The basics of medical marketing

Medical marketing has its specifics. This area requires a special, delicate approach and template solutions that can be applied to ordinary services and goods that do not work in the medical field. Let’s consider medical services’ specifics from the strategic marketing planning perspective.

Features of the promotion of medical services

Several factors determine the existing features of the promotion of clinic services:

• The doctor-patient relationship is not a seller-buyer relationship at all. Here we are talking about the most important thing – health and life! The price of a medical error can be too high. Therefore, to choose a clinic and a doctor, a potential patient, must trust him. Generating this trust is the main task of the medical marketing agency.
• Turning to the clinic, the patient expects a cure, improvement of his appearance, and getting rid of symptoms. However, in any case, he is worried that he will experience psychological and physical discomfort and pain. It is important to show a potential patient that there will be no such negative factors in this clinic.
• The field of medicine is complex, and it has many specific terms unknown to people without a medical education. In many cases, a potential clinic patient decides to seek treatment based on factors that he can evaluate, for example, the level of service, equipment, and appearance of the clinic.
• Very often, the patient’s internal expectations of therapy have nothing to do with the real possibilities for a cure. This factor must also be considered in medical marketing.
• The patient is set for a positive outcome in any situation (even the most neglected, complex, problematic ones). Moreover, this same outcome must, first of all, correspond to his internal expectations, often divorced from reality.

These factors create a unique emotional background, which determines the basics of medical marketing.

Medical Marketing Rules

Visiting the clinic, in many cases, is dictated by illness, which in itself is associated with a negative psychological and physical state. This is the main difficulty of medical marketing.

Several key rules will help overcome the negative and support the potential client of the clinic choose its favor.

• The patient’s health is an indispensable value for all clinic staff. It is clear that private medical institutions operate for profit, but still, this factor does not need to be emphasized.
• The requirements for ethical marketing methods are very high. The advertisement must be as subtle as possible but simultaneously evoke an emotional response from the target audience.
• Competent marketing should help the patient objectively assess the capabilities of doctors so that he does not have inflated or incorrect expectations.
• One of the most important tasks of a marketer is to overcome the main stop factors associated with fears and past negative experiences of potential clinic visitors.
• Advertising of medical services should be as honest as possible. Embellishing and operating with unreliable information can be too dangerous because here we are talking about the health and life of a person.
• Medical marketing often emphasizes increasing the loyalty of existing patients from the client base and retaining potential “warm” customers who have come into contact.

Segmentation of an existing customer base

When choosing the methods and tools of medical marketing, it is important to focus on forming “one’s own” client base and increasing the loyalty of already established patients. It is important not to expand the scope of the targeted impact but to achieve a real impact on the people interested in your clinic’s ongoing medical marketing services.

Such point influence becomes possible thanks to a clear and thoughtful segmentation of the client base, which should be carried out according to the following criteria:

• frequency of clinic visits;
• purchased services;
• the current level of loyalty (how long the client has been a patient of the clinic);
• Frequency of calls, filling in applications for a callback on the site, etc.

Tracking statistics according to these criteria allows you to highlight customers’ current trends and behavioral patterns and identify patterns. It is best to conduct such an analysis without using automated services.

An important result of such analytical work will be the breakdown of the client base into several conditional groups with common needs and characteristics. The greater the loyalty of patients, the easier it will be to collect feedback data through reviews or questionnaires. In turn, the more information you can find, the more accurate the segmentation will be.