Is Your Healthcare Business Facing Big Marketing Challenges?
If you’re working in the medical or healthcare world, odds are you’re facing a variety of challenges, including a healthcare marketing challenge.
Staffing shortages, competition with other recruiters, diminishing compensation, insurance providers restricting your ability to deliver care, patient perception of the healthcare world, creating brand differentiation — these are just some of the big obstacles you’re forced to overcome before you can do what you’ve devoted your life and career to: Providing people in your community the best-possible care.
So what can you do? Well, one critical way to overcome these challenges involves your approach to healthcare marketing. With the right strategies, implementation, tracking, and accountability, your marketing can have a positive effect on most every challenge that you face.
Let’s discuss a few of the most prevalent healthcare marketing challenges healthcare practices face, and what you can do to beat them.
Healthcare Marketing Challenge: Budgetary Restrictions
Tight marketing budgets are restrictions that almost every business faces at some point in their longevity — perhaps even multiple times.
Where once we were restricted to print and broadcast mediums we now have a far wider array of options for marketing ourselves, even when budgets are tight.
Some of these options only require a strategic investment of your time. Social media, for instance, is a perfect vehicle for communicating just about anything and everything that’s going on in your practice.
Consider leveraging social media to market things like:
- New hires
- Staff anniversaries
- Training and certifications
- Insurance updates
- Medical and health innovations
- Links to scholarly articles or news stories
- How-to videos
- What to expect or how to prepare videos
- Debunk myths or provide resources to quality health information
You can even devote a very small portion of your marketing budget to boosting certain posts that you feel are extra important to your community, which will in turn help you gather data to market even more effectively.
Healthcare Marketing Challenge: Original Content
Social media marketing isn’t your only lower-investment strategy for promoting your healthcare organization and overcoming your marketing challenges.
Tactics like blogging are also wonderful ways in which you can differentiate your practice from the competition, showcase your expertise on niche topics, as well as build a stronger SEO foundation for your website.
Think about it this way: Your potential clients are searching for highly specific information online, information that you possess expertise in. By publishing your unique point of view on how to deliver care or how people can benefit from certain services, you’re establishing a distinct brand personality that people can connect with.
The more useful the content, the more likely that search engines will reward its authority, and the more search engines reward its authority, the more visitors you’ll get to your site. You’ll increase site traffic, produce more leads, and convert more of those leads into clients.
Healthcare Marketing Challenge: Creating Differentiation
Creating differentiation is a big marketing challenge that every business, regardless of industry, will face as they grow their practice’s brand.
But how you can create differentiation relies largely on your ability to identify a lane, commit to it, and consistently deliver content that reflects that choice.
There’s a reason why TikTok and Instagram are such popular venues for medical, wellness, and health information. Yes, for some, it’s because they want to see pimples popped and ingrown hairs removed, but for many others, it’s the stepping stone they need to get real-life care.
Medical and health professionals, like psychologist Dr. Nicole LePera, plastic surgeon Dr. Anthony Youn, and podiatrist Dr. Dana Brems have garnered millions of followers across their respective social media platforms not only because of their expertise, but also because social media has given them a place to show their personalities.
People want to connect with other people, and Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and the like have created a space where providers can be more to people than the services they provide — they can be fully human!
And to be clear, your goal doesn’t need to be gaining millions of followers. Far from it. The goal can simply be to gain more followers, earn more traffic to your organic site, earn more reviews from patients, or any number of things.
Speaking of earning reviews…
Healthcare Marketing Challenge: Reviews and Testimonials
These days, people want confirmation that they’re making the right decision. They want confirmation that they’re making the right decision, but they don’t want you to tell them that you’re the right decision. They want the confirmation of their peers.
Luckily, thanks to Google reviews, Yelp, and other review platforms, it’s easier than ever for consumers to rate their experiences. It also helps you overcome your healthcare marketing challenges! Word of mouth is one of the most trusted forms of advertising, which is why it’s important to encourage your clients to review you vs. relying on reviews from unsolicited parties.
We encourage you to make reviews easy and accessible to your client base. Give them instructions on how to find your desired review sites, create an account, and how to publish them.
Make sure to respond to your reviews, thanking them for their kind feedback. Don’t be afraid to engage with critical reviews, either. The reality is that not everyone will have the experience that you want them to. Respond to your critics with grace, and where necessary, the facts.
Also, don’t be afraid to ask your clients for a testimonial about their experience with the practice. These can be powerful features in your website, social media, and in advertising. Make sure that any testimonials featured in any marketing materials are approved by the person featured by having them sign a marketing testimonial release form.
People want to know that the people you serve have had great experiences in your care. By actively seeking out these testimonials and reviews, you’re also making a deeper connection with these patients themselves — you want their feedback.
This gives you a real assessment of your services and tools for marketing the practice — sounds like a win-win to me!
Healthcare Marketing Challenge: HIPAA Compliance
As we all know, carefully adhering to HIPAA is essential in protecting your patients’ privacy. And as we also know, HIPAA can make marketing to your patient base incredibly difficult.
In today’s marketing, the more targeted we can get, the better our results often are. But the reality is that HIPAA prevents us from doing much of the same targeted marketing that other industries enjoy.
So what do you do to overcome this healthcare marketing challenge?
One, the most important thing to reinforce to your existing and potential patients is that their privacy is of the utmost importance to you, and that their data is safe and secure. This is more important than any marketing campaign.
They’re trusting you with their care, and their data. Don’t hesitate to promote your commitment to protecting people’s privacy and their private information. Tell them how you protect their data, and why it matters to you. This will resonate.
And while highly niche information is great for marketing tactics like blogs and social media posts, more general health and wellness information is better suited for other marketing tactics that would otherwise violate HIPAA were they too specific.
This still provides you a wide lane in promoting your services, health and wellness tips specific to your specialty, and information about the practice itself, including reviews and testimonials.
Healthcare Marketing Challenge: Insurance Restrictions
One of the biggest hurdles that every healthcare organization faces these days revolves around insurance reimbursements and care restrictions.
While marketing itself cannot increase your reimbursements or remove the restrictions you and your peers face.
What you can do, however, is become increasingly educated on the plans and insurance providers that your organization accepts, and center your inbound marketing strategies on those specific plans.
It’s restrictive. And it’s frustrating. You deserve to provide your clients with the care they deserve in the way you think is best for them.
Until there are major changes made in this aspect of the industry, however, we must learn to work within those restrictions in order to provide the best care possible while also creating revenue for the practice.
Understanding the ins and outs of your insurance partners and how you can maximize your care and reimbursement strategy is one way to approach this hurdle.
We’ll Help You Combat Healthcare’s Biggest Marketing Challenges!
You deserve to focus on what matters to you most: treating your patients, supporting your team, and ensuring your practice’s operations are running smoothly. While marketing is essential to the growth of your practice, it can be overwhelming to take it on alone.
Our team specializes in supporting and growing medical, health, and wellness organizations through proven marketing strategies that create real growth.
If you’re interested in learning more about how we do it, then let’s talk! I’d love to learn more about you and what you want to achieve. Contact me today!