A Definitive Guide to Healthcare Marketing

What Is Healthcare Marketing?

While healthcare marketing implements a lot of the core practices and principles that other businesses or organizations use to market their brands, healthcare is inherently unique because of the various considerations that come into play, particularly compliance with strict regulations and requirements set forth by:

• Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
• Stark Law
• Anti-Kickback Statute

And several others.

It is critical to protect patients’ privacy, promote patient health, and remain in compliance with all rules and regulations while promoting your brand and message. Quality healthcare marketing works to achieve just that. But quality marketing doesn’t happen without strategic, thoughtful planning.

Why Does Healthcare Marketing Matter?

Whether your practice, clinic, facility, or organization has been around for decades or you have just opened your doors to begin serving patients, how you market yourself will determine whether your practice or organization scrapes by or grows into a reputable and in-demand one.

Effective marketing not only keeps you in compliance but also increases brand visibility, captures the attention of potential patients or their family members, and enhances your patients’ experiences.

With guidance and direction from a strategic healthcare marketing plan, you can improve your reach with audiences and provide strong messaging about your offerings, values, practice models, and anything else that shows your target audience why your organization is worth considering.

6 Steps to Creating an Effective Healthcare Marketing Strategy

Crafting a marketing strategy that will take your healthcare practice or organization to the next level involves six critical steps.

1. Perform a Thorough Healthcare Market Analysis

To successfully tap into your target audience, you first have to understand how your market functions. What trends make it tick? What nuances separate it from other markets? What do patients and larger audiences expect when they engage with your market?

By investigating these questions and others, you’ll gain valuable insights into your market and a clearer understanding of how your organization needs to operate.

When performing your analysis, consider looking at your market from these angles:

Your Competitors

How many competitors are in your service area(s)? What does their marketing look like? How effective does their marketing seem to be? What marketing channels are they not using or not using well?

Evaluating your competition and the things they are doing to reach the same target audience can give you better direction for your own marketing strategy. Think of it like studying their plays on the court so that your team can craft and execute a stronger playbook.

Your Market’s Trends

Trends in the healthcare industry gradually change as new research is conducted, technology evolves, new developments come into focus, and nuances are better understood. For example, we used to think cardiovascular disease affected men and women similarly, and heart attacks presented similarly for both sexes. But now, after decades of research, we know that cardiovascular disease in women can present much differently than in men, and heart attack symptoms for women are often less obvious.

Another example is the shift from symptom-based care to holistic care. Healthcare in general used to heavily lean into the symptom-based model, where providers developed care and treatment plans strictly around ailments. Now, more providers are leaning into holistic care, which considers the health of the whole person—mind, body, and spirit—when crafting a care or treatment plan.

By knowing the trends affecting your particular corner of the healthcare industry and which direction trends are moving in, you can shape your marketing strategies to stay current and meet audience expectations.

2. Define Your Goals

A strategy is nothing if there is no goal to pursue. And without a marketing goal, it’s impossible to know if your marketing efforts are working.

Establishing the goals you want to achieve through healthcare marketing creates a clearer path to success. As you move toward your goals, you can see if you’re veering off course and determine how to pivot to keep moving forward. Goals give you something to move toward. Reaching them means accomplishing growth-oriented actions that elevate your business, grow patient bases, and/or improve bottom lines.

SMART Goals

The best kind of goal is a SMART goal, or one that is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. For example, if you want to increase the number of new patients you serve within a year, your SMART goal could be:

“To increase patient acquisition by 10% within the next 12 months.”

This goal is:

• Specific: Increasing the percentage of new patients your practice serves by 10% within 12 months.
• Measurable: Throughout the year, you can track progress and determine whether the percentage of patient acquisition has grown or stalled since the start date. Based on the results of each check-in, you can adjust, pivot, or push forward to reach or even exceed the goal.
• Achievable: Increasing the number of new patients by 10% is likely a challenging yet reasonable number, especially for smaller practices still working to become an established name in their market and service area(s). For almost any practice, it would be entirely unachievable to aim for a 100% increase.
• Relevant: Working to increase the percentage of patient acquisition is completely relevant for a healthcare practice.
• Time-bound: With a deadline of 12 months, you have given your team a clear timeframe to complete the job.

