1. Create a seamless digital patient experience

Todays consumers expect to engage on their own terms. A high-quality healthcare marketing strategy must pay close attention to the patient experience and allow them to enter your health system through their preferred channels. Start by identifying the many places the patients typically begin engaging with your health system. These introductory touch points, collectively referred to as the digital front door, could include channels like your health systems website, third-party physician listings, or your engagement centerjust to name a few.

Outline the path a patient is most likely to take after their first engagement with your health system, whether it results in a conversion or not. This practice, called patient journey mapping, will help you understand which actions lead to conversions, and which actions may cause a patient to exit the journey. Ideally, you will want to map multiple journeys across service lines, working with clinicians, revenue cycle specialists, and other patient-facing staff to capture entire care episodes and identify friction.

2. Build a consistent brand

Consumers dont buy products or services they dont know or trust. Similarly, consumers wont choose a hospital or care team that theyre unfamiliar with. Building a strong brand and promoting brand awareness helps reduce overall cost-per-acquisition, so make sure to allocate an appropriate budget to brand building.

Think about what makes your health system unique, and what draws customers in. Is it high- quality care? Caring staff? Cutting-edge technology? A high degree of trust? Find one crucial factor that attracts patients, and design marketing campaigns to spread awareness and activate your brand. Promoting your hard-won quality achievements is one of the most effective ways to build a trusting brand image.

3. Build engaging relationships using personalization

Despite the personal nature of healthcare, many marketing strategies have not integrated personalization. Marketers should leverage the clinical data contained in their electronic health record (EHR) system and consumer and behavioral data in their healthcare customer relationship management (CRM) software to laser-target patients who need their services.

4. Create a strong website

High-quality hospital websites help optimize the patient journey in a few key ways. They constantly collect important consumer data used for a variety of marketing purposes, like remarketing campaigns or fueling personalization in digital spaces. Modern websites are also great vehicles for delivering personalized experiences through dynamic copy and creative. Finally, they provide a central location for your content, which makes it easy for patients to learn more about your health system and quickly find the right doctor and location for their needs. Additionally, the SEO value of a strong website should not be overlooked. A good website provider should tout benefits like optimized site speeds and responsive design to ensure search engines look favorably upon your health system. This is crucial to help patients find your health systems official site with ease.

5. Evaluate the best marketing channels

Healthcare marketers juggle a variety of channels for marketing purposes, including organic search, paid search, social media, display ads, and moreand a single marketing budget to distribute. Making the most out of countless marketing channels can be overwhelming. A business intelligence solution will help your teams use data to discover the most influential marketing channels for different geographic areas, personas, and service lines.

6. Manage patient reviews

Research has uncovered that 59% of Americans find patient reviews to be very important or somewhat important when choosing a physician. Its clear the majority of patients want to see others have had a good experience with you before they entrust you with their own health. For this reason, it is crucial that health systems solicit positive reviews from satisfied patients.

However, receiving a few negative reviews is inevitable. Health systems that wish to maintain a favorable reputation must respond to these reviews in a way that is HIPAA compliant and empathetic. Even if a patient assesses their experience in a way that is brutally honest, remember to thank them for their feedback, address their concern directly, and communicate how you plan to resolve their concern.

7. Use analytics to secure your budget

Marketing teams often receive their budget from upper-level management. Unfortunately, assigning budgets in this way typically results in over or under-spending, which can diminish the marketing teams impact on the health system. Instead, marketers should analyze previous campaigns, determine how much budget is needed to reach key demographics, and present findings to executives for buy-in.

8. Align marketing with organizational objectives

Marketing needs to have a seat at the table when determining the health systems overall business strategy. Opening up a two-way dialogue between marketing and upper-level management will enable marketers to understand that organizations overarching goals. Then, they can use analytics to set a realistic budget to achieve these goals.

9. Analyze your market

Understanding rapidly shifting market dynamics matters more than ever, given ongoing consolidation of traditional providers and the growing number of new entrants intent on disrupting existing models. With advanced healthcare business intelligence built on the largest repository of healthcare-specific data, decision-makers responsible for driving business growth can understand interlocking market dynamics such as consumer need, market share, physician alignment, and competitive dynamics.

For an even greater competitive advantage, harness the power of claims-based analytics to identify detokenized patient activity across inpatient and outpatient settings, so planners can understand not just market share but share of care at the procedure level, for the entire pre- and post-surgical patient journey.