The providers, pharmaceutical companies, nonprofits, and government offices that comprise America’s post-pandemic healthcare system share a marketing goal: gaining and maintaining audience trust. A challenge is that health can be a private, intimidating, and often uncomfortable matter for laypeople to discuss. The modern marketer’s solution is to craft messaging that offers patients a sense of control and empowers them to take charge of their health. Fortunately, this desire for stability, and the optimism inherent therein, is common to patients and consumers across healthcare’s many segments. What’s uncommon is patient-centric healthcare messaging that successfully blends data, strategy, and empathy. Achieving this requires an understanding of how modern patients make decisions about their care.
Audience Trust
Amidst ever-expanding appointment / treatment options and rampant spread of misinformation, today’s healthcare marketing landscape is more fragmented than ever. In a market where patients boast of having “done the research,” healthcare organizations’ first task is education. Patients are an important part of the healthcare system, as delivery of services begins with an individual’s decision to seek care.
Data and firsthand patient anecdotes are two of the strongest tools for persuading individuals to engage with the healthcare system and choose the services / treatments that are right for them. This promotes a sense of control by allowing patients to make informed decisions about their care.
Patient Empowerment
Similarly, empowerment can help patients see their healthcare goals through to fruition. Making lifestyle changes can be intimidating and is often put off until “tomorrow” or “after the holiday.” Because modern healthcare marketing should, in part, focus on patient retention, messaging to existing or potential patients – whether via social media, email, text, or push notification – should be ongoing and highlight easily attainable goals that are part of a given health journey.
For instance, an email blast targeting arthritis patients could combine education and empowerment as follows:
Subject:
Improved Knee Mobility Begins in the Kitchen
Preview:
Take your first steps without leaving the table
Body:
Studies show reduced knee pain in patients who lost as little as 5% body weight.
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- Greater improvements seen after 10-20% weight loss
- Cutting added sugars from diet shown to reduce daily calories up to 14%, alone
- A little discipline now, more enjoyment soon!
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“Some people want to fit back in their old clothes, but three months and 20 lbs. later, I’m happier to walk comfortably in my favorite shoes!” – Lucero, current arthritis patient
Call-to-Action:
Learn how our Nutrition Team works across departments to promote joint health.
This healthcare marketing example advertises a provider’s nutrition specialists by educating on weight loss benefits for arthritis patients before services are ever mentioned.
Marketing Difficult Topics
Not all healthcare services, however, offer hope of improvement or recovery. Marketing hospice organizations and other palliative (or end-of-life) care comes with added complexity. Audiences would rather not think about mortality, and providers cannot make the same wellness claims as for other services. Addressing this inherently difficult topic requires compassion and a reassessment of what a patient’s sense of control can look like.
Terminally ill individuals cannot control the outcome of their condition, but they can take measures to improve quality of life in their final months and provide for the well-being of loved ones. Messaging for this kind of care should highlight comfort, opportunities to maximize self-fulfillment at end of life, continuity of medical services, and benefits (like grief counseling) that extend beyond patients to their families and other loved ones. It should be noted that, in these cases, the patient is often not the sole decision maker. End-of-life care is typically discussed by the family, so it is both the patient and their loved ones that desire a sense of control.
Tactful healthcare marketing that looks beyond physical patient care could read like this social media ad copy for the fictitious Valley Hospice:
Headline:
Where Care Carries On
Primary Text:
Compassion beats on after the heart. Our teams provide emotional care for patients, and family support continues up to a year.
Description:
Find relief from grief, here
This healthcare marketing example speaks to the emotional needs of both patient and family while assuring the patient that they will be leaving their family in the capable hands of a bereavement counselor – care that will allow their loved ones to “carry on.”
Showing Vs. Telling
No amount of data, empathy, or audience insight changes the fact that many healthcare concepts are difficult to visually conceptualize. Therefore, use imagery to depict the improved quality of life patients and their loved ones can expect. Rather than simply telling what the service or product does, show what it could do for them.
For example, appropriate imagery for the arthritis healthcare marketing example could depict a senior couple laughing while cooking together. The grief counseling example would do well to show a grandparent and grandchild spending meaningful time together, made possible by the hospice provider.
Don’t Sell Healthcare. Care About Health.
Moreso than other industries, healthcare marketing is rooted in public need. It is a reaction to environmental circumstances as much as economic factors. Therefore, to market healthcare is to care about health and to instill that same caring in others. Doing so, however, requires marketers to view the broader system from a patient’s perspective and providers to adopt strategies that emphasize patient retention and empowerment over sales of individual services. It’s an approach that is equal parts B2C and awareness marketing. Teams that keep abreast of changes in the healthcare market know it as a best practice, and patients will come to know your organization as a trusted source of information and care.
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