Every healthcare organization, regardless of its size, has to find ways to attract new patients and motivate other healthcare providers to partner up. There are so many strategies and tactics for selling products and services that it becomes easy to get lost in this myriad of healthcare marketing initiatives. This is why having a solid healthcare marketing plan is now a necessity. Amidst the chaos, sometimes all it takes is a little planning to succeed. Our guide will share everything you need to know about the healthcare marketing plan and why you need it.
What is a Healthcare Marketing Plan?
A healthcare marketing plan is a document that covers different aspects of a healthcare company’s marketing activities. It should be regularly reviewed, assessed, and modified to ensure its alignment with the current state and goals of marketing efforts and strategies.
No matter what kind of project you’re working on, it needs to have a foundation, right? It’s like building a house. The same applies to your marketing efforts. A marketing plan is your roadmap, the one you can use to build a pleasant and engaging healthcare journey for the audiences.
A healthcare marketing plan is most effective when paired with other strategies and methods. For example, combined with omnichannel marketing, you can strengthen your messaging across various touchpoints and deliver high-quality content on time.
Pros of Healthcare Marketing Plan & Why You Need to Create One
There are many things a company has to take care of — one too many, from optimizing health data management to maintaining patient engagement. Adding another task to the roster doesn’t seem like the best idea; however, there are many reasons why having a healthcare marketing plan is so important. Let’s take a look:
Provides clear marketing goals
Your marketing strategies should fulfill some purpose; in the best-case scenario, this purpose is one of the goals you set beforehand. Without having clear goals, how can you be sure that your marketing strategy is performing well enough? Writing out all of the goals and breaking them down might be a tiring and time-consuming task, but it will pay off in the future. With a marketing plan, you can easily track your goals and see how your strategies work over a certain period.
Saves you money
Without a clear marketing plan, your marketing team will struggle to understand how much budget they can allocate to specific activities and whether there’s room for new projects, software updates, or other expenses. A clear plan lets you know precisely how much you will spend, when, and on what.
Ensures consistency
A marketing plan can stabilize your marketing efforts, offering consistency at multiple levels, from devising new campaigns to delivering polished content to your audience. Here is a thing: a good marketing plan tells you not just about future deadlines and campaigns but also exactly how you will achieve your goals. This includes such aspects as the social media platforms you will be using, the preferred tone of voice, and even images that will be part of your campaigns. Imagine your marketing plan as a puzzle: you will see the full picture only when you combine all the different pieces.
Identifies your target audience
Your digital marketing plan should include insights about your potential patients, medical professionals who might be interested in your offerings, and people who already trust your business. Including this information in a marketing plan allows you to explore additional ideas on how to best cater to your audience and what channels you can use to reach them faster.
Helps define and keep up with KPIs
KPIs, or key performance indicators, are one of the most effective ways to measure the performance of your marketing strategies. However, having those won’t necessarily mean that your marketing campaigns are efficient. Instead of overfocusing on KPIs, break down those into smaller, more actionable objectives and include them in your plan. And in case you don’t have any KPIs yet, it’s OK: with a marketing plan, you can quickly determine what kind of goals and key performance indicators work best for your company.
What are the Key Elements to Follow?
Depending on the industry and company type, there might be different variations of marketing plans. Here are some of the ideas of what you can add to yours:
Market research
In this section, your goal is to analyze what you offer, whether a new drug, special treatment, or any other service or product, and find out how it aligns with current market needs. Conducting market research can help make your organization more relevant and improve your unique selling proposition while also allowing you to study current trends and how you can use them.
Analysis of your competitors
Knowing what your competition excels in and its weak spots can give you an upper hand in many situations. What do your competitors offer? Who is their target audience? How do they build their healthcare marketing strategy? Is there something unique or innovative about their actions and marketing strategies? Research companies similar to yours to better understand how you can succeed.
Goals
What are you trying to achieve with your marketing campaigns? What are your short—and long-term goals? Moreover, what metrics can you employ to measure the progress of your goals? Without visualizing your objectives and including them in your plan, it will be hard to envision the success of your healthcare marketing strategies.
Budget
When it comes to marketing, it is often extremely easy to go over the budget without noticing. This is why it is crucial that you not only include expenses in your marketing plan but also write out the entire budget to ensure that you and your team clearly understand what you will spend money on during a specific period.
Target audience
One of the most important questions healthcare marketers face is this: Who is my target audience for this product? It’s impossible to fully understand what people will be happy to purchase from you without knowing your customers. Even if your product or service is helpful, it doesn’t mean people will automatically want to buy it. Study your healthcare consumer, learn their characteristics, and break down their pain points and habits to improve your understanding of their needs and desires.
How to Craft a Strategic Healthcare Marketing Plan
Creating a perfect healthcare marketing plan requires just a few steps. Here is what you should do:
Conduct a SWOT analysis
SWOT analysis is a framework widely used by companies from many industries that can help you discover more about your marketing strategy’s weak and strong sides. Here is what the abbreviation stands for:
- Strengths: What is your organization good at? Is it using special software or new technology? Or maybe it is your strong patient relationships? It can be anything that makes your business unique and successful.
- Weaknesses: What are the areas that lack improvement? Is your marketing budget enough? Are your marketing tactics up-to-date? Many things can go wrong for even the best of the best. Sometimes, mistakes are okay, and using them as a lesson is always better than ignoring them. Let all these weaknesses teach you more about what you could do better.
