B2C Marketing for Healthcare Providers

Data is golden, and the digital marketing industry is flourishing. According to a Forrester report digital marketing spend will reach $146 billion by 2023, growing at a 9% compound annual growth rate (CAGR). In the context of healthcare marketing, this projection stands out.

Consumerism by and large has radically changed the way healthcare providers are now required to market their offerings. Many of today’s clients look for a digitally advanced healthcare experience, just like the innovation they expect in any other industry.

Healthcare systems and medical practices are thus evolving by the hour to live up to these expectations in order to remain competitive and to avoid staying behind. Consumers are now empowered to choose the best healthcare experience, with supreme credibility given to high-quality services provided.

As a healthcare marketer, approximately 89% of your potential clients with a college degree search the internet for health-related information, and 70% of these potential clients are internet users with a high school degree. And of those who say they were swayed by what they read online the last time they sought health information, 70% say that information influenced their decision about how to treat an illness or condition.

While your current patient volume may be sufficient for your business, marketing your practice digitally can still not be neglected. How else do you plan on maintaining your brand’s recall value for existing clients, or to get potential clients to know you and reach out?

It is understandable, though, that your primary attention is invested in patient care, leaving you with hardly any time to strategize your marketing plan. Precisely why the ease and tact of hiring an agency that specializes in healthcare marketing can come into play. You might have to allot a bigger budget than you have before, but it can certainly be worth the investment when you enjoy your bottom line growing consistently thereafter.

Healthcare digital marketing can be tricky if a novice experiments with it, as the set of regulations, if not adhered to, can cause legal repercussions. Hence, as a healthcare provider who is likely not very well-versed in the digital marketing of a medical entity, it is vital that you only go about it via a professional marketing agency that specializes in healthcare marketing and is well aware of HIPAA compliance.

We at Global Minds Solutions (GTBPO) understand that digital marketing requires trained professionals with the background and experience to analyse the demands and constantly shifting dynamics of patient care and implement effective strategies. Hiring professional services like GTBPO to steer your digital marketing can be beneficial to your digital marketing efforts, as it is time-consuming to stay abreast of the ongoing growth and development in the field of digital marketing.

We manage our clients outreach and expectations at all times, and we work closely with narrow segments of our clients solution and services, or target one or two segments of their audience at a time. We track established KPIs on regular basis, and scale accordingly. We work with patience and perseverance. Depending on our clients marketing mix, sometimes it can take several months to nurture and start converting prospects for healthcare product/service engagement. In the end, the progress we make while engaging more end-consumers will re-validate our clients products or services B2B customers and prospects as well.

The time has come for healthcare providers to wake up to the modern consumer and start building the alignment, capabilities, and infrastructure to support next-gen marketing in healthcare. Healthcare consumers have never been more empowered than they are today. The COVID-19 pandemic forced healthcare providers to adapt quickly to continue delivering patient care, including by pivoting to digital care. Seemingly overnight, telehealth went from an industry sidenote to the primary means of seeing noncritical patients. Healthcare consumers also saw global retailers, grocery store chains, and other disrupters demon­strate how convenient it can be to order your health products online for delivery or curb side pickup.

Consumers increasingly expect transparent, predictable, and mobile-friendly experiences, but most healthcare organizations have failed to keep up. Although healthcare providers have more options for how to spend limited marketing budgets, many have chosen to stick with the familiar traditional, and digital-marketing channels such as billboards and ads on television, on the radio, and in magazines, and with a one-size-fits-all digital presence.

We at GTBPO have witnessed that today, health systems have the same aspirations as companies in any industry: to engender long-term relationships with their consumers. Consumer goods, retail, and e-commerce leaders set the original bar and continue to push it higher today. A 2021 McKinsey survey of more than 3,000 US healthcare consumers found that satisfied patients are 28 percent less likely to switch providers.

Healthcare providers that are ready to rethink their marketing approach to grow and maintain continuity of care, or work to gain back what has been lost in recent years have their work cut out for them. In our experience, healthcare providers that implemented changes focused on improving the consumer experience, including through marketing efforts, saw their revenue increase by up to 20 percent over five years, while costs to serve decreased by up to 30 percent.

