10 Mar
When it comes to online medical marketing, you may think you’ve seen it all until you haven’t. There are tons of online medical marketing channels waiting for your medical business to access their patient demographics. But while using multiple online marketing channels is good and all, it all boils down to consistency. A consistent message through every marketing channel and your medical site is what establishes your medical business online and instils trust, loyalty, and credibility.
However, as mentioned with so many marketing channels on your marketing agenda, it can be difficult to remain consistent. This can result in portraying a disconnected voice and inconsistent branding to your existing and prospective patients. So the question remains, how do you remain consistent when marketing your healthcare business? Easy, with integrated marketing.
What Is Integrated Marketing?
It may surprise just how simple integrated marketing is. In simple terms, integrated marketing is a specifically designed medical marketing strategy for your multichannel marketing campaigns. Using this marketing approach can help your medical business achieve a consistent and unified marketing message across every marketing channel, space, or platform you use. A traditional integrated marketing strategy can include aspects such as:
- Digital platforms (SEO, Email, Social Media Marketing)
- Conventional platforms (Radio, TV, Print)
- Public Relations and Word-of-mouth marketing practices
- Branding (Voice, Mission. Tone, Goal)
Integrated marketing doesn’t deny the advantage of using multiple marketing channels, but it does help in improving your multichannel medical marketing practices efforts so that you can earn as much ROI as possible. With integrated marketing, you can layer your multichannel marketing efforts by keeping a consistent tone or voice so that you can ensure high patient generation and ROI rates.
What Is the Importance of Integrated Marketing for Medical Business?
Promoting the right marketing message is important now more than ever. As a healthcare business, you want to promote, educate and engage. But creating a strategy that does that while remaining true to your medical business’s message across the multiple platforms you use is crucial. Here are the various advantages of integrated marketing for a medical business:
1. Maintains A Consistent Patient Experience
Now with the advancement in technology and online marketing, there is a constant rise in the touchpoints you can use as a medical business to interact and promote your medical services to patients. Delivering and maintaining a consistent patient experience is crucial for medical businesses as it can strengthen patient relationships and induce trust and loyalty among the patient base.
A uniform marketing strategy ensures that a patient that uses 3-4 platforms that you also market on, sees a uniform image of your medical business, which establishes your medical business as an authority in their perspective.
2. Meets All Target Patient Groups
Integrated marketing encourages patient engagement in your marketing practices, meaning the groups of patients who may browse your medical site but ignore your ads on Facebook will be more likely to interact with your ads on Facebook since they will be marketed in a tone that they are used to seeing on your medical site.
It also helps your marketing tactics meet all target patient groups, making your marketing reach larger and more effective. By using a holistic medical business message, you reach the target patient groups that some of your marketing tactics may have been missing out on.
3. Boosts The Potential of Your Medical Marketing Campaigns
The biggest goal and advantage of integrated marketing is that it enhances and boosts the potential of your medical marketing campaigns across all the platforms and channels you use. Using integrated marketing can increase the number of brand impressions on the various marketing channels, ensures that your message is being delivered to all your intended patient groups, establishes your medical business as an authority, and delivers a unified, holistic, and cohesive business image that nudges patients down your medical marketing funnel.
What Are the Elements of an Integrated Marketing Strategy?
Creating an integrated marketing strategy is simple enough since you already have most of your homework done due to your prior medical marketing tactics. Here are the fundamental elements that you can use to create an integrated marketing strategy for your medical business:
Choosing The Right Marketing Platforms
The first thing that you need to note is that not all marketing channels will prove to be beneficial for your marketing strategy. You can use the patient interaction metrics from the platforms you do use and select the ones with the most engagement rates for your integrated marketing strategy.
Organizing Your Strategy Goals
After that, you need to determine what you would like your integrated marketing strategy to achieve. It can increase patient engagement, brand awareness, drive patients to your medical site, etc. Identifying your strategy goal helps shape your efforts together. If your goal is definite, your outcome will be as well.
Deciding On a Holistic Message
Deciding on a holistic message is as important as determining your goal for the strategy. Your message is aligned with your goal and is repeated across all online and offline marketing platforms you use, which will play a strong part in establishing a strong business identity and patient loyalty.
You can create a powerful holistic message by aligning your medical business’s positive values and goals to your marketing message. This way, your patients will associate your medical business with trustworthy words.
Keeping A Consistent Branding Palette
Aside from a holistic message, keeping a consistent branding palette is what adds the visual aspect of creating a unified marketing experience for your existing and prospective patients. Your branding palette includes everything from your logo, banner, color theme, tone, vocabulary, and visuals.
If a patient sees your Facebook ad with blue and green accents and your Instagram ads with yellow and green, they’re less likely to associate that marketing effort with your medical business. Use the same branding palette for all your marketing campaigns to further portray a holistic image of yourself to your patients.
Monitoring, Optimizing, And Improving
After you have applied your integrated marketing strategy to all your marketing campaigns, it’s crucial that you monitor its performance and compare the performance metrics. Identify which channels are proving to be the most effective and which are under-performing, as they may need a more concentrated integrated marketing approach. Your integrated marketing strategy needs to be tested and improved constantly in order to stay relevant and perform efficiently.
Is Integrated Marketing Really That Necessary After All?
The short answer, yes. The long answer, yes as well. As a medical business, you want your online medical marketing campaigns to keep performing optimally and not fall behind on their performance. One of the best ways to accomplish that is by implementing an integrated marketing strategy to your marketing campaigns.
Not only does it portray your medical business as an authority, but it also adds fluidity between your marketing channels, induces patient engagement and lead generation, and delivers a holistic and consistent message that builds loyalty, trust, credibility, and ROI rates.
