Ready for 2015? – Advance your hospital with patient-focused marketing
For many hospitals, early fall is strategic planning and budgeting time. What can a hospital do now to make 2015 a standout year?
As the healthcare regulatory and compensation environments swirl ever more complex, can smaller and rural area hospitals and clinics effectively compete with larger urban area medical facilities?
The answer, resoundingly, is yes!
Smaller hospitals already possess key positive differentiators. Here are some thoughts on how to improve your hospital’s marketing outreach and put those differentiators to work:
What’s your top service line? What does your hospital do best? With the past “hospital arms race,” some smaller hospitals can’t compete on the basis of available technology. But they sure can compete on personalized service. What high-demand service do you offer that people need to know about?
How personal are you? Selecting a medical provider and giving one over to care is a highly personalized decision, often laced with fear, uncertainty and doubt. People like to entrust this type of care over to people they know. Are images and photos of your key medical professionals front and center on marketing billboards, ads, and online pages?
Does your patient experience include social media? Still not certain about the how and why of your hospital’s or clinic’s social media presence? Be certain of one fact: Your larger competitors have already figured it out and are making Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media outlets a major positive tool in engaging and keeping their patients, some of which may have once been yours. Rightly implemented, social media can (and will) become a major part of your positive patient experience – you can post shareable great patient stories and testimonies, as well as provide key highly relevant information about workshops, clinics, and links to your on-target, content-focused Web site. And speaking of your Web site…
What do you look like online? The No. 1 medical research tool for patients and prospective patients is the Internet. Your hospital probably already wins when it comes to broken bones and routine medical procedures. But when disease or medical issues become complex, many patients – and key influencers like patient’s friends and families – turn quickly to the Internet for information. Is your hospital Web site simple and easy to navigate and to find information on? Is it full of real people and real doctors? Or meaningless stock photos and repelling jargon?
Is your Web site and other online information Mobile-friendly and device agnostic? Recent surveys show that more than 50% of patients and patient influencers use their smartphones and tablets to research for key medical information. What’s your online information look like on an iPhone? A Samsung tablet? You can re-engineer older sites to have mobile capacity.
Where does your online presence appear in search engines? As mentioned earlier, the Internet is the No. 1 source for patient medical research and referrals, whether we like it or not. When a patient or key influencer of a patient (parent, adult child, friend or co-worker) types in a search phrase or question (often creating what is called a “long tail search”), does your hospital appear on the first page of links? No? Do some research and find out what geo-targeted key words are active in your service line’s capability. Type the name of your service line into Google, Bing or Yahoo searches and see what comes up. Consider using AdWords or other online promotional services to push up your hospital online information—the Internet adds instant credibility and can result in your recapturing (or even capturing for the first time) a local patient and patient’s family.
PR and media relations have changed, but they’re still very effective. Media relations is still a competitive activity that requires focused communication with reporters, but with editorial and reporting staffs being cut back, a well-written and informative news piece can go far in advancing your hospital.
There’s more, including reviewing and re-targeting your current advertising so it works harder. Don’t wait, dust off what you’ve been doing and consider re-purposing what you have. Healthcare is only growing more complex, and cutting through the clutter can foster a major win in re-positioning your hospital for now, 2015 and the future beyond.
–Michael Snyder
Managing Principal, The MEK Group