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Do you run a healthcare-focused business? Then you need to have a solid marketing plan for your healthcare business.
A healthcare marketing plan is a research-backed, well-designed, and extensive document that maps out various marketing strategies—both digital and offline—in order to reach a specific goal. By leveraging various marketing channels, it aims to help healthcare businesses reach their objectives and accomplish their missions over a given period of time.
This document takes account of several different components, including the business’ products, available services, personnel, goals, and objectives. Marketers then formulate marketing strategies based on these factors, looking for ways to effectively relay information and grab the attention of a wider audience.
Making a marketing plan requires a lot of research—whether you’re devising an effective home care marketing strategy or formulating a step-by-step process to increase patient inflow. Arbitrarily implementing different strategies risks you losing money with no results. Before investing in ads, websites, and other marketing materials, you need to have a plan first.
What Are the Benefits of Having a Well-designed Marketing Plan?
Marketing has become an integral part of the current world economy. To stay afloat in a highly competitive industry, healthcare businesses need to improve their marketing strategies to attract more patients. After all, patients tend to first check medical services and their reviews online, rather than immediately go to the nearest hospital.
With an effective healthcare marketing plan, the following benefits are in store for your business:
- Have a roadmap of short-term and long-term goals to guide you in a highly competitive market
- Increase patient inflow and revenue
- Streamline business operations by setting a common goal for all personnel and departments
- Increase brand awareness and brand retention
- Accurately track your grass and measure growth and development
How do You Create an Effective Healthcare Marketing Plan?
Making a healthcare marketing plan seems easy, but in reality, it’s a labor-extensive process. To help you get started on your healthcare marketing plan, here’s a quick look at what you need to do:
1. Study Your Target Audience
Like any other business, it’s essential to know your target audience. What are their unmet needs? What kind of services are they looking for? After studying your target audience, create specific buyer personas. Tailor your promotional materials, content, and approaches to what they would find interesting and actively engage with.
2. Know Your Company’s Products and Services Inside-Out
It’s difficult to market a product or service when you don’t know what it’s about. Research what the company’s products are, what they do, and most importantly, how they can help patients. With a good idea of what your products and services are, you can formulate a more concrete plan on how to promote them. Thus, make sure to study your company’s available services, products, and even talented personnel, so you can properly highlight their advantages, specialties, and perks to your target audience.
3. Do a SWOT Analysis and Set Goals
The SWOT analysis is a popular marketing method that allows you to strategically assess the different components that may affect your healthcare marketing plan. It is mainly used to know your company’s standing compared to other competitors and is used to set long-term goals.
SWOT is short for:
- Strengths — include company resources and services that may give it an edge over the competition (e.g. location, cutting-edge machinery)
- Weaknesses — comprise of areas that need to be improved (e.g. parking spaces, customer service)
- Opportunities — include potential technological upgrades, business partnerships, and the chance of expansion
- Threats — refer to events, competitors, regulation changes, or anything else that may hinder your company from reaching your goals
After identifying these, you can set up goals that can help your company reach its objectives and mission. In formulating goals, think SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.
For example, you can aim to increase website traffic by 20 percent over the span of the next 6 months. With a clear goal, it becomes easier to formulate marketing methods that can most effectively accomplish it.
4. Clearly Define Marketing and PR Strategies
In the current healthcare industry, the importance of digital marketing cannot be stressed enough. While traditional marketing methods are still useful, more people are spending more time online. And like any other business, you need to go where your audience is.
To effectively build an online presence, you need to:
- Properly build and maintain your website — Make sure that the website can be easily navigated, is user-friendly, and lists all of your products and services.
- Create and update social media profiles — Consistently giving updates and producing content on social media can significantly boost your visibility in the online community. Engage with your audience to build a rapport with them and steadily build your reputation as a reliable healthcare company.
- Increase your search engine ranking — Internet users often depend on search engines to find healthcare services and establishments. Unless your company is on the first page, your website is virtually invisible to your target audience.
There’s a wide variety of marketing strategies you can use to climb up the rankings and attract a wider audience online. Some of these include PPC (pay-per-click) and SEO (search engine optimization) methods. Depending on your short-term and long-term goals, you can focus and combine various marketing methods that best fit them.
5. Conduct a Gap Analysis
If the SWOT analysis is an external evaluation, the gap analysis focuses on the internal conditions of a company. It helps you identify the company’s weak points and find ways to fine-tune them in order to improve company operations. This method is most often used to set short-term goals.
In making marketing plans, the gap analysis helps identify where a company is and how far it is from its objectives. After this examination, marketers can tweak marketing strategies and adjust goals to whichever best helps the company.
An effective healthcare marketing plan takes a lot of time, research, cross-examination, and labor to make. Put in the work, however, and it will greatly reward you. With a good plan, it becomes easier to navigate through the complex healthcare industry.
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