Great healthcare comes down to great service through all aspects of the patient experience. This also includes hospital marketing, which can make or break whether prospective patients decide to visit your hospital or switch to another provider.
Healthcare marketing includes all of the communication and marketing efforts that make an impression on your target audience, bring them to your establishment, and accompany them through their treatment and care.
In this article, we’ll give tips and tricks for how to market your hospital and develop your own healthcare marketing strategies. Let’s get started!
How to Market a Hospital
Hospital marketing is a team effort that both helps patients choose you over other providers and increases their confidence in your services. As such, investing in a quality marketing campaign can be the trick that gives you an edge over your competitors.
Hospital marketing can be done purely in-house, but it can be helpful to get professional input to give your hospital the best chance of success. Therefore, working with a professional marketing firm is often a great idea to help you reach your target audience most effectively.
Marketing hospital services often rely on a few foundational ideas: developing effective communication standards, employing outreach effectively, and focusing on your target audience.
Establish Communication Standards
You have the enormous privilege and responsibility of helping people take care of their health and guiding them through the most important moments in their lives. All of your communications should reflect your awareness of this and provide a positive patient experience.
Patients want to receive care from confident, capable practitioners. Providing clear and informative information shows patients that their medical care will be similarly high quality.
From tone to style to phrasing, it’s important to nail down your communication standards as a marketing department before developing your marketing materials. This will ensure that all new materials contain the same high level of professionalism and get your message across.
Employ Strategic Outreach
Executing effective strategic outreach frequently makes all the difference when it comes to making an impression on your target groups. By taking the step to contact potential patients, you let them know their worth and show them that you provide care tailored to them and their needs.
To create a useful outreach program, healthcare marketers should focus on being proactive. Include aspects such as automated paper and digital appointment reminders and online platforms for patients to contact their providers. When patients understand that you’re enthusiastic about communicating with them about their health, they’ll feel empowered to choose your services.
Study the Audience
As is the case in virtually any sector, understanding your audience is a vital step in any successful marketing campaign. This means collecting data about the groups you’re focusing on. You can send out surveys to target demographics, interview potential patients, and ask current patients to review their experiences.
You can then turn this collected data into statistics and quotes that illustrate the high quality of care at your hospital. It also gives you a glimpse into patients’ expectations and experiences, which helps you improve your services. After all, providing excellent services is also part of every healthcare organization’s marketing strategy!
Collecting target audience data can be complicated by the fact that healthcare can be a private topic, however, so some people might not want you to gather information about them. Therefore, it’s vital to request informed consent for every person you collect data from. Store all of your data securely, and delete it once you’ve finished using it.
Top Hospital Advertising Strategies
Hospital marketing includes a range of strategies, both online and on paper. Some strategies include distributing effective print materials, making online information easily accessible, and building your brand. We’ll explain each of these ideas in turn.
Print Strategy
A multi-prong print marketing strategy gives your hospital the best opportunity to make a great impression.
Reach out to patients with clear appointment reminder cards that help them keep track of their upcoming visits. Distribute informative brochures about procedures, products, and conditions that give patients the knowledge they’re looking for.
Help community members learn about your hospital by sending mailers to target demographics in your area. Mailers also help them remember your hospital when they need care.
Partnering with a professional printing company makes print marketing easy, as the printing company creates all of your print products for you and sends them to you. Your print partner can even create your design for you, which ensures that your products are professional and aesthetically pleasing.
Digital Outreach
Digital outreach reminds patients that you’re there and that you care. Both by making yourself easily available to patients and their families and by contacting them yourself, you establish a relationship that both increases patients’ trust and lets them know that you’re ready to help when they need it.
Make your outreach personal. When a healthcare provider personalizes their customer interactions, patients are 47% more likely to choose that provider for their care. So, quite literally, personalized outreach pays off for your healthcare practice.
Consistent Branding
Hospital branding consists of developing a recognizable identity for your organization, which patients can depend on. It symbolizes the high quality of the care you provide, as well as patients’ improved outcomes after choosing your services. Strong branding increases loyalty, leads to more word-of-mouth recommendations, and improves patient experiences.
To develop your hospital’s branding strategy:
- Make sure you understand your target demographics and what they’re looking for in their healthcare professionals.
- Consider the various aspects of your brand identity, including your brand offering, voice, and unique selling point.
- Keep track of your brand’s impact to ensure that it has the intended effect.
Print Authority: Top Medical Business Marketing
When you’re ready to take the next step in your hospital marketing, partner with The Print Authority! Your mission is to improve patient outcomes, and our mission is to help you make that possible. Since 1991, we’ve been dedicated to helping our customers succeed through top-tier medical printing services.
For all of the materials that will make your hospital printing strategy a success, contact The Print Authority today!
