According to a national survey from Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, 72 percent of internet usersof internet users looked online for health information within the past year.
Today, healthcare consumers (patients) are intelligent, tech savvy and willing to spend the time to make informed decisions when it comes to choosing provider services. In this modern healthcare landscape, technology is playing a significant role in changing how the consumer seeks medical care, which means hospitals need to rethink how they are engaging with past, current and future patients.
This is where hospital marketing programs come into play.
With the changing healthcare environment, traditional marketing is no longer an option and healthcare marketers need to make the shift towards digital marketing campaigns. Let's take a look at a few reasons why this is a must:
The Savvy Healthcare Consumer
With access to an immense amount of medical information, today's healthcare consumers are more knowledgeable than they ever have been before. Now, consumers are asking questions like is this provider covered under my plan? Do they offer the services I need? How much does it all cost? It's up to healthcare organizations to not only respond with that information, but to do so in a digestible and concise manner.
As consumers are taking a more proactive approach to their health, they are able to self-diagnose based on all the information they have available at their fingertips; meaning they are less likely to seek hospital services unless they truly require serious medical attention. With patients now able to self-cure for minor health issues, fewer are coming to hospitals for answers and these hospitals are now forced to become more creative and targeted in order to maintain a steady revenue stream.
Hospitals need to engage with consumers on a deeper level in order to attract and retain them. This creates a more competitive environment among hospitals and patient care facilities to promote their individual health systems and draw in new consumers.
Traditional Marketing Will No Longer Cut It
In order to reach these consumers, hospitals must rethink their old ways of marketing outreach. In the past, hospitals took a traditional marketing approach, which involved leveraging offline channels to reach consumers that typically are not integrated, which makes it difficult to measure the return on marketing investment (ROMI).
To connect with the modern healthcare consumer, however, marketing campaigns have needed to expand beyond traditional tactics. Today's digital marketing campaigns are deeply targeted online and offline campaigns. Beneficial to many marketing campaigns throughout a variety of industries, customer relationship management (CRM) tools are helpful in pinpointing the target audience a campaign would want to reach. When used in healthcare marketing, these campaigns break down patient interactions to provide metrics that support and provide insight into key performance indicators, and the ROMI.
Solutions such as CRM can help segment out patient information, allowing hospitals to reach their target patient audience with an appropriate message. A healthcare CRM allows hospitals to specify patient needs, providing hospital marketers with the information they need to make tactical and informed decisions to reach patients more directly.
Digital Marketing Offers a More Robust View of the Consumer
Digital marketing campaigns allow healthcare organizations to collect information to better understand patients, which allows them to engage more intelligently and deliver a greater patient experience. The information gathered can help inform future interactions with patients. By bringing digital marketing campaigns into hospital and health system marketing departments, they better able to reach the tech savvy consumer and enhance patient relationships
As consumers become more technologically advanced, hospitals are being forced to connect and engage digitally with consumers, or risk losing those patients to competing hospitals or health systems. With this change, hospital and health system marketing departments must shift from traditional towards digital marketing campaigns to engage with a larger patient base.
Kristin Hambelton is responsible for leading marketing and inside sales at Evariant. She oversees all marketing strategy and operations including product marketing, branding, demand generation, and corporate communications. She also manages the team that is responsible for identifying, qualifying, and developing opportunities for the sales organization. Prior to joining Evariant, Kristin worked for Adobe as a result of their acquisition of Neolane, where she served as vice president of marketing. Kristin was part of the executive team that drove significant year-over-year growth, leading to the sale of the company to Adobe for $600M. Prior to Neolane, Kristin held marketing leadership roles at IDC, Kronos, and Digital Equipment Corporation. She has been recognized for her achievements by several organizations, including a Bronze Stevie Award for Female Business Executive of the Year and Sales Lead Management Association's 20 Women to Watch.