How to Fine Tune Your Marketing for Healthcare Businesses in 2021

Marketing for healthcare businesses is not quite the same as marketing for other businesses. There are different considerations, such as HIPAA compliance, and marketing healthcare services requires slightly different tactics than marketing a store or a professional service. But marketing is still important for medical practices and other healthcare businesses, and there are things you’ll need to do in order to fine-tune your medical marketing strategies.

4 Steps to Optimizing Your Medical Marketing Strategies

Use past data to figure out what works.

If your business is brand new, you won’t have access to historical internal data. But, if your business has been operating, you can use what you’ve done to help figure out where your marketing dollars should go in the future.

Answer the following questions:

• What marketing strategies did we invest in last year?
• Did we see growth in the following KPIs:
  • Patient volumes
  • Patient values
  • Overall revenue
  • Overall profit
• What strategies worked the best, based on the data we have?

If you don’t have data, or your business is brand new, your priority should be to make sure that you are able to collect that data this year. Companies like Sequence Health can help you collect and analyze patient engagement data in a HIPAA-compliant way.

Brainstorm new ideas.

At this stage, what you want to do is figure out what new marketing strategies could be used to generate new patient leads. Healthcare advertising, medical SEO, social media marketing, traditional marketing strategies such as radio or news… there’s a lot that can be done! But not all of these ideas will be equally viable.

Take insights from people in your company who work patient-facing roles and who are intimately familiar with the initial stages of patient onboarding. You’ll also want to use the insights from people who work with the website, the social media, and anything else related to your practice’s online presence.

Assess the ideas and come up with a strategy for each viable one.

Not all ideas will be right for this year. You will have likely settled on a few strategies that are viable for your practice. Not only that, but you’ll also have the original strategies that you’ve been using that have worked thus far.

Now, it’s time to come up with a strategy and an action plan for these initiatives. You’ll want to come up with the following:

• Tasks required
• Team members & their responsibilities
• Timeframe
• Costs involved
• Ideal outcomes

Set SMART goals for these strategies.

SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. The goals you choose should be based on KPIs that directly contribute to the bottom line.

Of course, not all strategies will work in the end. You will want to assess the results at the end of your chosen timeframe and decide whether or not it’s worth pursuing in the future.