Neglecting marketing in today’s market is like extracting a tooth at home – cheap but long and painful. The comparison with dentistry is not accidental here, and the conversation will go directly to medical marketing, the features of which set their own rules of the game. But the solutions to these rules are suitable for promoting medical centers and companies from other areas.

What will you learn today:

1. Features of the medical business.
2. Marketing in medicine and its types.
3. Stages of formation of marketing strategies for medical services.
4. Medical marketing trends.
5. Examples of medical marketing that worked in the West.

Features of the medical business

Features of the medical business determine the approach to promoting medical services. If they are not considered, it will not be possible to promote a private clinic effectively.

Patient ≠ customer. The choice of a clinic or an individual specialist is approached with more responsibility than the choice of any product. A person often experiences nervousness or fear for his health, trusting him to another. He also understands that some procedures may be accompanied by pain. Most patients are informationally limited and forced to completely trust their doctor, taking the prescribed treatment and following the recommendations.

Doctor ≠ seller. Not only the quality of the service but also the health (sometimes life) of a person depends on the professionalism and experience of the doctor. Therefore, during the initial examination, diagnosis, and treatment, the doctor must strictly follow the instructions and consider many different factors. All his actions should achieve a result – improving the patient’s condition. The effectiveness of the doctor’s work directly affects his reputation and the reputation of the entire clinic.

Medical service ≠ another service. Consulting a doctor regarding its consequences for the patient is not the same as going to a hairdresser or a trip to a car service. After all, the problem with which a person turns to a specialist often affects the quality of his life. Therefore, its solution, which includes medical materials, personnel manipulation, laboratory work, and specialized equipment, has a relative value.

The doctor-patient relationship is very important. The actions and behavior of clinic workers should reduce the psychological discomfort that most clinic visitors experience. A simple conversation often helps. After making a diagnosis, the doctor should tell the patient about his disease and treatment methods because the unknown is most frightening. The tone of the conversation, the degree of confidence of the specialist, and his appearance have a psychological impact on the patient and affect the doctor’s reputation, sometimes more than the result.

In addition to private, there are states. Healthcare organizations. This circumstance cannot be ignored in strategic planning of development and calculation of the competitiveness of services. A properly defined market landscape is the foundation for all marketing and analytic processes. For example, in developing an advertising campaign, reliable data on competitors helps save time and money.

Medicine and its types

Based on the characteristics of the medical business, we distinguish 5 types of marketing for promotion in the

social media marketing sector. Based on them, you can build an effective marketing plan. Types into which we divide marketing in medicine:

Organization marketing. The branding of the entire healthcare marketing comapny facility as a whole. This is the most prevalent form of advertising. However, in some cases, the effectiveness of this type of marketing promotion may be inferior to that of other types of marketing promotion.

Marketing specific services. It is effective when used with a clinic specializing in a specific medical field. This type of marketing is used in response to seasonality and other factors. For instance, offering discounts on an allergist visit during the spring, when most people experience a worsening of their allergy to plant pollen, is a fairly justified promotional measure.

Medical marketing specialists. A very effective marketing promotion aimed at improving the reputation of the leading doctors of the clinic. After all, often, patients unconsciously associate the success of a specialist with the success of the entire institution. Yes, and a particular doctor is usually chosen based on reviews about him on the Internet and friends’ opinions.

Place marketing. This type of promotion of a medical institution is suitable for various sanatoriums and specialized medical organizations located in certain places. Often these are resort towns of the Black Sea coast and the Caucasus. Here, attention is focused on favorable conditions that contribute to a speedy recovery and their medical effects on the body.

Medical marketing ideas. In medical services, this may promote innovative treatment methods developed by clinicians or certain laboratory tests that are difficult to access.

Naturally, each of the listed promotion types should be tailored to the needs of a specific target group of customers. Marketing analytics identifies the target audience (TA) and its desires. These can be surveys and parsing in social networks, traffic segmentation from the site, and other methods.

The above types of marketing promotion, in most cases, should be used in combination, which will help to achieve much more tangible results and cover a wide target audience.

Stages of formation of marketing strategies for medical services

To fully use the concept of branding in the healthcare marketing agency, you need to break down all the work into its parts. Usually, professional marketers are involved in forming a marketing strategy, but business owners should also be at least a little familiar with the topic. So what needs to be done:

Step 1. Gather information about the local health care marketing

Evaluate the capabilities of your institution in the early stages of its existence and compare it with the rest of the market in which, one way or another, you will have to work. This includes an analysis of the maximum patency of patients and the quality of service. In addition, predicting how medicine will develop in a more or less foreseeable period is necessary.

