The Anatomy of Healthcare Marketing

Understanding How to Make an Impact in a Complex Sector

Healthcare marketing is complex stuff — marketing professionals in this sector know this.

They also know how to overcome whatever challenges these complexities present with a solid understanding of healthcare marketing strategy, beginning with their target audience. Of course, their target audience represents six generations, all the way from the GI Generation to Generation Z.

Unsurprisingly, “understanding the ins and outs of healthcare marketing strategy” isn’t exactly a simple task.

Don’t worry, we’re here to help.

Let’s break down the anatomy of healthcare marketing into two parts: healthcare marketer responsibilities and the primary problem they face with effective marketing.

Responsibilities

Website and Social

Let’s start by prioritizing. Healthcare Marketers are spread pretty thin when it comes to all that their job demands of them.

When it comes to the most basic of digital assets — social media and websites — marketers need to make sure they have their bases covered.

For websites that means ensuring mobile responsiveness, offering ample opportunity for conversion and placement of clear, obvious info hubs. It’s important to lay this groundwork while being careful not to neglect strategic SEO to beat out the competition.

In addition, they also have brand management related responsibilities with their website, particularly when it comes to website reviews.

Patient Acquisition

Healthcare marketers are also in charge of patient acquisition strategies, which can be extremely time-intensive.

Often, accessibility plays a key role in conversions, and giving potential patients ample opportunity to connect and stay connected is a big part of that. Referral programs are also a critical component of a successful patient acquisition strategy.

Mergers of two hospital systems can be a confusing time for patients and marketers alike — it’s important to emphasize practice-specific marketing as a key focus in ad campaigns, ensuring that patients will continue to receive high-quality, specialized care while promoting new assets to retain patients, and boost patient acquisition.

Taking Orders

Unfortunately, many of the priorities that healthcare marketers are faced with day in and day out are directives from their superiors. This can be anything from fulfilling collateral orders and completing sponsorship requests to updating staff bios.

These tasks tend to under-utilize the skills healthcare marketers have to offer as strategists and can be a frustrating part of a healthcare marketer’s day-to-day. 

The Primary Obstacle: A Wide Audience

Now that we’ve identified the major day-to-day responsibilities of healthcare marketing professionals, it’s time to talk about their obstacle: diversity within their audience.

Everyone needs healthcare at some point. Whether it’s the GI Generation or Generation Z, the healthcare market spans each generation of consumers.

Such an ample audience is good for business, but the problem arises in communicating with that audience and the resources needed to connect with each segment as individuals. Each generation seeks information about healthcare differently, often choosing channels that are unique to them — where younger generations may respond to healthcare advertisements delivered via social media, older audiences may respond better to television advertisements.

Solving the Puzzle

Fortunately, there is a solution to this multi-generational puzzle, and it revolves around where we focus the crux of our attention.

Primarily, healthcare marketers should realize that an omnichannel approach is absolutely necessary for reaching all target audiences in effective ways — investing too much in any one medium, like social, will only neglect certain segments of your audience.

It’s important to remember that healthcare is largely about comfort, and in healthcare marketing, marketers need to communicate in the ways your audience feels comfortable with. This makes a strong case for the necessity of blending online and offline tactics.

It’s also important that healthcare marketers focus on creating solutions that are scalable and efficient. Segmenting your audience, building out personas and marketing to those personas utilizing smart MarTech solutions is a solid strategy to accomplish this.

Get the Tools

Healthcare marketing can put marketers in frustrating positions as they try to deal with the industry’s inherent challenges, but your marketing goals are far from out of reach. Contact us to see how Strata can help with the tools you need to develop a truly integrated healthcare marketing plan.