- Opportunities: These are various tactics that can give you an advantage that you have yet to implement. Some examples of opportunities are new collaborations or partnerships, software or technology, market expansion, etc.
- Threats: Use any obstacles or challenges in your work to improve your healthcare marketing strategy instead of simply ignoring or looking for the simplest solution possible. What are some weaknesses hindering your progress? What’s stopping you from succeeding? Consider all these questions in your SWOT analysis.
SWOT analysis is a powerful tool that allows teams to explore different opportunities and better understand their capabilities and vulnerabilities, so make sure to implement it into your next marketing plan.
Define your target market
One of the best ways to ensure you’re catering to the right audience is to create a buyer persona first. Knowing that you and your target audience are on the same page is essential in the healthcare industry. If you offer services to the wrong group of people, both parties will experience negative effects: there will be fewer prospective healthcare consumers for you, and patients in need may not receive the necessary services or products fast enough.
Remember that a target market is a broader term that usually refers to multiple groups of prospective patients and potential business partners that might be interested in your company. This is why creating different personas is crucial, depending on the number of target audiences you can identify. Here are some of the questions to help determine your target audiences:
- Demographic questions: Where do they live? Where do they work? What age group do they fall into? What places do they usually attend?
- Psychographic questions: What is their lifestyle? What are their habits? What values and beliefs do they have? What hobbies do they have?
- Behavioral questions: How do they decide whether to purchase something or not? What are their buying habits? What and how do they think?
- Communication: How do they prefer to communicate with healthcare organizations and service providers? What are their preferred channels for receiving information? What social media do they use?
Combined with tools like Google Analytics and eWizard, it’s possible to create a perfect customer journey. All it takes is a little bit of research.
Establish SMART goals
Before you start working on your healthcare plan, make sure you have all five SMART goals ready. Here is what each letter stands for:
- Specific. If you want to achieve something, you must precisely understand what you want. “More sales” is not a good goal; “make 50 sales in a month” is much better.
- Measurable. It’s important for your goals to be specific and have certain benchmarks that can help measure your progress toward achieving the goal.
- Achievable. Being ambitious is a great trait, but it’s best to focus on realistic goals when it comes to marketing. You might end up in a situation where you or your team will take on more than you can manage, which never ends well.
- Relevant. Do your goals align with the company’s values and mission? There is no point in having goals just for the sake of it.
- Time-bound. Having a goal with no deadline is almost always guaranteed that you will eventually forget about it.
Adjust your strategy and plan
Content marketing is never going to be stable. Your team will experience ups and downs, and that’s completely fine. During such periods, it’s vital to question your current digital marketing tactics and whether they continue to benefit your company.
To ensure that you still have an effective healthcare marketing strategy, review your plan occasionally to see which goals you’ve achieved, what contributed to your success, and what didn’t. Doing so lets you quickly determine if there is a need for change before you spend your time and money on unnecessary activities. For example, suppose you have been doing e-mail marketing a certain way for a while and realize it’s not working. In that case, you can save resources by repurposing your e-mail marketing strategies instead of simply continuing as is or scrapping the whole thing.
Best Practices for Healthcare Marketing
In addition to a healthcare marketing plan, there should be at least a few other practices that you can implement alongside it. This is what you can do next:
Measure the performance of your marketing efforts
There are many methods you can use to track your performance, including your achievements and failures. Use key performance indicators to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Here are some examples of KPIs:
- Conversion rate;
- Customer lifetime value;
- Click-through rate;
- Cost per click;
- Customer retention rate;
- Engagement rate.
Another way to measure your success is to gather patient testimonials and feedback from healthcare providers to see if they are satisfied with the services provided and if there is anything you could add to make your marketing strategies even better. For instance, if your main focus is blog content, you could ask your audience to share topics they would like to read more about.
Use search engine optimization (SEO)
Over 50% of online consumers use Google to find new brands; 51 of shoppers report using Google to research products before making a purchase. This statistic applies to all industries, with no exception. People know what healthcare services and organizations are best for them, and if your company doesn’t appear on the first, maximum, or second page of a Google search, it’s likely that the possible customer won’t even learn your name. SEO is a huge part of any marketing strategy, so make sure you dedicate enough time and budget to improve it.
Develop consistent branding
Consistent branding equals brand recognition. Here is a thing: how will your target audience recognize your company if your messaging keeps changing and there is nothing that makes your brand stand out? Think about something unique about your organization that you can use to differentiate it from the competitors. When it comes to marketing, it’s crucial to establish key messages that resonate with the brand’s vision and values and incorporate these messages into all future marketing activities. This will make your brand more recognizable, leading to increased patient loyalty and improved online reputation.
Use social media
Even though social media has been one of the most popular platforms for many online users, many healthcare marketers still haven’t started to leverage their power in marketing. 80% of internet users research healthcare providers, hospitals, and healthcare-related news using social media. 42% of consumers look for online patient reviews to learn more about healthcare businesses. Social media is the right place to start if you are looking for ways to nurture patient relationships, increase patient satisfaction, and engage with possible customers.
Create an Adaptable Marketing Plan with Viseven
Creating a plan that covers all important aspects of your marketing strategies will take some time and effort. It might not seem worth the struggle first, but having a marketing plan can give you an advantage, as you will be more prepared for possible challenges and upcoming trends.
Are you ready to leverage the best healthcare marketing strategies to reach a broader audience and improve customer engagement? Contact us now, and experts from Viseven will assist you with any questions you might have.
