How come your favorite vintage store or coffee shop always manages to find new and creative outlets to increase profitability, while healthcare businesses get stuck in the seriousness and officiality of it all?
We can’t deny the core differences or banalize healthcare services: grabbing a cup of coffee doesn’t even compare to making serious healthcare decisions, but we can draw attention to a common denominator across different industries that can help you improve profitability in healthcare: personalization.
Imagine if your practice could run as smoothly as your favorite coffee shop, where everyone knows your name and your order and makes you feel right at home, alleviating the stress and worries of everyday life. Let’s explore how we can bring that level of personalization and efficiency to your marketing strategy and set your practice on the right track to boosting profitability.
Pick The Low-Hanging Fruit: Reputation Management
Let’s start simple: reputation management. It’s like making sure your coffee shop always smells like freshly brewed coffee—it draws people in and keeps them coming back.
While reputation management doesn’t fall under direct outreach campaigns, it’s a crucial component in each stage of the patient journey: other people’s experiences and praise can often be a determining factor in potential patients’ choices, making online reputation an invaluable ally in increasing profitability in healthcare.
Collect and Leverage Patient Reviews
Use automated systems to request patient reviews after their appointments across various platforms. Despite the instinct to prioritize healthcare-specific platforms, you should focus primarily on Google Business Profiles and Apple Business Connect – the two platforms that emerge at the starting points of the patient journey. Showcase positive feedback on your website and social media to gain more visibility and build trust with potential patients.
Monitor and Respond to Reviews
To simplify review management, use a centralized system to monitor reviews from all platforms, keep track of feedback, and respond promptly. When responding, ensure you’re not disclosing any PHI to stay in line with HIPAA regulations and your patients’ expectations. And don’t stress over a few negative reviews: a mix of reviews is actually more believable and organic to prospective patients, assuming you have a high overall rating. Address concerns calmly and avoid any escalation.
Leverage Feedback from Patient Surveys
Besides being an extremely useful tool for improving patient outcomes and quality of care, patient surveys can be gold mines for testimonials. Use positive feedback from surveys on your website and other media to highlight patient satisfaction and showcase the devotion and expertise of your healthcare business.
Implement Patient Feedback
Even though patient feedback can be leveraged in marketing, none of it matters in the long run if you don’t make real changes: use the feedback to conduct concrete improvements in your services, show your patients that their opinions matter and lead to tangible changes, reflecting your patient-centric approach.
Effective Budget Allocation and Tracking
Budget allocation and comprehensive campaign tracking can feel like a game of whack-a-mole, especially with healthcare privacy laws throwing wrenches in the works. But fear not! Here’s how to stay on top of your spending and make sure every dollar counts.
Implement Call Tracking
Monitor your campaign effectiveness by using call-tracking software to identify which marketing campaigns generate the most calls. This helps you identify the most effective marketing strategies, allocate your budget accordingly, and increase profitability in healthcare.
Apply Marketing Attribution Models
To better understand the patient journey, develop marketing attribution models. Attribution models help you credit the different touchpoints in the patient journey and see what drew their attention, how they interacted with different elements of your campaign, and, most importantly, where they converted, making their insights invaluable for refining your marketing efforts.
Confused? Conveniently enough, we wrote extensively about marketing attribution in healthcare, and can confidently claim you’ll feel much more directed and at ease after reading our guides and musings.
Use Healthcare Marketing Tools for Compliant Tracking
Healthcare marketing tracking can feel like a minefield due to HIPAA regulations and privacy laws. To overcome this obstacle, rely on tools designed specifically for healthcare marketing to track patient interactions and campaign effectiveness while maintaining HIPAA compliance. These tools can help you get all the data you need while protecting your patients’ private information, and one particular tool comes to mind as our modest recommendation.
Perform Regular Financial Reviews
Another reason why using healthcare-specific marketing tools for data analysis is of utmost importance is the ability to track your KPIs. Impressions, clicks, and likes can be useful metrics overall, but to truly understand how to invest your marketing dollars effectively, you need to measure your conversions, ROI, and PAC (Patient Acquisition Cost). Conduct regular reviews of your marketing spending and outcomes, then shift funds toward the campaigns and channels that deliver the best results.
The Key to Profitability: Segmentation and Predictive Targeting in Healthcare
While reputation sets the scene for successful marketing and effective tracking helps you understand where to direct your money and efforts, the secret sauce to skyrocketing profitability is segmentation and targeted marketing.
It’s like knowing exactly how each customer likes their coffee and having it ready just as they walk in to place an order. Anticipating your patients’ needs will ensure trust and loyalty.
Identify High-Value Patients Through Predictive Targeting
While all patients deserve equally dedicated and detailed care, to increase profitability in healthcare, you need to diversify your patient mix to include more high-value patients. Looking at demographics, insurance coverage, and healthcare needs can help you identify the most profitable patient segments.
This is almost impossible to achieve manually, so you’ll need a healthcare-specific marketing tool that supports this targeting by relying on anonymous data analysis and segmentation to procure effective audience lists.
Predictive targeting in healthcare can help you identify potential patients who are likely to need your services soon. By analyzing data patterns, you can proactively reach out to these patients before they even know they need you.
Target High-Margin Procedures
The key to increasing profitability in healthcare lies in attracting high-value patients for your high-margin procedures. For example: you stand to earn much more from one hip replacement surgery than a dozen routine appointments.
These procedures involve other pre and post-surgery services that further increase the Patient Lifetime Value while providing patients with comprehensive care with a dedicated team of specialists.
Personalize Marketing Campaigns
Once you’ve procured your audience lists for selected high-margin procedures, develop marketing messaging that’ll resonate with your target segments. Personalize your social media ads, postcard marketing, and content marketing to increase conversion rates. Test to see what works best and apply your findings to jumpstart each new campaign.
Use Detailed Data Analytics
Use conversion tracking and data analytics in predictive targeting to gain insights into patient behavior and preferences. This will help you further refine your audience segmentation and targeting strategies, significantly increasing your healthcare marketing ROI and practice profitability.
Embrace Healthcare Marketing Technology
Increasing profitability in healthcare doesn’t have to be mission impossible: by focusing on targeted marketing and supporting these efforts with reputation management, performance tracking, and data-informed budget allocation, you can create a profitable healthcare business that grows at scale with the support of a loyal patient base.
SocialClimb’s comprehensive marketing platform allows you to build centralized healthcare marketing campaigns, automate processes, integrate with your PM/EHR platforms, and track all crucial aspects of your marketing in one place. Our platform is the only one on the market that offers compliant predictive targeting in healthcare and conversion tracking, ensuring you stay ahead of the curve while keeping your marketing efforts efficient, effective, personalized, and creative.
Reach out today or take a moment to think on it, but we’ll leave you with the last piece of advice: don’t wait too long to experience the benefits of healthcare marketing technology. Healthcare marketing is still catching up with the rest of the world, and the market is not yet as saturated, so even the smallest steps you take in this direction can make a significant difference and set you apart from your competition. If you’re looking for ways to increase profitability in healthcare, data-driven digital marketing is your safest bet.