Stage 2. Study the target audience

At this stage, you need to analyze the behavior of patients in the area. It is important to identify the factors that encourage them to turn to competitors or refuse their services. It is necessary to understand why one group of patients prefers to go to fortune-tellers and alternative medicine specialists. In contrast, the other systematically go to an appointment at a clinic located in a remote area of ​​the city.

Stage 3. Conduct a demand analysis for specific services

It is desirable to study the behavior of consumers in dynamics over the past few years or another period. This will give a more detailed picture and help determine how advanced medicine is in general and find factors that affect demand.

Stage 4. Analysis of direct competitors for marketing

You need to know as much as possible about organizations working in the same field as you. Every clue matters here. The main questions of interest to us will be the number of funds spent by a medical institution for the provision of services and their cost, the composition of patients, the chosen marketing strategy, the advantages of competitors over us, discounts provided to customers, the financial situation of the organization. This is one of the most important parts of which marketing consists.

Stage 5. Selection of advertising channels

Television, radio, print media, social networks, instant messengers, and various aggregators help promote a medical brand. Therefore, here the scope for imagination is huge, as never before. It remains only to find a way to position your medical brand and find the right channels.

The more carefully the analytical work in these areas, the more effective the marketing and the developed strategy will be. The dependence here is the same as between the exact diagnosis and the prescribed treatment. Therefore, it is better not to save on analytical work and not rush.

It is also very important to control marketing at all stages. This approach will help to understand how viable the chosen development strategy is. To do this, you need to break down one global goal (for example, market leadership) into many small goals that are achievable shortly. For each of them, it is necessary to determine its implementation period. Thus, you will get a whole marketing plan. This allows you to track the work results and helps you stay motivated over time, making small but important achievements more visible.

Medical Marketing Trends

Thanks to information technology’s progress and rapid development, you can reach your target audience differently. However, complications can arise when dealing with such a delicate subject as healthcare.

This is because the marketing of most clinics and centers comes down to a standard set: website creation + SEO, contextual advertising, activity in social networks. And all ends with leaflets with information about promotions and discounts. Of course, these techniques are not ineffective, producing results. But if we are talking about achieving undisputed leadership in the market, we need to use non-standard solutions.

Trends that are gaining momentum, which marked the marketing in medicine in recent years:

• Mobile applications. More and more people prefer to access the Internet through mobile devices. What prevents us from making our medical brand even closer to people through our mobile application. On this basis, you can create a comprehensive marketing strategy. For example, a clinic specializing in cardiovascular medicine could commission a well-being diary, where their patients could enter their blood pressure and pulse data every day and record sensations. This requires certain investments, but there are few alternatives to such marketing today.
• Marketing with narrow specialization. Recently, more impressive results in their development have been shown by small specialized clinics or private family-sized offices for several specialists. This is a smooth return to the pre-revolutionary form of such a business and, at the same time, a look at Europe, where private medicine still coexists perfectly with public health systems.
• Integration into messengers. In addition to social networks, WhatsApp, Viber, Telegram, and Skype have already firmly entered our lives. Many people use them to solve their everyday problems, including making appointments with doctors. For well-known centers, such marketing is a common practice. Therefore, do not be too lazy to leave contacts on your messengers on the clinic’s website. So you will become even closer to your patients and get new ones.
• New generation content in marketing. Standard medical texts and footcloths about the merits of the clinic are commonplace. However, you need slightly different content marketing to interest the user and eventually see him at home. This will help different types of information materials. It can be comics, audio in the form of useful and entertaining podcasts about health, various graphic content. At the same time, thanks to a well-thought-out presentation, the behavioral factors of the site, such as traffic and the time spent by users, will improve. All of this will take your marketing to the next level over time.
• Appeal to each patient personally. This is made possible by fine-grained targeting with multiple social media filters. Today, skillfully using this system, it is possible to divide all clinic patients into groups and present each with a unique offer, calculated exactly for her needs. By the birthday of your regular customer, you can show his friends an advertisement to purchase gift certificates and discounts on medical services for such a wonderful occasion. And we are not talking about the possibilities of working with the audience of competitors. This is the true marketing of the future.
• More interesting medical videos. Given the unprecedented growth in the popularity of video aggregators and the vacancy of this niche by healthcare organizations in our country, it is worth acting now. The format of a short video on medical topics allows you to present often boring information about diseases and their prevention in an unobtrusive, simple, and understandable language, sometimes with humor. Your possibilities here are limited only by your imagination. At the same time, this is a great chance to present clinic doctors and certain services in a more native way than is usually done on websites.
• Medicine with a new level of service. Thanks to the abundance of offers and advertising, patients began to appreciate the quality of medical services and their comfort. This must be considered when hiring staff and organizing the clinic’s work. It is worth remembering that the patient, in most cases, would rather find another institution than agree to make an appointment at an inconvenient time. It is also necessary to create all the conditions for a comfortable stay inside the clinic itself. This includes the neatness of the staff, its friendliness, cleanliness of the premises and much more. These parties are also part of the reputation of your business. Modern marketing consists of similar nuances.
• Health Gadgets. These are modern, convenient devices that allow many patients worldwide to diagnose their condition without a doctor. Today, manufacturers of such gadgets are actively cooperating with large clinics. So a specialist who advises his patient to use, for example, a fitness bracelet saves him time and often money for a repeat visit. It is difficult to find a replacement for such marketing in terms of the effect produced. In addition, Western medicine is already using the practice, according to which a person who buys a device under the prescription of a doctor pays significantly less for it. Paradoxically, such cooperation between the gadget manufacturer and the clinic is also medical marketing for both brands and positively affects reputation.
• Development of telemedicine. The essence of such medicine lies in remote medical care through modern communication channels. This is a solution that, according to experts, will soon allow many patients to save their time by not wasting it on trips to clinics. Moreover, the medical service will become especially relevant for residents of megacities who do not want to once again travel long distances to a healthcare facility to find out the results of tests and get a doctor’s advice.

