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Healthcare Marketing is Most Effective When Simplified

August 12, 2013

marketing to millennials

In an era where everything is digital, even our realities are augmented, healthcare marketing agencies easily lose sight of what’s important – motivating and inspiring patients to take action. Between social media marketing, video marketing, email marketing, search engine marketing, and multiple forms of advertising, the patient can easily get lost in the mix, and the ultimate goal of every campaign can easily get muddied with too much stuff. Quaintise professionals have noticed a change in the healthcare marketing industry from patient-centric advertising to baffling, unfocused advertising with no clear purpose.

The Purpose of Healthcare Advertising

According to Dr. Tait Martin, affiliate professor of social marketing in the College of Public Health at the University of South Florida, advertisers work under the illusion that, if they just make impressions or entertain the audience, consumers will then remember the sponsor positively and later take positive action.

Of course, we at Quaintise know that is not the case. Sure, entertaining the audience can be beneficial and can leave an impression, but is it the impression that you want to leave? Is it the impression that will inspire patients to take action, call your offices or walk through your doors? Probably not.

Marketing Throw-Back

In order to be successful in healthcare marketing, agencies must return to their core principles. Those little aspects of marketing that actually mean something.

1. Emotion

– If you want to truly connect with an audience, you need to make them feel something. No matter what the patient tells you, it is their primal instinct, that little voice in their head, that, according to Dr. Martin, is ultimately in the driver’s seat in our decision-making. If you can appeal to your patients’ emotional side through marketing strategy, you will achieve your goals.

2. Purpose

– Every patient has a problem; it is your job as the physician to provide the solution to that problem. The same goes for any industry. In marketing, there is a problem and solution, and in order to generate action from the consumers, or patients, you have to convince them that you have the solution to their problem…the best solution. The audience needs to explicitly understand why taking action will help them.

3. Compatibility

– The specific purpose of your campaign must fit into the lives of the people whom you want to take action. For example, if you want to increase patient load for Back-to-School, but you only have office hours from 9am to 3pm on Monday through Friday, odds are you won’t increase your patient base. Your hours aren’t compatible with your patients’ daily lives. It’s not a logical fit.

4. Cost

– According to Dr. Martin, this pertains to many aspects of marketing; money, time, ego, reputation, or other forms of capital. What will it take to make it happen?

With so many advertising and marketing avenues and platforms, healthcare marketing agencies easily stray off the path of simplicity. Dr. Martin gives a great example:

It would be unhelpful to tell others to get active because it will allow them to live longer. This simply seems too incompatible and incomprehensible to the average sedentary person.  “But if you say something specific,” Martin says, “like, ‘Exercise 30 minutes a day, or walk a certain number of steps, or walk around the block,’ that can begin to seem compatible with someone’s life.”

It doesn’t have to be complicated. Remember that and your marketing campaigns will have greater success. Of course, you can always count on the Quaintise team to create marketing success for you.