. Promoting awards
or accolades for this sort of achievement is a terrific way to build trust in
your brand, especially because you’re asking consumers to trust you with their
health.It may take time to determine what works best for your brand. But
eventually, a sound healthcare marketing strategy with consistent branding and
marketing materials will come together and represent your brand in the best
possible light.
2.
Evaluate the online patient experience.
Twenty
years ago, simply having a website was enough to impress prospective healthcare
consumers and help them find your healthcare brand identity.
Today,
consumer engagement has become increasingly complex as the healthcare industry
shifts more readily into virtual care experiences, like telehealth and remote
monitoring.
A
website is your organization’s front door. It’s often the first thing consumers
see; if it’s not optimized, it may also be the last time a person considers
your hospital or healthcare practices.
Aside
from ensuring your site has accurate and easily accessible contact information
(e.g., locations, phone numbers, contact form, and primary services), the
imagery and wording represent your consumer base.
On
top of that, to encourage better engagement, healthcare businesses must include
value-add experiences, like easy access to information, timely appointments,
and high-quality communication with healthcare providers. It must be baked into
every experience they have with your brand, intentional or not. User experience
is an essential part of website design. But sometimes, designers are so focused
on making the website look good that they forget to focus on the patient
experience. We often find that websites need to be completely reimagined. But,
we also look for ways to make small but immediate improvements to drive more
business, like positioning the “Contact Us” form above the fold.
Creating
a positive patient experience also means analyzing how most consumers typically
engage with you (e.g., website, social media, paid ads, third-party listing
service, etc.).
Consumers
want to interact with you on their own terms. Your medical marketing strategy
must account for every consumer touchpoint.
Examine
the path consumers take after first engaging with your business and whether
they call or submit a form (or not). Mapping your consumers’ journey can give
you a better understanding of their needs and what can trigger a conversion.
3.
Build a responsive healthcare website
A
responsive website automatically adjusts to the size of a screen, so the
experience is the same whether the site is accessed from a computer, tablet,
phone, or another mobile device.
It’s
the norm in website design today—but more than that, it’s something search
engines look for when crawling any medical website to determine how and where
you’ll rank.
Google
cares about the user experience. As of September 2020, Google committed to a
mobile-first index of all websites, including Healthcare websites. This means
it ranks responsive sites higher than non-responsive sites. However, even if
your site is responsive, it’s important to confirm that your content and
imagery load properly (and promptly) across all mobile device types.
4.
Test site speeds
Healthcare
marketers who study user (prospective healthcare consumer) behaviors online
have proven that consumers are less willing to put up with slow loading times
than ever before. It only takes 5 seconds to lose a prospective consumer.
What’s
more, poor site speed may cause your medical or healthcare website to fall in
the search engine results. You can test your site speed using Google’s
PageSpeed Insights. If load times are slow, talk to your web developer about
ways to speed it up. I also recommend checking the site speeds of your direct
and indirect competitors to see how your site stacks up.
5.
Optimize organic search engine results for prospective healthcare consumers
Search
engine optimization is a powerful tool for getting your medical practices or
hospital network to the top of the search engines. However, it’s a lot more
complex than most people realize.
You
cannot simply use the term “orthopaedic surgeon” 100 times throughout your
website and hope to rank #1 on Google among all doctors, physicians, and
surgeons providing healthcare services in your area.
SEO
involves using the right optimal phrases and keywords so Google can understand
your healthcare organization‘s websites. Focusing on organic SEO tactics helps
you rank for the proper, relevant, and pertinent healthcare-related search
terms (e.g., medical conditions, healthcare professional treatment of any
type). However, you must also use those
terms naturally throughout your content because Google cares about readability
first and foremost. This is only the beginning of healthcare marketing best
practices for SEO, which also include:
Ø Developing content pages full of high-quality information
and optimized with your keywords.
Ø Having internal links pointing back to relevant pages on
your website.
Ø Gaining external backlinks from reputable health sites.
Ø Managing your site index or sitemap (making it easy for
search engines to read and rank).
Ø Claiming your healthcare website on Google Business Profile
and complete your business listing with complete, accurate information.
Ø Fill out every available section for each location
Ø Incorporate photos and videos
Ø Optimize local listings and reviews
Ø Post frequently asked questions in the Q&A section
Ø Optimizing your site with local SEO tactics (increasing your
likelihood of appearing in the Google Local Pack).
Ø Submitting your website to Google.
6.
Use PPC and display ads for healthcare marketing
Paid
search advertisements appear first in search results.
Search
Engine Optimization (i.e., “Healthcare SEO”) is an organic marketing strategy
used to earn a healthcare system, hospital, or practice greater visibility
online.
