Healthcare Marketing

Patient satisfaction, retaining providers, and healthcare marketing

How can you retain and build your market share while delivering great outcomes?

In the days of star ratings and patient satisfaction, staff recruitment and retention, reducing costs and maintaining quality (not to mention patient safety), reimbursement and revenue issues, and more, hospital administrators and staff must juggle resources and capacity (all while delivering good outcomes for patients and families). Meanwhile, a unique and ironic brand challenge still remains for healthcare professionals.

Successful healthcare marketing and PR builds brands and positively differentiates hospitals, clinics or practices, in spite of the fact that healthcare is often intrusive, inconvenient, sometimes perceived as not fully effective, and of course, expensive. Recognizing that patients often face anxiety and uncertainty, effective healthcare communication (whether by providers, marketers or staff) produces calming confidence, elevating patient loyalty and satisfaction. In a time of COVID-spawned mistrust, this is an important consideration for all, particularly to preserve and grow market share. Effective marketing and PR appropriately magnifies great patient service and provider performance.

Healthcare marketing and communication (both internal and external) is complex and involves/touches many people, teams, and influencers. Here are a few thoughts to consider:

Talk about health in your marketing messaging, not healthcare. Be personable and human. Reduce abstractions and be attractive.

Focus on building positive, empathic relationships. Well-meaning physicians (who are under pressure to multi-task, including simultaneous EHR input) sometimes interrupt patients within 18 seconds after asking a question (as research shows from the Cleveland Clinic). The outcome? The patient can feel that they’re not being listened to, which can reduce confidence and ultimately, satisfaction.

Here are some additional considerations:

• List specific hospital strengths. How do they stack up and are differentiated/positioned against competition?
• Remember that logos and taglines are important, but they don’t equal a brand. A brand is a living actionable mental (and emotional) perspective that exists in your patient’s mind – that brand perception directly influences star ratings and patient satisfaction scores (which in term impacts revenue).
• Perceived brand and patient experience go hand-in-hand (when possible, regularly measure external and internal perceptions of performance and perception – as a reminder, regularly check and update your hospital/practice Google Business Profile; this includes posting appropriate photos, short videos and short blog posts laden with key words – and the all-important star ratings).
• Deliver on  promises. Brand equals promise. A broken promise can erode and ultimately be lethal to a brand, and to whether a patient will return (or score a one-star rating).
• Brands take a long time to build and require targeted energy to maintain. But in a crisis, brands can be bruised, even destroyed, in a day or even minutes.

Want some MEK bona fides? Here’s one perhaps to consider:

Want more? Contact the experienced healthcare marketing professionals at MEK!

(Looking for fresh thoughts? Click here for a brief summary of healthcare strategies and marketing tips.)