Consumers are becoming increasingly involved in choices about their healthcare and changing the way they access health information. Now, hospitals and health systems are pressured to revamp marketing efforts in order to reach and connect with these evolving patients.
As healthcare marketing becomes more digital, marketers are moving away from traditional campaign styles in order to connect with the 72% of patients who search the Internet for answers to their health-related questions.
Last week at the Hospital Marketing Innovation Summit, thought leaders in hospital marketing came together to discuss innovative strategies to satisfy the consumers who are accessing health information as well as advance marketing efforts within the continuously evolving healthcare system.
Various speakers and events provided me the opportunity to learn how hospitals were engaging with different subsets of patients, rebranding their hospitals, and using digital efforts of marketing to trump the traditional events.
Let’s take a closer look at the topics discussed:
Marketing to Promote Population Health and Wellness
At the summit, multiple speakers addressed the various challenges and opportunities presented in promoting population health. As Dr. David Kindig once remarked, “population health is the steadfast coordination and integration of all clinical and social services that assist every patient in becoming or staying well where all healthcare providers work together to provide coordinated health care that environmental influences affecting patients.”
Piloting and testing programs have become an integral part of healthcare marketing, especially in regards to population health and wellness. Take, for example, the Tips from Former Smokers campaign by the Center of Disease Control and Prevention. The campaign was able to reach and effectively communicate with their target audience and helped motivate 1.6 million smokers to attempt quitting.
Another part of population health marketers are trying to promote is in regards to ACOs. It is expected that ACOs will play a crucial role in moving the U.S. healthcare system from a fee-for-service and volume-based model to a value-based model. In order to help enhance Affordable Care Organizations (ACO) as well as improve the satisfaction and transparency patients have with their own health, new polices have been put in place. The Comprehensive Primary Care Initiative, one of the many new polices, is designed to strengthen the delivery of primary care for enhanced population health.
Promoting population health also presents opportunities for innovative partnership and care settings, virtual healthcare, and term based care. Within the last 15 years, CVS’ Minute Clinics have changed the way patients seek help for health issues. Minute Clinics allow individuals with limited timeframes to seek medical care from certified nurse practitioners within a neighborhood CVS location. This type of innovative partnership and care setting has currently helped more than 25 million consumers and it is continuing to grow.
Within population health, there is also a prevalent shift from a volume-based to a value-based care organization and from disease management to prevention and wellness strategy. This relates to health systems changing from reactive models to proactive health models. In a proactive health setting, marketing’s efforts expand from patient retention and acquisition to the strategic management of population health.
Creation of Brand Awareness and Loyalty
Another prevalent theme throughout the summit was the creation of brand awareness and loyalty. As consumers become more in control of their healthcare choices, providers are forced to develop memorable marketing campaigns that will be top of mind when patients need care.
An example of marketing efforts creating brand awareness is the Saint Vincent Hospital’s “Where babies come from” campaign. Through a series of videos and articles, the hospital was able to associate itself with the saying “where babies come from”. STVHS utilized their knowledge of the consumers’ behavior to promote their brand and stay relevant in a competitive market.
Social media also plays an important role in healthcare today, as it has an impact on the level of brand awareness a hospital can build. Social media allows the healthcare system to reach patients on a daily basis, whether they follow the organization or not, and increases engagement and awareness levels as a result.
Health systems in today’s healthcare landscape are social proofing their organizations and utilizing the power of word of mouth marketing. Patients have untold information about their healthcare experiences at their fingertips and want pass it along to others who are in the same situation.
The biggest factor in building brand awareness and consumer loyalty relates to the endowment effect. The endowment effect hypothesizes that people overvalue what they possess, even if they do not technically own it. This is where personalization becomes an important part of healthcare marketing and patient communication. It gives consumers the sense that they are in control of their healthcare and the way they monitor it, but depend on the physician to help. By facilitating trust with personalization, patients become more committed to their healthcare provider. By committing to a healthcare provider, patients would feel more inclined to buy in to other communication channels like mobile applications or social media, leading to improved engagement and loyalty.
Link Investment to Revenue: Uncover the ROI of Digital Marketing Efforts
Another interesting topic discussed during the summit was how healthcare systems can link the money they have invested in digital marketing efforts to the revenue generated. A large part of ensuring the maximum ROI relates to the tools implemented. The utilization of 10 new programs may seem promising, but if the organization is only seeing results from three, the money spent purchasing the other seven has been wasted.
In addition to selecting the right tools, health marketers must also be able to cipher through the results generated to determine key performance indicators (KPIs) and the role they play in the success of the marketing campaign. Despite the importance of developing and tracking KPIs, it will be deemed pointless if marketers do not take action on the results found. You wouldn’t eat ten doughnuts immediately after working out and still hope for the same results, would you?
Evariant, for example, tracks and measures month-to-month and year-to-year traffic generated by our main site as well as our AskEva blog pages. If we see that our social sharing traffic is declining, we revamp our approach in engaging followers and entice them to pass our post along. We also track that performance of the keywords used within search results. If we find that “big data in healthcare” has declined several spots, we will revise our blog topics for the month to include information surrounding that keyword.
Defining the Balance Between Primary and Specialty Care Marketing
The last key takeaway from the summit relates to balancing marketing efforts between primary care and specialty care health providers. The competition for primary care and wellness is tight with the development of retail locations like Minute Clinics and the innovation of telehealth. Patients are not going to the primary physician unless is it absolutely necessary.
This level of competition is increasing the amount of market research conducted, like consumer interviews and tests, as well as the increased need for a more thorough budget for marketing plans. These two aspects help health organizations understand the gap and divide between primary and specialty care marketing by helping them understand their consumer audience.
With respect to personalized patient communications, primary and specialty care providers must market to patients with the goal of connecting emotionally, providing a sense of expertise, and making them patients engaged. Simply, marketers must embrace the patient voice. By listening to the patients, health organizations can revise their physician’s profiles to meet the needs their patients have as well as develop wellness programs addressing key issues consumers are facing.
Final Thoughts
From my experience at the Hospital Marketing Innovation Summit, I was able to gain a different perception of healthcare marketing. As the healthcare industry becomes more competitive and dependent on digital marketing efforts, marketers must broaden their horizons in order to remain relevant.
The topics discussed offered critical insight into the working mechanisms and challenges of healthcare marketing where campaigns must lead to greater value through patient engagement and more significant returns over the long term.
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