How Changing Digital Strategies Impact Healthcare Marketing
With the digital revolution knocking at their door, healthcare marketers find themselves between a rock and a hard place. Because of HIPAA regulations and FDA restrictions, it’s challenging to embrace online opportunities to their full potential. All the same, it’s impossible to ignore how changing strategies are impacting healthcare marketing, especially when you look at the picture the figures tell.
Digital Dust-Up
Digital channels are disrupting and overtaking traditional marketing in all sectors including healthcare, according to a recent Medicare Advantage study. Seniors and boomers make up two of the biggest target audiences, and up to 45 percent of this audience uses the web to search for healthcare insurance and services.
A 2016 Age-In Study from Deft Research shows the greatest growth in consumer healthcare marketing is in mobile apps, social media and digital ads. These are all strong indicators that digital strategies are leaving other marketing methods in the dust.
Extending Reach
The vast majority of healthcare consumers look online for information, so it makes sense that providers reach them there. In the past, “spray and pray” marketing methods used to cast a wide net using radio, TV and print. Since precise targeting became possible, companies can extend the reach of their marketing dollars significantly by switching to digital methods.
Stats from Google indicate more than three-quarters of patients search for information before booking healthcare appointments. With 92 percent of consumers claiming they trust social media reviews and recommendations above other marketing, healthcare practitioners have begun engaging digitally in a big way to increase their reach.
Patient Personalization
In the bad old days, people were accustomed to being targeted en masse like sheep. With the arrival of big data, however, reaching the right patient with the right message at the right time has become increasingly possible.
Personalization no longer means simply addressing email messages by name. Marketers can now deliver highly personalized communications based on demographic, social and online behavioral information. Users searching for diabetic supplies, for example, can be targeted for related products based on the assumption they or a loved one are diabetic.
Measurement Ability
The ability to measure performance is where the real clout of digital marketing comes in. Almost everything can be monitored, tracked and quantified, which takes much of the guesswork out of ongoing marketing. It also makes it possible to measure ROI, which was difficult if not downright impossible with traditional healthcare marketing. And that means making better budget decisions than ever before.
For more insights on creating successful healthcare marketing campaigns, call Wax Custom Communications at 305.350.5700 or visit waxcom.com.