However,
even if your site ranks number one organically, for a search term like “surgeon
in Tulsa,” there are still 3 or 4 paid advertisements above your organic web
page that people will see first.
PPC
(pay-per-click), or paid search advertisements,
are laser-targeted to appear first on the search engine results page
(SERP) for a set of search terms. You can manage your budget with paid search
and decide how much you’d like to spend to keep your site at the top of SERPs.
Your return on investment is clear and defined with both PPC and display ads
that appear on the sidebar or top of other websites.
7.
Leverage social media (the right way)
Too
many hospitals and healthcare practices rely solely on organic social media for
a large part of their digital healthcare marketing strategies. Organic social
media means posting photos, updates, events, etc., directly to Facebook,
Twitter, or YouTube. It’s a valid brand-building strategy and lets healthcare
consumers know what’s new.
However,
it shouldn’t be your only social strategy. Paid advertising on social media is
a better way to reach much larger numbers of the right people who may be
looking for your services—even if you’re not already connected. Let’s face it:
few people share posts from local healthcare organizations online unless they
are already engaged with that group (or better yet) employed by it.
Paid
social media is about more than pressing the “Boost Post” button that appears
when you post from your business page. Like PPC or display advertising, it
involves strategizing and budgeting to target the audience you want.
Related:
Topical Social Media and YouTube webinar: COVID-19 and Healthcare Marketing.
8.
Ask for reviews from healthcare consumers
Consumers
want to see that others like them have had a good experience before scheduling
their visit. Online reviews continue to gain credibility for potential and
current patients. 86% of 1,124 US-based consumers surveyed trust online reviews
as much as personal recommendations and believe they’re a reliable resource
when choosing a new physician.
Typically,
healthcare consumers only leave reviews when motivated to do so (e.g., if they’ve had an above-average or extremely
poor experience). Unless you’re proactively asking for reviews, you’re missing
out on opportunities to feature positive consumer feedback.
Keep
your finger on the pulse of consumer feedback by incorporating automated,
HIPAA-compliant review platforms into your healthcare marketing strategy.
While
there are many good options out there, our agency provides clients with a
highly scalable platform that offers the three most vital functions:
Review
solicitation. Most review/rating sites allow you to ethically solicit reviews
from healthcare consumers and patients, so long as you don’t artificially
“stack the deck.” Your platform should allow you to request reviews at scale
through text and email or on a one-on-one basis through QR codes, tablets, and
individual text messages. Your platform can direct patients to websites like
Google and Facebook and generate first-party reviews for your website.
Review
monitoring. While review monitoring for a single location is pretty manageable,
it can be a nightmare for multilocation providers. What’s more, without the
proper software, you will likely miss both good and bad reviews on dozens of
rating sites.
Review
responses. Your platform should also allow you to respond to online reviews
easily. (More on this in a moment.)
Note:
All client communications need to be empathetic and HIPAA compliant. Also, be
sure never to post or buy fake third-party reviews.
9.
Follow up with consumer feedback in your marketing efforts
If
a healthcare consumer shares a poor
opinion of your practice on outside review sites such as Google, Facebook, and
Yelp, you need to respond and show that you’re working to resolve the problem.
With the proper follow-up, consumers may be motivated to update their reviews
to let others know you resolved the issue quickly.
Reputation
management should be a part of any healthcare marketing strategy, but this
doesn’t mean you should get defensive about negative reviews. Instead, look at
them as learning experiences and upgrade processes and equipment as needed to
ensure the best possible patient experience moving forward.
10.
Look into traditional media options
Many
healthcare businesses are reluctant to invest in external media opportunities:
traditional advertising sources like radio, television, billboards, and
newspapers. These can be significant investments, so you must be careful where
you spend your money to see the best, tangible results.
Having
unqualified healthcare media buyers make these decisions for you is the best
way to make sure your advertisements get seen by the right people at the right
time. A billboard in the middle of nowhere does little to bring in healthcare
consumers, but a television advertisement that runs on a channel with
demographics that represent your average consumer can do wonders for your ROI.
11.
Build physician referrals into your medical marketing plans
How
does your practice reach potential referring doctors? If you’re not using a
physician liaison, you’re not getting what you need. Doctor referrals are some
of the best organic marketing strategies for bringing in new healthcare
consumers. To ensure you’re receiving as many doctor referrals as possible,
you or your physician liaison must be proactive and exercise best practices in
professional communications and relationships. Here are several suggestions to
help you get started:
Meet
& greet
Welcome
every new healthcare professional to the area with a personal note or in-person
visit.
