Health care is a basic human good because it affects our opportunity to pursue life’s goals, reduces our pain and suffering, helps prevent premature loss of life, and provides information needed to plan our lives. The company has to give all its members access to an adequate level of care, regardless of their ability to pay.
Connecting healthcare and marketing
Healthcare nowadays means every aspect, service, and facility to take care of your health. Government, politicians, political ideologues, third parties, and the media have become accustomed to conveniently and neatly defining what they want to “give” you. By simply getting involved, these middlemen dilute the quality of the health care you can get, whether it’s from the government or insurance companies.
Health marketing is the promotion of health information to protect the entire population’s health. You can check out the definition and strategies of healthcare marketing to identify the difference between healthcare marketing and traditional marketing.
What is different about healthcare marketing?
While some traditional marketers insist that conventional marketing philosophies and techniques can efficiently work in healthcare, the reality shows otherwise. Continue reading to learn more about how healthcare marketing is unique and to appreciate it.
1. Demand for products and services
Marketing for other industries usually involves techniques for creating demand for a particular product or service. Traditional marketers implement initiatives and execute activities to attract, engage and excite potential customers.
For example, a cosmetics company may feature supermodels and celebrities who use their products to entice consumers.
The above strategy works for all commercial products and services, but will it work for healthcare products and services? In some cases, probably yes.
However, due to their very nature, it is mainly impossible to use the same marketing techniques to create demand for healthcare products and services.
2. Marketing in healthcare can be subject to a lot of privacy regulations
Anyone even vaguely connected to the healthcare industry has heard of HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). HIPAA strictly protects the security of patient PHI (protected health information), essentially any information that can be used to identify a patient.
This applies to the marketing team in a healthcare organization as much as it does to any physician or healthcare software developer, and the penalties for violations can be high.
As a general rule, marketers should be careful not to create any advertisements or social media posts using patient information – names, photos, or even vague-sounding treatment information without the patient’s express consent.
Staff should be warned against taking pictures inside the office if PHI might be visible, whether on a computer screen, a whiteboard, or a handwritten note on a suction machine. At the same time, the doctor is Instagramming their lunch.
3. The stakes are high
Because the products and services offered by healthcare providers can save lives, the stakes are much higher than in other industries. This means that healthcare marketers must be extra careful to ensure that their marketing efforts are ethical and responsible.
When talking about procedures and treatments, be careful of exaggeration, avoid exaggerated words such as “best”, do not make vague promises to cure incurable conditions, and do not make any claims that are not scientifically proven. A provider cannot technically be called a specialist unless they are certified. Secure terms like “may prevent” and “may detect” are your friends.
4.End-user
Traditional marketing campaigns focus on end users or the people who decide to buy and use products or services. All marketing efforts are aimed at attracting this group of people. Marketers learn as much as possible about target users, especially their needs, likes, and preferences, to determine the right strategy to reach and persuade them.
While end users are clear in traditional marketing, this is not always the case in healthcare marketing, as the user of a product or service is usually different from the individual who decided to purchase it.
The decision maker may be a doctor, family member, or healthcare provider, but it is the patient who ultimately uses the healthcare product or service. The work of a marketer in the healthcare sector is therefore more than just the implementation of a promotional campaign. It is rather a matter of determining where to put the marketing emphasis under these conditions.
5.Measuring the desired result
Healthcare marketing also differs from traditional marketing in terms of measuring the desired outcome. In most cases, the effectiveness of a traditional marketing approach is determined by its contribution to the company’s economic bottom line.
If the business generated more profit after the campaign, the strategy is considered successful.
While the increase in profit may be a good measure to judge the usefulness of certain healthcare marketing efforts, this is not always the case.
In general, identifying and measuring the desired outcome of health care promotion is much more complex than simply tracking profits.
For example, if you run a teaching hospital, your measure of marketing success will most likely include increasing the volume of research grants or clinical trial subjects rather than increasing the number of patients admitted.
6.Most healthcare clients are not marketing pro
There is no reason to anticipate that a cardiologist will be an excellent copywriter for social media. Because of this, their hospital employed a healthcare marketing company.
However, because of their considerable training and attention to their medical specialization, it can be simple for them to forget that the majority of people do not speak doctor fluently. Additionally, they frequently fail to comprehend the potential need for marketing to publicize what is, in their eyes, an obvious requirement.
Getting the proper kind of highly technical information from the experts and then translating it into understandable English are typical back-end tasks in healthcare marketing.
7.Creative industry
The cottage industry of health care is made up of multiple independent businesses that collaborate to provide medical billing services to a community. These “cottages” exchange goods and services and offer patients medical care.
Except for a few nationalized healthcare systems, no healthcare market is fully vertically integrated. In terms of how they provide care, how they are compensated, and who pays them, categories of trade partners might vary greatly.
Traditionally, phone calls and fax machines have been used to coordinate care among trading partners. Can all of these trading partners be served by a single solution? Maybe, in some situations, and definitely not easily.
Conclusion
Healthcare marketing is relatively new. Its development is based on the fact that conventional marketing approaches are lacking when applied in healthcare, due to their unique characteristics and requirements.
The above discussion clearly illustrates this point. This is why hospitals, healthcare providers, medical centers, and people like you in the healthcare industry need such a specialized marketing method to achieve your goals.
The digital healthcare solution in Marham is intended to deal with the medical and health issues that clients address. To provide rapid care, it’s building an ecosystem where patients can get their needs met seamlessly from wherever they happen to be – even if you’re not feeling well abroad!
