05 Oct
As an online medical business surviving in 2022, you may have noticed how catching and retaining the attention of patients appears to be getting harder and harder with each passing day. Patients have now access to a virtually endless variety of medical services and content in today’s mobile and omnichannel marketing for healthcare. If you look at it from their perspective, the moment they interact with any medical website or app, they are flooded with a storm of marketing messages that are often irrelevant.
Most of the time, your patients choose not to participate in your marketing tactics. In fact, 42% of users online have at least one device with an ad blocker installed. Because of this, your patients are less brand loyal than before, and it doesn’t help that digital marketing expenses keep on rising.
So what can you do to make your patients become loyal to your medical brand and click on your medical ads instead of ignoring them? It all depends on relevant and hyper-targeted outreach that is supported by a strategy that puts your patients first. This is why learning about patient-centric marketing, its importance and methods to create a patient-centric strategy can help you gain the most from all your medical marketing efforts.
What is Patient-Centric Marketing?
In plain digital marketing, patient-centric marketing is called customer-centric marketing. It prioritizes the needs and interests of the patient by linking marketing strategy successes to positive shifts in consumer behavior. Patient-centric marketing follows an analytical strategy that creates a comprehensive profile of your patients using media data, identification data, and conversion data.
A patient-centric strategy is the opposite of a channel-focused strategy. While a channel-based approach focuses on how to utilize a marketing channel or platform to reach the target demographic, patient-centric marketing focuses on a strategy that determines whether:
- Will it help the patients?
- Would the patients like this?
- Do the patients need this?
- How would it approach the patients?
- Will the patients consider it relevant?
- What are the patients struggling with right now?
- What’s happening in the medical world, and how is it affecting the patients?
Why Is It Essential for Online Medical Businesses To Be Patient-Centric?
From a marketing viewpoint, a channel-centric strategy might appear logical, but it really keeps you from the information you require. For instance, pay-per-click (PPC) marketing generates the greatest sales, leading you to allocate more funds to those strategies. However, you are blind to the fact that the vast majority of those PPC campaigns are backed by other media platforms, such as your social media accounts. You’re restricting the possibilities of your efforts if you don’t engage in those top and middle funnel activities.
In the end, medical marketing isn’t limited to distributing your message through various media platforms. A patient-centric approach to marketing will provide you with the most accurate patient analysis and, as a result, the best results because it’s about impacting the patient experience. It’s crucial for medical businesses to become more patient-centric if they want to optimize their medical marketing strategies, increase brand visibility, and ensure patient satisfaction.
Five Steps To Develop And Implement A Patient-Centric Marketing Strategy
The following five steps will help you develop an effective patient-centric marketing plan:
1. Perform A Patient Behavior Analysis
You can divide your patients into separate groups using a patient behaviour analysis, and then customize your medical services, ads, and content to each group’s requirements. Your budget and overall needs will determine the analysis process, but there are many tools and resources available online that can help you conduct it. Learn how you can use your patients’ feedback to enhance your medical services and attract more loyal patients.
2. Invest In A Website Makeover
Your medical website should be able to operate every element of your medical business if you want to provide the greatest care for your patients. You can hire website development services from a medical marketing agency to help you assist with the process. A medical marketing agency can collaborate with you to determine which of your website features are effective and which ones require modification or improvement.
3. Get In Touch With Patients Via Email
The inboxes of patients are among the best places to connect with them and learn more about them. As long as you include one simple CTA to learn more about your patients, sending them emails can help you understand what makes them tick, what questions they have, and what information they enjoy. As long as it’s well-planned, having an email list is essential to creating a successful patient-centric marketing strategy. Create lead nurturing email campaigns that take patients on personalized conversion journeys to becoming your long-time loyal patients.
4. Ensure Your Medical Content Is Optimized
If you want patients to find your medical services among your competitors, you must constantly improve your medical content. This entails optimizing every piece of content you create, including the copy on your website, blog posts, social media updates, and any web pages or digital content you create. Ensure that:
- Have a knowledge base with specific keyword content.
- Publish guest posts to gain backlinks.
- Create articles or videos based on frequently searched terms by your patients.
- Include hashtags and keywords that are relevant to each platform.
- Update the size requirements and accelerated mobile pages (AMP).
- Regularly auditing your medical content.
- Optimize your landing pages, websites, and social media channels with targeted keywords.
5. Display Your Medical Services By Using Your Patients
Using your patients, especially your high-value patients, to promote and display your medical services to current or potential patients is one of the best methods to develop a patient-centric marketing plan. This also translates to patient advocacy. When a person is passionate about a brand, they will gladly spread the word about it. It’s a great idea to ask patients if you can publish pictures of them along with their experiences with your medical services.
Do Your Patients Know You’re Striving to Provide an Individualized Experience to Them?
It’s hard to believe that even in 2022, your medical marketing strategies are missing a large portion of potential patients. This is all because you’ve yet to make your medical marketing strategies patient-centric. Consider contacting a medical marketing agency right now to learn more about how you can make your entire marketing funnel more patient-focused to get the best results.