3. Define Your Audience(s)

If you’ve served patients in your service area(s) for many years, you may have a good understanding of who your audience is and how they operate. If your practice is newer, you may have less of an idea of what your audience expects and how they engage with practices like yours.

Regardless of your understanding of your target audience, it’s helpful to perform an audit of existing patients, prospective patients, family members, caregivers, and anyone else in your audience so that you can improve engagement and communication.

When looking at your audience, you need to clearly define:

• Who they are (Demographics like age, sex, education, income, geographic location, family status, etc.)
• How they think (Psychographics like personality, lifestyle, values, attitudes, interests, etc.)
• What they need (Do they tend to need your services for themselves, a child, a senior, etc.?).
• Why they need your services (Is it because they are experiencing symptoms, suffering from conditions, needing general checkups to health maintenance, etc.?)
• When they need your services (Is it on a routine basis, as-needed basis, emergency basis, etc.?)

To help you define these aspects of your audience, it’s wise to build patient personas, or detailed representations of your ideal patient(s). Through market research and data analysis of your current patient base, you can craft a complete persona representing your average patient that can be used as a guiding light when creating marketing strategies, targeted campaigns, and personalized messages.

As your audiences shift or their preferences and expectations change, you can adjust your persona to stay current with your marketing strategies and even your practice models.

4. Strengthen Your Brand

Before you can execute a well-crafted marketing strategy for your healthcare organization, it’s crucial to have a well-established, cohesive brand that is consistently used across all your marketing collateral, from your website to your business cards.

A consistent, cohesive brand is not a recommendation; it is an absolute must-have. Without a consistent brand, people can easily lose trust in your practice or organization. And that is a dangerous possibility in the ultra-competitive healthcare industry.

Trust is the most valuable thing you must earn from your patients, since you hold the proverbial keys to their health and comfort. They can only trust that your practice will shepherd them toward better health and healing. If you don’t earn their trust or you lose it, they can easily turn to your competition for the care they are looking for.

Inconsistent branding is simply not trustworthy. Signs of inconsistent branding include:

• Using multiple logos at the same time.
• Having multiple mission or vision statements in rotation.
• Not using established branding colors, fonts, or imagery across your marketing collateral.

Essentially, a mistrusted brand does not have or does not use an established brand identity or brand voice.

Brand Identity and Brand Voice

Your brand goes beyond your practice’s name and logo. It’s the combination of what audiences see (identity) and what people hear (voice) when they engage with your brand.

Why Partner With an Agency That Knows Healthcare Marketing?

It can feel overwhelming to keep up with the constantly changing trends, expectations, and requirements in healthcare marketing. Crafting a unique strategy that will elevate you above your local competition can also seem like a challenge.

But when you turn to a marketing agency like M&R that understands the specific and nuanced needs in healthcare marketing, you’ll see how detailed strategy and execution come together to result in success for your organization. It takes more than a generic website and cookie-cutter marketing plan to reach your audience and grow your practice—you need individualized solutions, built around your organization’s ultra-specific and unique needs, that will most effectively grab your audience’s attention and increase conversions.

Since 2008, M&R Marketing has dedicated itself to serving healthcare professionals, crafting marketing strategies and tactics that have reached organizations’ goals campaign after campaign.

Want proof? Check out the full case studies of some of our healthcare clients:

Create an Effective Healthcare Marketing Strategy with M&R Marketing

When you partner with M&R Marketing, you’ll partner with a full-service team dedicated to seeing your organization thrive in your vertical. We are an in-house team of digital marketers, web developers, graphic designers, copywriters, project managers, and business development managers, all ready to design and execute the custom marketing solutions you need to reach your audience, earn trust, increase your patient base, and further develop your name and reputation in the communities you serve.

Ready to Get Started? Call M&R Marketing at 478-621-4491 and Tell Us About Your Healthcare Marketing Needs Today.

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