Build
and maintain relationships
If
you want doctors to refer their patients to your practice, they must trust your
ability to provide exceptional care. Not only that, but they’ve got to like
you. Reach out regularly to establish a friendly, professional relationship.
Get
involved
Referring
physicians are more likely to take notice of your practice, value your skills,
and entrust their patients to your care if you’re actively engaged with your
community.
Follow
up regularly
Thank
referring physicians with a phone call or handwritten note, and keep them
apprised of the referred patient’s condition and the course of treatment you
administered or prescribed. They’ll appreciate the information and your
attention to detail, which may also help persuade them to refer additional
patients to you.
Keep
it simple
Make
it easy for doctors to refer their patients to your practice. Keep your contact
information on your website, social media accounts, and business cards
up-to-date, and have an easy-to-use referral form on your website.
Scale
your outreach.
In
decades past, it was easy for solo practice specialists to build relationships
with referring doctors one-on-one. Today, hospitals and multilocation groups
are far too large, and the competition is too great to contemplate just
“dropping by with some business cards.” Instead, larger organizations rely on a
team of skilled physician liaisons and the right digital marketing tactics to
woo referring physicians.
See
also: Doctor Referral Building That Works
12.
Check in with your current healthcare consumers
Though
it may not compare to digital advertising, word-of-mouth referrals should
always be part of your overall medical marketing strategy.
Follow
up with your healthcare consumers after an appointment or procedure to see how
they’re doing. Ask about their families, or send birthday cards with a
personalized touch. You should also send emails and text reminders for
follow-up appointments (in-person or via telemedicine) and do whatever you can
to maintain a positive relationship.
Consumers
will always appreciate you taking the time to reach out and may go out of their
way to recommend your business to friends and family.
13.
Become an authority in your specific field of medicine
Prospective
healthcare consumers are more likely to remember brands that establish
themselves as an authority in their medical specialty. Your public relations
strategy should involve reaching out to appropriate media outlets when you have
something noteworthy to share—it’s almost free advertising for your healthcare
brand.
Stay
up-to-date with your specific healthcare industry niche through LinkedIn groups
and other online forums. Consider following sites like HARO (Help a Reporter
Out) to learn about interview opportunities. Submit healthcare community press
releases from time to time—and consider hiring outside help to boost your
visibility.
14.
Track your marketing strategy
You
should continuously monitor how your medical marketing strategy pays off in
terms of ROI. Each year, your healthcare marketing budget should adjust in
terms of what you want to focus on and be based on a careful study of your
metrics (performance analytics dashboard). There are many ways to do this type
of healthcare consumer marketing tracking:
Use
a CRM (customer relationship management system) like HubSpot to track how
healthcare consumers engage with your campaigns via emails, call centers, or
targeted landing pages.
Use
Google Analytics to determine which terms you rank for and which terms you’re
missing out on.
Track
your PPC campaigns by setting up Google AdWords.
Use
a HIPAA-compliant call-tracking system to see how your paid advertising is
paying off and monitor your front desk.
See
also: The HHS/CDC’s Gateway to Health Communication.
15.
Audit your call center’s response to your healthcare marketing initiatives
You
can have the best healthcare marketing strategy for anyone in your area, but
you lose money and opportunities if your call center cannot handle calls
properly. An audit of your healthcare consumers’ call center experiences may
reveal any of the following:
Long
hold times for potential consumers
Confusion
or consumer misinformation
A
slow scheduling system
An
inability (on the part of your staff) to discuss or present your healthcare
services
No
strategy in place to get consumers to make a commitment or book an appointment
We
strongly believe that no healthcare marketing strategy is complete without adequate
training for your call center. This helps you and your team learn how best to
represent your brand.
Ready
to update your marketing plan? Implement these 15 strategies to gain and keep
consumers and grow your business.
Strategic
Planning for Medical Tourism
In fact, planning is no less
important in a changing environment; it may well be more important.
Organizations need to be very clear on medical tourism industry needs and then
work to address them through similarly clear organizational missions,
priorities, and objectives.
The challenge of delivering patient care has become greater with changes in the
healthcare industry, and it is here that long-range or strategic planning for
medical tourism can be most helpful.
Planning is designed to help an organization define its vision for the future
and then determine systematically how it will get there, understanding
obstacles and figuring out ways to overcome them.
There is an important caveat.
Longer-range planning requires some level of organizational stability. It is
very difficult to plan in a crisis, and unrealistic to look five years ahead
unless an organization has some confidence that it will exist next year, and
that most of its key staff and its physicians will continue to be affiliated
with the organization.