We work closely with healthcare providers to bring it all together and achieve lofty marketing ambitions. We worked with one regional healthcare provider through our agile marketing team as part of its digital transformation process focused on increasing the share of new patients who schedule appointments digitally instead of over the phone or in person. We were able to build a backlog of more than 300 test ideas representing a wide variety of goals and priorities, from improving online scheduling to optimizing content on specific pages. We prioritized half of these tests to launch in a period of only 12 months, yielding an impressive test success rate of about 50 percent. When successful tests were scaled by our teams, the healthcare provider tripled the number of new patients from digital channels, compared with before the transformation.

We have seen that today, most healthcare providers have critical capability gaps that stand in the way of mounting an end-to-end, personalized consumer journey:

The theme of these challenges is fragmented information. Our next-level marketing suite is built on a robust, integrated technology stack enabling real-time information through omnichannel consumer touchpoints, and 360-degree view of consumer-centric data. In addition, we understand that no marketing function operates with an unlimited budget, we work closely with healthcare providers to prioritize use cases that can add great value to healthcare services and bottom line.

In our experience, patient scheduling tends to be a priority growth lever for healthcare providers and systems. This makes sense considering that being able to easily schedule an appointment is a critical step in the consumer healthcare journey. Use cases that improve scheduling would thus rise to the top of the priority list and the budgeting conversation. For other providers, use cases could include better patient communication management to facilitate follow-up care.

Reliable collaboration between our marketing and technology teams is paramount to achieving seamless healthcare consumer journeys.

Given that these marketing touchpoints span the entire healthcare consumer experience, from learning about a provider to scheduling a visit and receiving care and follow-up care, reliable collab­oration between the marketing and technology teams is paramount to achieving seamless healthcare consumer journeys. And to deliver it, our integrated technology stack across both digital and traditional channels is essential.

Our B2B partners whether healthcare employers, providers, payers or enterprises, recognize that they have bought into our healthcare marketing services because they believe that we can deliver a positive outcome for their end-consumers. Healthcare consumers are increasingly savvy and have high expectations for personalized connections. The key elements of our strategy that enables our partners to acquire consumer/patient buy-in are:

As a healthcare marketer, we have witnessed rapid changes in the healthcare industry that requires agility and focus. We have in the past devised effective plans for healthcare providers ranging from hospitals and health device companies to clinics and solo practitioners. Below are some methods that can be applied for varied healthcare clientele to boost their practices:

For companies whose service or product must be purchased or opted into by a healthcare consumer, like a branded fitness program or medical equipment that is eligible for insurance reimbursement, the most immediate measure of consumer experience is typically satisfaction with your solution. This means that you should take responsibility for generating brand awareness at the consumer level as well as for generating leads to your B2B partner.

While B2C marketing may take a rap for high cost, there are ways to mitigate the potential for overspend and waste to achieve a positive ROI. Our highly focused media and creative services are key to efficient marketing. Here are some strategies that we have adopted successfully while delivering exceptional results for our B2C healthcare marketing clients:

Generally, marketers use the term “attribution” to describe the process of measuring the effects of marketing efforts and the rate at which they convert consumers to achieve desired consumer outcomes. Although attribution serves as a crucial indicator, but our view is that consumer outcomes are not the only measure of ROI; the ulti­mate goal is an improved patient experience and potentially improved health outcomes.

A simple example would be analysing the click-through rates of marketing emails to determine what messaging is most effective. Attribution analysis is a critical component of measuring the financial ROI of spending on digital marketing in healthcare, and most providers and systems today are early in the process of building out their marketing-attribution capabilities. As a result, the healthcare providers are often misaligned on what works, which can greatly affect marketing’s budget allocation.

The challenges related to marketing-attribution capabilities faced by healthcare providers are resolved by GTBPO based on providing real-time insights and reports as to how individual digital channels, such as paid media or the provider’s website are driving new patient appointments booked via phone calls or online.

Another challenge faced by healthcare providers related to industry regulations require that healthcare data be anonymized adding complexity to its measurement, but the regulations does not preclude it from being measured. We at GTBPO have developed three attribution tools in particular can help healthcare providers effectively mea­sure what works.