Target marketing in healthcare is the practice of marketing your practice to your prospects by doing research, and segmentation. With healthcare target marketing, you can better reach your ideal patient. It is helping medical practice to reinforce their campaigns so that they don’t neglect any patient zone. Moreover, it is essential for a medical practice to target new patients in order to increase revenue. Increasing the effect of the patient targeting strategies helps you boost the growth and performance of your medical practice.
What Are the Challenges Faced by Healthcare in Targeting Patients?
Patients with unique preferences want to feel understood by their healthcare providers. So it is important to customize an appropriate healthcare digital marketing strategy that directly improves your patient care. Proficient patient targeting is the key to attracting patients based on their existing healthcare concerns. Doing targeted messaging directly resonates with patients brings them to your practice and promotes engagement. However, HIPAA makes it challenging to target patients with a higher likelihood of needing their particular services if that targeting is based on PHI This leaves them with limited options, resulting in a scattergun approach that doesn’t deliver the desired results.
1. Lack of personalization due to HIPAA
Personalization is the core ingredient of every healthcare marketing campaign. Patients do not prefer to indulge in false medical information which can affect their health. When looking at your healthcare campaigns, patients just want to see the medical services they are interested in. There comes the role of personalization in your healthcare marketing campaigns. But due to HIPAA regulations, healthcare marketers are extremely limited in access and ability to utilize patient’s information, putting them at a disadvantage.
SOLUTION: There is the opportunity to reach patients with relevant messaging without compromising their privacy status. Remind patients about their appointments, and inform them with the stats of disease and prevention. Showcase the unique values of healthcare organizations that can embark patients for repetitive sign-ups and appointment scheduling.
2. Targeting restrictions due to HIPAA
Retargeting is common where patients who visit a website are shown advertisements when they leave. This is the best target marketing strategy that entices patients to return and take repetitive actions. Meanwhile, to protect patient information and privacy, HIPAA prohibits healthcare marketers from re-targeting users who have recently viewed their sites.
SOLUTION: An inbound market strategy helping providers gain new patients without violating HIPAA regulations. Whereas, healthcare marketers should create useful, engaging content that is optimized for search engines. Most healthcare organizations are targeting their near patients by doing local SEO in which the website is optimized for potential patients near the practice vicinity.
One can also benefit from pay-per-click (PPC) advertising with clear, and compelling calls to action.
3. Public Perception of Healthcare
Patients have become more informed in recent years due to the ease of unlocking healthcare systems by doing research on the prescribed drug prices for healthcare coverage. Therefore, healthcare organizations need to accurately prescribe to the patients so they don’t lose their trust in the healthcare operations running at your medical practice.
SOLUTION: Healthcare providers need to build trust with prospective patients and effectively convey the value they offer. Develop your thought leadership by getting online reviews, and testimonials and improve patient perception. Healthcare companies and surveys should focus on patient care, and testimonials from current patients in their patient target marketing.
4. Attracting the Right Patients
One of the challenges in patient target marketing is crafting appropriate content that is easy to rank. Healthcare facilities need to remain visible on the platforms where the patients are simply looking to understand the disease causatives.
SOLUTION: Positioning the healthcare practice as a trusted resource while minimizing sales tactics, can be greatly beneficial. Healthcare campaigns must be designed with target patients, relevant keywords, and clear goals in mind. Some parts of the content shall provide general information, whereas others should be more focused and drive action.
5. Limited investment in marketing
Healthcare practitioners struggle to drive the most out of the target marketing. Therefore practitioners think about investing in healthcare digital marketing efforts. Moreover, the limited use of digital marketing and new technology among healthcare providers makes the investment in healthcare digital marketing somehow complex.
SOLUTION: Focus on making data-driven decisions and tracking return on investment (ROI). Analyzing traffic sources for the website allows optimization and effective content creation.
Performing adequate keyword research improves marketing campaigns and their performance. By doing this you can make informed decisions on what pages to focus the time on. Likewise, Google Analytics can also help in tracking conversions to demonstrate the value your healthcare digital marketing generates. Moreover, marketing automation frees up time to focus on other things while driving leads.
Conclusion:
Portraying your practice as thought leaders in the industry positions the provider as a trusted resource. Even if the patient does not need services today, the provider will be top of mind when they do. Therefore, healthcare target marketing focuses on patient experience at every point of interaction.