Marketing automation: President of Smith & Jones talks healthcare marketing strategies

This tool can help engage prospective clients and healthcare consumers

My experience heading up business development at Smith & Jones has made me realize that there are considerable similarities between my job securing clients for our advertising agency, and a hospital’s job attracting patients to service lines.

The landscape for generating revenue and building business has transformed dramatically over the years. Consumers are changing the way they make healthcare decisions, alternative care models are popping up left and right and competition is increasing. With new industry behaviors to consider, healthcare marketers are changing the way they’re making important business decisions, too.

With all these developments, it is imperative we adapt and move forward with the latest in healthcare trends.

That’s where marketing automation comes into play.

From my experience

Chief marketing officers and marketing directors don’t want to be bothered by an arbitrary sales pitch. Cold calls are not as effective as they once were. Healthcare prospects are more sophisticated than ever and the good ones have administrative assistants filtering through their phone calls.

Instead of going in for a hard sell, it is important to nurture and educate prospective clients until they are ready to buy. Marketing automation helps feed relevant information to our leads, while tracking how interactive they are with our website.  Our hope, is that when it is time to choose a new marketing agency, they’ll have us in mind.

This type of marketing helps generate revenue, while justifying ROI.

The same goes for healthcare marketers. In our, “2016 Healthcare Marketing Trends” white paper, we explain how healthcare consumers want to feel like your organization is speaking directly to him or her —not as a salesperson —but as a hospital that cares.

Marketing automation will help promote new, highly personalized content to healthcare consumers, at the right time. It will help nurture your relationship, and again, provide evidence to its success.