Leadership also needs the time to plan, and with the daily challenges in an
organization, it is extremely beneficial to engage a healthcare consultant to
assist. Moreover, while planning provides increased organizational definition,
a sound base for planning is consensus concerning a well-defined mission
statement and/or organizational goals.
These must often be developed as a foundation for longer-term planning. It is
also difficult to plan if the organization is so young or its leadership so new
that they do not have a good sense of the medical tourism industry and of the
competition.
Most new organizations find that they do best by first attempting to reach
consensus on a mission statement and then doing shorter-range planning, usually
for a single year. Learning from that experience, they can begin a longer-term
planning process.
Planning that focuses on a period of
three years or more requires an organized, serious effort which takes time and
energy. Moreover, planning is not a one-time effort; any plan needs to be
reviewed, monitored, and updated.
The benefits to an organization can be significant — a clear focus, a sense of
joint purpose and agreed-upon priorities, consensus on strategies, and a basis
for measuring progress and impact. Patients recognize the hospital facility,
but individuals’ needs are typically more narrowly defined among:
- Bariatric
- Behavioral Health
- Cardiology
- Cardiovascular
- Emergency Department
- Geriatrics
- Imaging
- Neurosciences
- Oncology
- Orthopedics
- Outpatient Care
- Pediatrics
- Primary Care
- Rehabilitation
- Women’s Services
What’s more, there are the needs,
interests and influences of — and the consensus among — the
internal voices in your organization, including administrators, directors,
medical staff, employees and many others.Making it all more complex, the
competitive environment — and even the delivery system itself — is constantly
changing. Also the “customer” and their “purchase” are unlike any retail
transaction. Often, the objective is to provide a convincing solution in
advance of an actual patient need.
Did we mention patient
experience/satisfaction, institution branding and messaging, professional
reputation, wellness initiatives, community relations, cultural imperatives and
government regulations?
The critical elements of a hospital marketing plan are detailed in a series of previous educational articles.
- Target Marketing – Establishing Target Customers
- Competition Analysis
- SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and
Threats)
- SMART Goals
- Strategies and Tactics
- Marketing Budgets
- Marketing System
It’s not an easy task, but it is an
important one. A comprehensive marketing plan for hospitals provides the
insight and tools needed to anticipate, assess, prepare, build a roadmap to
follow, cover your bases, construct necessary support systems, protect yourself
in the healthcare marketplace, win consensus, inspire a winning culture and
specifically define the measure of your marketing success.
Disconnected
marketers… and what to do instead.
In this circus-like environment
that’s part art and part science, it’s nearly impossible to please everyone. Is
it any wonder that many CEOs don’t really trust marketers? This observation
isn’t exclusive to healthcare marketing. But, according to a Fournaise
performance survey in business, 80 percent of CEOs believe that
“marketers are too disconnected from the short-, medium- and long-term financial
realities of companies.“And that’s because 78 percent of these CEOs think
marketers too often lose sight of what the real job is: to generate more
customer demand for their products/services in a business-quantifiable and
business-measurable way.”
In our experience, most successful marketing
pros that we know are numbers-oriented people. A hospital marketing plan in
their hands is designed to clearly express specific goals and quantifiable
results. Ultimately, this is what creates business credibility with top
management.
Internally, they have learned to
communicate in hard numbers. They know that metrics, analytics and real-dollar
Return-on-Investment (ROI) numbers are the primary language of administrators
as well as physicians.
Doctors are trained in science, and
they rely on evidence-based practices. Similarly, business-minded
administrators, chief financial officers and managing executives will view a
hospital marketing plan from the bottom-line up. Neither group will be overly
impressed with what they regard as “soft metrics,” such as “the number of
brochures created and printed” or even “the number of people attending an
event” (production outcomes).
The true scoreboard
of success is an effective, strategic marketing plan that is carefully aligned
with — and supporting of — your hospital’s business objectives.
- Embrace strategic outcome metrics — The
number of website visitors, Facebook likes, blog articles
posted, social media mentions and the like constitute useful — but
intermediate — data. Construct the elements of your marketing plan to
account for quantifiable, measurable return on investment (dollars out
over dollars in). It should also account for other specific numbers, such
as trackable new patients, referrals and referral-source activity,
preference and image ratings, measurable market share and the like.
- Drive toward realistic expectations – The
nature of strategic plans is to achieve quantifiable goals. For each
service line or marketing campaign, include performance indicators that
can be monitored and managed from baseline to conclusion. And, whenever
possible, make midcourse adjustments that remove obstacles and enhance
success.
- Research prospects for success – Business
success favors those service lines where the marketing territories, target
audiences and consumer needs are the strongest. Orient your plan to
leverage those opportunities that meet public demand. It’s not about what
you’re selling; it’s about what the market needs and wants.
