Five Things You Can Do To Get The Most Out of Your Healthcare Marketing Dollar

There was a time not so long ago when word of mouth and a good reputation for competency were all that was needed to ensure that your clinic's patient volume was consistent or growing. But today, with ever-changing insurance plans and preferred provider lists, higher deductibles, and patient co-pays, patients are more conscious of how they're spending their healthcare dollars. They have choices. They have the internet at their fingers to compare services. And, they're not afraid of making a change to better meet their needs, or to save some time or money.

Welcome to consumer-driven healthcare in the 21st century. Here, your marketing strategy – and the dollars you spend to execute it – matter more than perhaps ever before.

An investment in your practice and providers

A healthcare marketing strategy is an investment in your practice – and in your providers. Doctors tell their patients that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Similarly, it's better to have a sound strategy in place now than to wait until half of your providers are sitting in their offices, polishing their stethoscopes, waiting for patients to come through the door.

Most practices are hiring outside help to assist them in meeting their branding and patient volume goals. Maybe yours is one of them.

But are you getting the most you can from the services you're outsourcing?

Here are a few ways to ensure you're getting the most from your valuable healthcare marketing dollar:

1.)  Keep your website current. Your website is your digital welcome mat. It's the first thing your prospective patient is likely to see.  So if it's been a few years since you've updated your site, if it’s looking cluttered, or if it's not easily navigable on a mobile device, it's probably time for an upgrade. More than 75% of online traffic happens on a mobile device, so optimizing for that capability is particularly important.

The experience should be the same whether the site is accessed on a computer, tablet, or mobile device. In addition to creating a better user experience, accessibility is something search engines look for when crawling your website to determine your rank.  in short, your website is not an extra or unnecessary piece of collateral anymore; it's a reflection of your practice and your providers. It should appear as polished, up-to-date, and professional as they are. Invest accordingly.

2)  Don't cut corners on collateral. If your brochures are printed in-house and folded sloppily, or if the branded posters or signs in your lobby are faded or dated, you're probably not putting your best foot forward. Unprofessionally created and even hand-made signs leave too much room for patients to wonder where else you might be cutting corners to save a few dollars.

If your flyers look a little too much like the PTA announcements your third grader brings home from school in her backpack because you have a staff member with a rudimentary understanding of Publisher and she's happy to make them, consider hiring a professional designer or marketing consultant to help with effective, thoughtful messaging and a clean layout.

3) Let the professionals you contract with use the expertise you hired them for. If a patient came to you after spending a few minutes on WebMD, print-out in hand, sure of his diagnosis, and asking for a certain prescription, you might begin to wonder when Google became a suitable substitute for your medical degree. The marketing experts you've enlisted to help you meet your communications and marketing goals have the education and training to know what resonates with your audience, and how to communicate that message visually, cleanly, and persuasively.

When you micromanage the layout, design, image, and word choice, the message is often muddied, and the look and feel of the collateral are often compromised, cluttered, or even completely lost.

Recognize and utilize the strengths and talents of those you've trusted to bring your brand to life. If something feels completely off or there's an inaccuracy involved, of course, that needs to be addressed. But unless you have a minor in communications or graphic design, chances are that your consultant or agency knows better. You're the expert when it comes to diagnosis. They're the experts when it comes to communication strategies.

4) Evaluate the distribution of your marketing/advertising budget. How much is going to traditional media (print, billboard, radio, etc) versus digital?  Marketing strategies that earn the highest return on investment (ROI) and have the lowest patient acquisition cost (PAC) tend to revolve around digital services, such as search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, email marketing, and social media. Bonus: in addition to costing less than print display ads, these digital services are highly trackable, which make it easier to measure the performance of your marketing plan.

That doesn't mean you don't need any traditional media. Understanding your demographic and how they're reached is essential to determining the allocation of media spend. As for how much to set aside for marketing, the ratio of your total budget will depend on whether you're a well-established practice without a huge need for growth, in which case maybe 2-3% of annual revenue is an adequate budget, or whether you're brand new and needing to grow, in which case 15% might be more appropriate. Most practices will fall in the 5-10% range, which includes not only the media, but the services to create it and the staff or agency to manage it.

Pay-per-click advertisements are paid advertisements that are laser-focused to appear first for a set of search terms. Also known as "paid search," you can manage your budget and decide ahead of time what you're willing to spend to keep your site near the top of search engines. Your return on investment is easily 

5) Leverage your social media channels (with purpose). Many hospitals and medical practices rely strictly on organic social media as their primary healthcare marketing strategy. Organic social media includes the sharing of events, announcements, updates, photos which are posted directly to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, etc. It's a decent strategy to build your brand and to let your audience and patients know what's new. But it should not be your only social media strategy. Paid advertising is a much more effective way to reach the right people who may be seeking your services – even if you're not currently connected to them. Paid social media is not just pressing the "boost post" button that appears when you're on your business page. It involves budgeting and strategizing to target the audience you really want.