Mid-year 2015 – Healthcare Marketing Trends That Can Eat Your Lunch
With new medical coding requirements, fresh regulatory uncertainty, advanced online consumer sampling, and increasing competition across the board, the healthcare industry faces a host of new challenges in mid-2015. Targeted marketing and educational efforts remain key to retaining patients and physicians, as well as building market share.
How is your clinic, practice or hospital dealing with these trends as we approach the midpoint of 2015? 
The attention span of a clinical gnat – Patients, influencers, physicians, medical professionals and prospects all share one thing in common: they have little or no time to absorb and act on complex information. Infographics and short FAQ documents – especially online – can help combat information overload and fatigue.
We spent a fortune on our Web site and Google trashed it – Earlier in 2015 Google announced that it was rewarding Web sites that were optimized for mobile devices. This of course reflects the continual migration of users to mobile platforms like tablets and smartphones (which is endemic in the medical world). Google remonstrated that its new search algorithms would not “penalize” non-mobile sites, but when your search ranking is lowered, what’s the difference? Many hospitals and clinics have responded by at least re-designing their home page (including having “run-on” mobile-friendly formats) and selected key pages to incorporate mobile best practices. Meanwhile, for those with older sites, haul out those key words and other SEO legitimate enhancements.
Dropped a bowling ball on those ants yet? – Often if you want to make a hospital CEO roll his or her eyes, tell them that you’re planning on a rolling out a new brand campaign. To change brand perception through advertising often requires a digital, electronic and print broadside if you want to do things in hurry. Building a reputation long-term with consistent communication (re: effective PR) and consistent performance is hard to replace.
Key words for success: relevancy and authenticity With the Internet having effectively become the all-important Second Opinion (and sometimes the First, Second and Third Opinion), demonstrating a high degree of relevancy – coupled with believable authenticity – is critical to keep anxiety low and trust high among your patient, family and key influencer populations. Much of this takes place online. Many medical and healthcare sites offer self-diagnostic automated decision trees. If you’re not offering this type of useful service, your competitor probably is. Wonder why so many marketing firms put photos of their docs and critical care personnel on high-traffic billboards? People want to see who is operating on them or offering them expensive advice.
These and more trends impact the success of your practice, clinic or hospital every day. Want to know more? Contact Michael Snyder at msnyder@themekgroup.com, and or call 317-805-4870 today.