Conducting A SWOT Analysis: A Self-Assessment to Grow Your Medical Business

To run a successful medical business, it is important to regularly analyze that your healthcare strategies are operating as efficiently as they should. The worth of any medical marketing strategy is determined after you evaluate its proficiency to your expected success rate. While there are numerous formulas and practices in the field of medical marketing to successfully assess your medical business, one of the most popular and efficient strategies is to conduct a biannual SWOT analysis.

A SWOT analysis is used to determine the internal and external success of a healthcare business’s marketing infrastructure. The primary objective of this evaluatory strategy is to help doctors understand the full awareness of all the factors involved in making a strategic decision in their medical marketing game plan. Conducting a biannual SWOT analysis can help you and your medical marketing team identify the key issues that may be stopping your marketing strategies to perform at their optimal proficiency rate and gain a better ROI rate.

What is SWOT in Healthcare Marketing?

An acronym for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, a SWOT analysis is a strategic process that helps your medical business overcome any underlying obstacles in your marketing game plan and determine new routes to pursue. A SWOT analysis isn’t restricted to just evaluating marketing, but can also help doctors further define their medical business by developing improved patient personas, determining their medical competition, and what problems are causing their medical business to fail.

Conducting this analysis gives doctors a better understanding of who they are as a healthcare business, who their patients are, and what future problems they face with their medical competitors. After this assessment, they can then develop goal-oriented strategies to help their medical marketing practices to increase ROI and patient conversion.

When Should Doctors Perform A SWOT Analysis?

A SWOT analysis isn’t time-restricted and can be conducted anytime you are about to commit to a new medical marketing venture, whether it is exploring new medical SEO strategies, rebuilding old medical PPC practices, or considering a change of plan midway through a medical marketing strategy.

It may also benefit your medical business to conduct a general SWOT analysis to highlight the areas where your medical practice is growing well and which aspects of it need some adjustment. From a general business perspective, a formal SWOT analysis is performed twice a year just to keep your major medical marketing game plan updated and improve your medical business’s weak points and capitalize on its strengths.

What Are The Elements Of A SWOT Analysis For Medical Marketing?

Instead of using futuristic AI tools, a SWOT analysis is traditionally done by using a simple method of splitting your medical marketing gameplan’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats into four quadrants. Creating this layout helps assess each marketing component.

Strengths

The first element of a SWOT analysis for medical marketing is its strengths. This element recognizes any aspects of your marketing game plan that is doing well and has the potential to be further improved. This could be something more specific such as your medical SEO strategies, your something general such as your overall presence as a medical business. Identifying your successes helps you recognize where you are going right and which marketing strategy is bringing the most flux of patients.

Weaknesses

After identifying your strengths, it’s important to critically analyze your weaknesses as they are what may be bringing your medical business down. This element can be specific challenges such as a shortage of medical keywords that are high in relevance but extremely expensive or an overall lacking of patient engagement in your marketing strategies. Once you have identified your weaknesses, creating a strategy to solve them becomes more approachable.

Opportunities

Lining up your opportunities is a crucial part of medical business development. It is important to keep searching for new marketing strategies or build on ones that are lacking in effort. This element can be your medical social media platforms growing or taking advantage of new medical marketing spaces. In short, an opportunity is an element of a SWOT analysis that covers anything that may help you improve patient conversion, gain a better online presence as a medical business, and generate the ROI of your dreams.

Threats

Identifying your threats is the final element of a SWOT analysis. This element can be anything or anyone that poses a risk to your medical marketing strategies and their potential for success or growth. Your threats can include emerging medical competitors that may pose a challenge when it comes to medical keyword bidding, changes in Google’s algorithm, or any aspect that may potentially harm or jeopardize the potential of your medical marketing’s infrastructure.

How To Develop Medical Marketing Strategies After A SWOT Analysis?

After creating a list of your SWOT elements, it is imperative that you sort them into priority levels. For instance, if you think that your weaknesses are growing more than your opportunities, you may choose to work on those marketing strategies. Once you have prioritized what elements need to be focused on, you can now create short-term and long-term marketing strategies for your medical business. Here is a prototype of how you can use the results of a SWOT analysis and convert them into beneficial marketing strategies:

• Priority: Weakness
• Weakness: Low patient engagement
• Solution: CTAs, improved Social media presence, using online portals, follow-up practices

By using this layout, you can create a robust and budget-friendly medical marketing strategy that will help you overcome low patient engagement rates on your social platforms and medical sites. Listing down solutions such as implementing call-to-actions after every medical blog post, email, or social media post, being active on your social platforms by responding to patients, using online portals to encourage patients to interact with each other, using follow-up practices in your email, SMS and SEO strategies can help you create a custom solution to induce high patient engagement rate.

If you want to work on your strengths, you can develop ways to use your already existing strengths to maximize your opportunities, thus creating strength-opportunity strategies. Following this process, you can create medical marketing strategies that will minimize your weakness and can help you eliminate the threats you identified for your medical marketing game plan. For instance:

SEO (Strength) → Low Patient Engagement (Weaknesses) → New Social Platform (Opportunities) → Low Conversion Rate (Threat) = Creating a social media marketing strategy that focuses on patient engagement and creates qualified patient leads (Solution)

A SWOT Analysis For A Medical Business

Conducting a SWOT analysis is a very simple and traditional way of identifying your weaknesses and creating ways to overcome them. For doctors, it can act as a comprehensive strategy generator for their medical marketing game plan and help them to identify not only the weaknesses and threats of their marketing strategies but also ways to use their strengths and opportunities to grow their medical business. Not only is SWOT an evaluation technique, but it a way for doctors to increase their patient conversion, gain online authority, and own a medical business that stays atop of its medical competitors.