Grow Your Revenue in 2023

Many hospitals and medical practices are feeling the post-pandemic financial squeeze this year as persistent staffing shortages intensify, and supply costs increase.

One budget that often gets placed under the microscope during financially challenging times is the marketing budget. Marketing is necessary to drive patient acquisition and revenue growth, but the budget can get bloated if no one pays attention to what's working and what isn't. Where is your organization spending its marketing dollars? Are you getting a return on investment for your marketing dollars?

These 5 trending healthcare marketing strategies, when implemented properly, will help your system to grow patient volume and engagement and in turn, increase your revenue too.

1. Targeted Advertising - Omnichannel: Maintain a comprehensive marketing strategy that meets your patients where they consume media, including TV and radio. Incorporating traditional media advertising such as radio and TV is an integral part of a multifaceted marketing approach. Use data and analytics to understand your system's target patient demographic and create personalized advertising campaigns that reach them wherever they spend their time, whether it's TV, radio, print, or online.

Many of your potential patients, especially those in certain demographics, may be just as likely to learn about your services via traditional media as they would online. TV and radio advertising provide many advantages above and beyond digital/online marketing alone:

  • Television and radio are powerful storytelling tools that stand out as highly effective methods to engage patients and potential consumers. Healthcare marketing teams shouldn't overlook the persuasive impact of television or radio when devising a media strategy. Television and radio reach a large and diverse audience, making them ideal for healthcare organizations, practices, and hospitals needing to reach a wide range of people.
  • Additionally, TV and radio ads often utilize high-quality production assets, and the dynamic audiovisual nature of TV makes it a more engaging and persuasive medium than most other forms of advertising.
  • TV and radio advertising helps to build brand awareness, differentiate from the competition, and reinforce brand messaging, making it an important resource for long-term marketing efforts.
  • Radio and TV ads can be accurately measured and optimized based on metrics such as audience ratings and demographics.
  • Television and radio advertising enables healthcare organizations to build trust and credibility. TV remains a trusted source of information, and viewers often perceive TV advertising as more credible and authoritative than other forms of advertising.

TV and radio continue to be relevant and effective marketing tools, especially for organizations that want to grow their reach and revenue while strengthening their professional reputation. Therefore, it's important to consider whether the benefits of television and/or radio advertising make sense for your practice, specialty, market, and media needs.

Local TV and radio advertising offer powerful methods to directly reach precise demographics and target specific audiences within your community. Local TV and radio stations are well-respected mainstays of the community with loyal followers you can leverage to your advantage. Integrating radio and/or TV advertising with your digital strategy provides a winning combination of multi-channel access to key local audiences and diverse demographics you may not otherwise reach via other media or digital marketing.

2. Digital Marketing: Utilize digital channels such as websites, social media platforms, email campaigns and pay-per-click (PPC) ads to reach potential patients and educate them about your services and unique offerings. The technology available for digital marketing today allows you to specifically target your potential patients in a very sophisticated, data-driven way.

  • Retargeting / Remarketing: Use retargeting ads to reach individuals who have previously visited your hospital's website or engaged with your content.
  • Personalized Ads: Create personalized ads that speak directly to the interests and needs of each individual patient, prompting them to take action.
  • Dynamic Ads: Use dynamic ads that update in real-time with information such as available appointment times, events, locations, or promotions, in a relevant and engaging way.

3. Engage the Community: Leverage your existing patients and community to grow your reach.

  • Patient Reviews and Referrals: Encourage current patients to leave positive reviews on websites like Yelp, Google, and Healthgrades. Incentivize referrals through loyalty programs.
  • Community Outreach: Participate in community events, health drives (screenings, vaccinations, etc.) and wellness initiatives to increase visibility and build relationships with potential patients.
  • Reputation Management: Monitor and respond to online reviews and ratings to maintain and improve your practice's reputation, which can impact patient acquisition and retention.

4. Retain current/past patients - When devising your targeted marketing strategy and community engagement, don't forget to include your current and past patients in your outreach. It costs more to bring in a new patient than to retain an existing one. Retention efforts can include patient health reminders, community events, patient success stories and testimonials. For elective procedures, aesthetics, etc., you can also promote special pricing, deals, or sales to current patients.

5. Content Marketing: Create and share valuable, informative health content, including news articles, blog posts, infographics, and videos, to educate prospective and existing patients while establishing your practice as a trustworthy source of helpful, relevant medical information. Share answers to common health questions in your medical specialty, symptom checkers, seasonal updates (flu, RSV, Covid, etc.), public health advisories, or new services. Working with a reputable expert in SEO (search engine optimization) can also help you expand the reach of your content by optimizing your website and content for online search, so that more people will find your content online.

6. Public Relations - Earned Media: In addition to paid media such as traditional advertising and sponsored digital ads, a strong public relations strategy with consistent media outreach can help reach new audiences outside of your existing patients, followers, or community. Coverage by outside media outlets raises your visibility and increases brand awareness of your health organization. Mainstream news, media outlets, and healthcare industry publications always seek interesting medical content to feature. Below are a few ideas for topics that could be covered by local or even national media:

  • New, innovative procedures, cutting-edge devices or drugs, and/or clinical research being conducted at your hospital or by your physicians
  • New service lines, health centers, or new physician specialists
  • Participation in community events, health drives, philanthropic endeavors, charity, etc.
  • Unique, notable patient success stories - human interest features - these can also be tied into current events if there is a relevant news hook to leverage (be creative! An experienced PR rep can help you take advantage of applicable news hooks)
  • Any medical news that may be tied into current events or public health events (epidemics, seasonal updates, foodborne illnesses, etc.)

Conclusion:

While these trending healthcare marketing strategies are highly effective for patient acquisition and retention (and thus, for revenue growth), healthcare marketing can also be more complicated and complex than marketing in other industries. Therefore, it's helpful to work with a team of knowledgeable marketing and media experts who are also well-versed in the healthcare space. Contact CMG Health Marketing today to find out how we can help streamline your healthcare marketing efforts for optimum results in achieving your revenue growth goals.