The healthcare landscape is ever evolving, and as marketers, it’s essential to stay ahead of the curve. Several challenges persistently surface, becoming stumbling blocks for many. Our industry experts aren’t just aware of these challenges, but are actively tuned into them, working to find the most efficient strategies and solutions to cut costs, increase margins, and build resilience.
Forrester reports that investments in customer experiences improve margins. However, industry headwinds have forced healthcare leadership teams to sharpen their strategic pencil and prioritize investments that are certain to drive results and deliver business value.
Marketers especially feel the brunt of this, striving to optimize their strategies amidst these challenges and seamlessly bridge the gaps in connection, care, and convenience for their audiences.
Opportunity: Attract and Retain Patients
Despite the breadth and depth of medical expertise, many healthcare providers grapple with visibility. In an age of instant information, it’s crucial for patients to find, access, and schedule services with ease. Ensuring you’re visible is the first step in establishing trust.
QUICK TIP: Revamp your find care journey – today’s patients prioritize proximity and immediate availability. Leveraging intelligent search tools, especially those powered by AI, not only refines and optimizes their paths but also ensures you are easily discoverable.
Opportunity: Maximize Data
Healthcare is swimming in data. From patient histories to real-time monitoring, the data points are vast and growing. But with this surge comes the challenge: How do healthcare leaders harness this information?
The potential value is undeniable, but capturing and compliantly leveraging it effectively, especially without straining resources, remains a significant hurdle.
QUICK TIP: Dive into your organization’s data governance and data management strategies. Consider how marketing initiatives can not only draw from, but also actively enhance your enterprise’s overall data reservoir with unique insights.
Opportunity: Reduce Operational Costs
Every marketer is tasked with the challenge of doing more with less. With rising operational expenses and the need for innovative marketing techniques, striking the right balance between budget and efficacy is a constant juggle.
QUICK TIP: Shift the focus to cultivating a shared vision across the organization. While it’s challenging to design and monitor collective goals and KPIs, embracing them is pivotal. It prevents falling into restrictive team-based silos and mere box-checking, steering toward holistic success.
Opportunity: Stop the Bleed of Referral Leakage
Ensuring patient retention and managing referrals efficiently is paramount. Referral leakage not only impacts the bottom line but can also hamper the patient’s care journey, leading to fragmented care experiences.
QUICK TIP: It’s essential to identify, as precisely as possible, where leakage occurs. Implement flags for follow-up communications to reassure and re-engage, ensuring no patient slips through the cracks. Create open lines of communication among patients, physicians, and hospital operations.
Success In Action: Better Data Powers Healthcare Marketing Campaigns
Build Business Resilience – Your Path Forward
While these challenges may seem daunting, they’re not insurmountable. They highlight the imperative for improved collaboration across all touchpoints — encompassing not just the interactions your consumers have with you but also the interactions that various teams and stakeholders have amongst themselves in constructing a comprehensive picture of those consumers. Prioritizing ease of discovery, building trust, and facilitating seamless engagement with both patients and healthcare professionals is essential. This principle of nurturing robust relationships and promoting open communication underpins everything we champion for our clients.
Discover how you can reduce costs and boost margins. Download our guide to master the intricacies of healthcare.
