You handle the marketing for a company within the healthcare industry and have been charged with developing the marketing strategy for the team. No pressure. Have you thought about what you can be doing to ensure your healthcare marketing strategy actually works? Below are some points to consider.
Know Your Audience
The number of marketers out there, in any industry, that don’t know the audience that they are marketing to is unbelievable. This is by far the most important thing you can do to ensure you have a solid strategy that works.
For the healthcare industry in particular, it is extremely important to know your audience because the industry is so massive. You need to know which areas of the field you need to be focusing on and find your niche.
Say you’re trying to sell a software that will help improve daily productivity for nurses in the hospital. Would they be your target audience? Not necessarily. Yes, they are the ones who will ultimately benefit from the product, but they are typically not the financial decision makers in the hospital. You’d need to be targeting the hospital executives who would make the decision to purchase your product.
On the flip side, if you had a product that can help doctors get ready for work faster in the morning and attend to patients faster, doctors would then be your target as they would be the decision maker for their home purchases...even if it related to their profession.
In addition to knowing who they are, know where they are. This will help you target your marketing efforts in the right areas. For example, while Twitter is a great platform for promoting content, it is also home to copious amounts of information and is harder to get found throughout the noise. On the other hand, many hospital executives frequently visit LinkedIn. By finding out which groups your audience is a part of, it will make it a lot easier to promote your content and messaging because it is a smaller, more targeted audience. There’s less noise to get through. Find out where they are and focus your efforts there.
Understanding your audience’s pain points and how you can help them solve their problems is key. Knowing where they are coming from will help you get in their mindset and understand how to best persuade them to work with your company.
Know Your Products and Services
It’s one thing to know your audience, but it’s another to understand your own products and services. Do you know all of the ways your product can benefit your audience? Do you have answers to your audience’s toughest questions? Show them how you can help solve their problems and then show what else you can do for them. Know everything there is to know about your company’s services.
Know Your Competition
Look outside of your company bubble to see what your competition is doing. Assess their strengths and weaknesses as you would with your own company. What are they doing well that you should try? What are they doing that you can do better? Knowing what your competition is doing can help you set yourself apart from them and dominate in the market place.
Analyze your Data
Review your data. Analyze your data. Develop a strategy. Implement the strategy. Rinse and repeat month after month. Analyzing your data is the most important thing you can do to ensure your strategy is working. By using marketing and sales software, such as HubSpot, you can review all of your stats in one place, which makes it easy to track trends across mediums and campaigns.
At the end of every month, you should do a thorough analysis of your campaigns to see what’s working, and what’s not and why. Before the months end, it’s a good idea to check in on your analytics throughout the month to make sure everything is working, but don’t obsess about trends until the months end as you typically won’t see patterns before then.
Be Flexible
A marketing plan is just that...a plan. And you know what? Sometimes plans change. Deadlines may be missed. Content may not be approved. Whatever the case may be, the strategy may not end up as you thought, but that’s OK, you need to roll with the punches and continue to look forward and strategize.
Following the tips above will help you create and maintain a healthcare strategy that works. What other advice would you add to separate your company from the rest? Please leave your comments below.