These trends in the development of marketing in medicine will help you stay ahead of progress. Their integrated use will provide a faster and more tangible effect when implementing a promotion strategy. Moreover, we are talking about both large and medium-sized, as well as small companies operating in Moscow or regions whose specialization is medicine. To further stimulate your imagination, below we have compiled impressive examples of business promotion abroad that are worth knowing about.

Examples of medical marketing that worked in the West

Establishing a trusting relationship with your target audience is impossible for every brand. What can we say about companies specializing in such a delicate area as medicine? However, with a non-standard approach and a little courage, you can always use any business feature to your advantage and find unexpected solutions. The following cases are excellent examples of this:

Information and support. The American Breast Cancer Center Carilion launched a campaign on Twitter. By following a pre-set hashtag on a social network, you could learn about breast cancer and destroy your stereotypes about this disease. Participants also had the opportunity to go to the clinic’s website to support women with this diagnosis.

The Dana Farber Cancer Institute, which also specializes in women’s oncology, has its own YouTube channel, an unconventional method for medical marketing strategies. The videos posted on the channel help raise the spirit of patients tell them that everything is not so scary. It also contains information about what has been achieved in medicine, innovative methods of cancer treatment, and reports on the results of their application.

A fun selfie for men’s health is also marketing. How to tactfully draw attention to delicate male issues? Run a fake mustache selfie contest on social media as Anne Arundel Medical Center did. As a result, traffic to the institution’s website has increased significantly. Such advertising would not hurt any medical center.

Creation of a friendly online community of patients. As time has shown, this is also a very effective way to increase brand loyalty. For example, the Floating Hospital for Children, which specializes in treating children with various diseases, has created a website with a blog for their mothers, who can communicate, share their stories, find support and new girlfriends.

Donation and football. Leo Burnett Tailor Made for the Hemoba Foundation attracted thousands of new donors to blood donations very unusually in Brazil. It was necessary to combine sports, marketing, and medicine. It was enough to negotiate with a popular football club in the country, whose players wore uniforms with white stripes instead of the traditional red ones for the next match. According to the terms of the campaign, anyone could help return the players to their famous colors by donating blood. So, with the influx of new donors, more and more red stripes appeared on the team’s uniform in subsequent matches. This is one example of how marketing and medicine can influence each other.

Entertaining infographic. This way of interacting with the audience in marketing is picked up by an increasing number of healthcare organizations every year. Remember the hand-drawn information posters in our clinics and hospitals? In the digital world, medical infographics play their role. For example, the Western Pediatrics Center Banner Health has achieved great success in its application. On the created schemes, in an accessible form, it was told about the permissible sugar content in a child’s daily diet and debunked stereotypes about the flu. This is a great option to help present large amounts of complex information in the form of a picture diagram. In this era of clip thinking, where users are often not ready to spend more than a few minutes reading large text, infographics are an excellent weapon in the hands of marketers.

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