- Firm goals and flexible strategies – The
nation’s health care system continues to reinvent itself, and any viable
plan needs to adapt when necessary. A good marketing plan will hold to
achieving the defined goals and objectives, but also recognize that
anticipated strategies, tactics, media and budget to achieve the goals
can, and sometimes should, be modified for success.
- Track results in real time — While
after-the-fact analysis has value for future planning, immediate feedback
is a guide to flexibility and often allows for midcourse changes. Push the
winners; fix or stop losers. If you’re not tracking, you’re flying blind.
You’ve got to track… constantly and preferably in real time.
- Execute with enthusiasm — Marketing
is neither a “nice-to-have” initiative nor a business afterthought. The
sum effect of a plan is truly mission-critical for the viability and
growth of a hospital, regardless of the size of the facility or
organization. Consequently, an aggressive play-to-win attitude helps fuel
success. The attitude is contagious with management, medical staff,
colleagues, team members and ultimately the people and community that you
serve.
A
final thought…
For any hospital, large or small,
the construct and implementation of a comprehensive marketing plan
are complex and dynamic. (Please reach out to us, we can assist with
that.) As a starting point, connect with us here for creating a plan that meets
your hospital business objectives.
You’ll find more information
about building
a marketing system in our
instructional library. And for related reading, click through to these articles:
- Hospital Advertising Evolves: Achieving Results in an Ever-Changing Industry
- Healthcare Marketing:
15 Healthcare Strategies That Bring More Patients
- Building a Hospital Website
- The True Definition of ROI: Metrics for Profitable Hospital Marketing in
2014 [Podcast]
Use these simple, cost effective
marketing tips for your hospital to make it the preferred choice for patients.
Hospital marketing is challenging to
say the least. You can’t really inspire people to come visit a hospital. You
know they won’t. However, you need to increase your patient base to do justice
to all the investments you have made on your hospital and subtly marketing your
brand is the key. We share with you some tips that will help you create a brand
awareness with minimum investments.
8 Subtle Marketing Tips to Create
Awareness about Your Hospital Brand.
1. Get A Responsive Website
The first thing most potential
patients will try to do is go through your website (until and unless it is an
emergency and your hospital happens to be the nearest) and find out as much
about your hospital as possible, online. So don’t just build a website that
displays information about your hospital and your team, but focus on giving
patients useful health information to take better care of themselves and their
family. Good idea would be to talk about preventive care.
2. Use Social Media Well
The world is on social media. Facebook,
Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and the likes are the virtual places where you can
reach to create brand awareness with potential customers as well as attract
good talent. Appearing on social news feeds often will go a long way in keeping
you in the mind of the users. Interesting posts keep people interested. And
people remember useful tips and their source.
3. Don’t Underestimate the Power of
SEO
You know your potential consumer is
going to hit Google, right? When your potential patient searches for best
healthcare practice you want your hospital’s website to pop up on the first
page. That is what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) does. Get your web
developer and content editor to focus on SEO keywords. Hire a SEO consultant,
you do not need a full time employee on your payroll for this.
4. Stress on Internal Marketing too
That’s right. Every employee of your
hospital is your spokesperson. Get your HR Head to make the employee experience
at your hospital great and get them talking good things about their hospital.
5. Give Patient a Chance to Say Wow
Branding is not what you tell your
customers, it’s what they tell each other about you. Enhance patient care, and
they are sure to remember it for a long time. Give them care and attention and
they will speak for you. Get your Operations Head to work towards giving the
patient an exceptional experience. Nothing works better than Word of Mouth.
6. Shoot Emails
Emails are effective. Get your IT
team to maintain a subscriber email list and share helpful informative emails
based on the patient’s illness. It tells your patients that you care for them
even after they leave your hospital. Maintaining communication with useful,
helpful and high value information is key to building a good hospital brand.
7. Showcase
Get your good work out there as
testimonials, videos, patient stories etc. Post on your website, post and
re-post on social media, show it on the LCDs in the hospital waiting areas.
Talk about break through treatments in interviews, conferences and public forums.
8. Automate your operations
The patient and the family is
already stressed when they are in a hospital. Make their experience simple and
easy by using a reliable Hospital Information System (HIS). This will make a
world of a difference in the experience right from registration to patient
discharge. Another pain point for patients is the way hospitals manage health
insurance claims and settlement. Using a robust revenue cycle management
solution (RCM) would play an important role in taking the stress out of
hospital insurance claims management.
Show your patients and the society
in general that you care about their health and well-being and you really do
not want them to reach a stage where they have to go to a hospital.