2023 Healthcare Marketing Trend: Leveraging Growth Marketing – Recap
Our 2023 Healthcare Marketing Trend #3: Using Data to Fuel Growth inspired our most recent webinar. If you missed it, you can watch the full webinar below! Keep reading for a quick overview.
Marketing ≠ Advertising
A good thing to remember as we kick off the growth marketing topic is that “marketing” and “advertising,” although often used interchangeably, are not the same. Marketing is a broad term encompassing all a company’s activities to promote and sell its products or services. Advertising is a specific, paid tactic within the larger marketing strategy, like television advertising, print advertising, digital advertising, etc. So, what is growth marketing, and how does it fit within your marketing umbrella?
Growth marketing is a strategy focused on long-term, sustainable growth. It combines traditional marketing tactics with data-driven approaches to drive meaningful results.
The benefits of growth marketing for hospitals and health systems include increased website visibility, improved website performance, and increased customer engagement. Additionally, it can help increase website traffic, leads, and conversions, meaning more patients coming through your doors.
What are the benefits of integrating growth marketing into your strategy?
Growth marketing will be essential to meet the demands of healthcare leaders looking for more tangible marketing results. Some benefits of growth marketing include:
- Greater response rate on marketing initiatives
- Demonstrated ROMS (return on marketing spend) through downstream revenue of procedures and encounters
- Predictive modeling provides targeted marketing and one-to-one patient communications
- Revenue growth within the current patient base
- Improved patient experience and clinical outcomes
- Improved brand perception
What are examples of growth marketing in healthcare?
There are plenty of marketing strategies that you’re probably already using that can be considered growth marketing tactics. The key is to evaluate the data you’re getting from these efforts and make changes to garner better results. Here are some examples:
Content Marketing:
Content marketing is a growth marketing tactic to attract and engage customers by providing useful, relevant, and valuable content. For hospitals and health systems, this could include creating informative blog posts, eBooks, whitepapers, and videos about various health topics.
Search Engine Optimization:
Search engine optimization (SEO) is another growth marketing tactic to improve a website’s visibility in search engine results. For hospitals and health systems, this could include optimizing website content for relevant keywords, improving page load times, and improving website usability.
Conversion Rate Optimization:
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a growth marketing tactic to improve the performance of a website or landing page. For hospitals and health systems, this could include testing different page layouts, call-to-actions, and optimizing form fields.
Integrating with your CMR
At the center of your growth marketing efforts should be your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool, which houses all your information and data. Using marketing automation tactics like lead scoring, you can create more “one-to-one” style messaging triggered when a user takes specific actions. For example, here’s how a prospective patient could go through an engagement cycle for Bariatrics:
- They see your advertising and visit the landing page.
- They click a CTA and fill out their information.
- The information is input into the CRM. This triggers email automation and retargeting digital ads to make sure you stay top of mind.
- The automated email gives them information on the next educational session, and they sign up.
- After the education session, they receive a follow-up email asking them to schedule a consultation.
- After the surgery, continue to follow up with them via email to ensure they’re keeping up with the post-surgery weight-loss program.
Even after booking a service, stay in contact with them! Lead patients to better health outcomes by keeping them “on track” and engaging them much like a retailer would.
Final Considerations – How to get started
- Start by establishing your organizational goals
- Set your service line growth strategies and objectives
- Evaluate Infrastructure and processes: Staff training and expertise
- Integrate departments and technologies:
- Marketing
- IT
- C-suite
- Patient experience teams (Can we live up to what we’re promising?)
- Business development
- Service line VPs or directors
- Communications team
Need help implementing your growth marketing plan this year? Feel free to schedule a call with VP Paul Fahey. We’d love to see how we can help.
Further Reading:
A Quick Guide to Healthcare Marketing Analytics
How to Build a Campaign Around Analytics
How to Prove Healthcare Marketing ROI (Webinar)