Like law firms, healthcare administrators and the facilities they manage have special concerns when it comes to marketing their services. For example, it’s critical to keep ethics in mind. Fortunately, there are also marketing methods that work particularly well for hospitals and other healthcare facilities. This guide will cover these methods as well as additional marketing tips for health administrators.
1. Focus on Expertise and Specialization
When marketing your healthcare facility or individual healthcare providers working in your facility, it’s important to focus on expertise and specialization. The medical field is all about specialization, and so you will want to target your marketing towards people who will benefit from your specialists. The expertise of your staff is also worth a mention. For example, if you have doctors who are considered experts in a particular field or have received numerous awards, that’s the kind of stuff that should be present in your advertising.
2. Content Marketing
Content marketing is key in many industries, and healthcare is no exception. Utilize social media and your own website/blog to provide a source of information for your patients and customers like many other successful and well-regarded hospitals have. Put that online master in healthcare administration degree to work and get your employees from different departments to contribute so you produce different, engaging and informative content.
3. Use Jargon and Hard Facts Sparingly or Not at All
Your average patients aren’t going to understand medical jargon, and hard facts, such as percentages, get dry and boring unless used sparingly or to make an important point. Avoid using terms that your clients won’t understand (or do and use the ad as a way to enlighten them about the meaning of the term and why it’s important to them) and use numbers to highlight and support your message. It can be good to put numbers in perspective by using comparisons so people will easily understand.
4. Get Your Clients to Help
Word-of-mouth advertising is the best form of advertising, as it doesn’t cost you a thing, it brings in new customers, and it shows that existing customers are happy about your service and will likely come back. It’s a good marketing tactic to promote at any business, but perhaps even more important for healthcare facilities because of how personal the connection your staff has to your patients. To encourage this, offer the opportunity for patients to give feedback, create a referral program and gather video and written testimonials from clients. The testimonials in particular can serve as good advertising on their own.
5. Give Away Branded Products
Hospitals, nursing homes and other care facilities are in a position to benefit from putting their name on products they provide. Like hotels, you can buy all kinds of products with your facility’s name and contact information on them to give out to patients as a form of marketing. If the items are given away at any point, they also serve as advertising to potential new clients. The products can also promote good health, like stress balls, pedometers and hand sanitizers, making them of benefit to your patients as well.
There are avenues open to healthcare administrators trying to advertise their facility’s services that are not as useful to other types of business, so it’s most definitely in your best interest to take advantage of them. Following the marketing tips presented here should lead to improvement and tangible benefits in your marketing strategy.
Dixie Somers
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