In healthcare practice, a good healthcare / medical marketing plan lets you anticipate, assess, make preparations and formulate a guide that you can adhere to in order to significantly improve your chances of success. With plenty of information on the internet, patients feel less and less of the need to go to a hospital, clinic or practice for their health needs. This is why healthcare marketing planning is very important. With a well-refined, well-budgeted plan, you can avoid time costing mistakes, increase the inflow of your patients, keep returning customers happy and in the end, increase your ROI. Here is a good healthcare marketing plan that you can follow:
- Get updated with the latest trends
Healthcare marketing has been rapidly changing, especially in the recent years. It is to be expected as healthcare is a quickly evolving industry whose evolution is brought about by technology and policies. If you have good marketing planning, you can easily keep up with current trends like Big Data, AI, Machine Learning as well as mobile apps. These technologies give you opportunities to stand out and differentiate yourself from the heap.
- Make sure your brand is visible and solid
The days when healthcare marketing was just carried out by word of mouth or coupon mailers are gone. Because of the internet and social media, healthcare marketing has dramatically changed. In fact, healthcare marketing is exclusively done online. This is the reason why you have to put a healthcare brand that is suitable for an online audience. This where healthcare marketing planning comes in. You need to strategically outline your brand and your presence for online audiences and online patients.
- Audit your products and services
Just like the manufacturing industry, a healthcare industry needs to audit its products and services. You need to have full knowledge of your products and services and not just your management team. Many people think that this is just going to be an extra hassle but your life is actually going to be much less stressful if you know your products and services front and back. To do this easily, you can create a matrix that aligns the products with buyer personas. Ask yourself questions such as who are your target customers and patients? Why do your patients need your services or your products? What problems are solved by your products and services? Knowing what you are offering and the value of your offers to your patients will help you market more effectively.
- Have a Gap analysis
Having a gap analysis evaluates your current marketing strategies and determines the adjustments you need to do so that you can achieve the objectives that you aim for. In order to do a gap analysis, observe your current strategies that you use in acquiring patients. Then, look at what your competitors are doing. Ask yourself if there is anything you can do better than your competitors. Is there anything that they are doing which you aren’t which can help you improve. Can you copy your competitors or modify their strategies so you can improve on them?
- Do a SWOT analysis
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. From time to time, do a SWOT analysis of your healthcare marketing campaign. With this, you can periodically evaluate your internal and external environment as part of your strategic planning process. Since SWOTS are very subjective, you can also get an external SWOT analysis from a well-informed but objective third party and compare it to your own SWOT analysis. For this task, you can hire a digital marketing agency to do a SWOT analysis for your healthcare marketing campaign.