What shift must you bring into your Healthcare Marketing Strategy for Improved Demand Generation?

The ultimate goal of nearly every marketing strategy is to increase the number of customers that you can reach, communicate to and successfully acquire for your business. But how would you go about improving the demand generation in your healthcare marketing strategy?

Introduction

Almost every business today has a marketing strategy in place. Perhaps not codified or complicated, but every business today has one form of marketing strategy in place. Businesses hope to reach a target audience of potential customers with these strategies. By reaching them, businesses will be able to communicate with them and try to convince them into becoming a customer. 

For most healthcare businesses a marketing plan is in place so that they can acquire new customers and patients. Healthcare marketing today is an indispensable tool for a health brand. For every healthcare business, the cost borne to acquire new patients remains significantly high. Businesses are increasingly adopting healthcare digital marketing strategies to improve their patient acquisition through traditional and social marketing techniques. 

But unfortunately for healthcare businesses, traditional marketing, and social marketing techniques cannot be directly translated into healthcare marketing. This is why healthcare marketing is a cross-disciplinary subject, where a mix of creativity and expertise combine to drive lead generation (demand gen). 

Targeting demand gen through a single shift in your healthcare marketing plans can lead to increased overall customers and a massive boost to your bottom line.

What is demand generation?

Demand generation is a marketing program wherein a business seeks to increase its qualified inbound leads (a person interested in the service provided by your healthcare brand). Demand generation achieves this goal by creating a systematic funnel where your healthcare brand optimizes marketing and sales initiatives for every customer interaction. 

"Demand generation can make a business’ marketing messages sound more authoritative and carry more weight with prospective clients, and ultimately help increase revenue by farming strong leads” ~ Samantha Bonanno/Gartner

Demand generation often is misunderstood as just be creating a demand for your product or service. But in reality, demand generations is an umbrella term for a host of activities that improve customer engagement and drive long-term interest in your healthcare brand.

Since demand generation is spread across the entirety of customers’ journey or a patient journey in the case of your healthcare brand, it is usually separated into four discrete stages. The entirety of the demand generation process is often viewed through the lens of a demand generation funnel report or visualization.

Four stages of Demand Generation: 

  1. Building Awareness 
  2. Creating Interest
  3. Brand Positioning
  4. Patient Retention 

Building Awareness

The start of every digital demand generation plan is by creating awareness about the healthcare business. While building awareness may seem like a simple prospect, healthcare businesses need to be aware that just mere ‘awareness’ is not enough. Patients and customers should have a positive opinion of the healthcare business and trust the brand, and the healthcare professionals that it employs.
Healthcare businesses should also ensure that they are building awareness about the type of services that they can provide. 

Creating Interest

This task is easier for healthcare businesses for the most part (depending on the services offered) as customers are already looking for solutions to their problems. Healthcare businesses just need to provide information about the potential solutions to these problems and help patients by providing them with valuable information.

 Inbound marketing

Inbound marketing is a bit of a broad term. It is the portion of the marketing plan where potential customers are onboarded. These customers are the ones most interested in your services and solutions. Through lead generation (a completely different concept), sales initiatives, and other processes healthcare businesses are able to convert the interest of potential customers into acquiring actual customers.

Patient Retention

Finally, no amount of marketing or sales will help your healthcare business to retain customers if there is no good service. Healthcare businesses need to capitalize on the work of the demand generation plan by providing the necessary solutions to customers. By providing great patient experiences and increasing patient satisfaction, healthcare businesses can ensure that customers choose their businesses over others. 

Improving Demand Generation

The best way to improve demand generation in a healthcare marketing plan is by improving the quality of content being used. Content marketing serves a multitude of purposes to improve demand generation.

Content marketing is essential for creating the necessary brand presence and authority required to establish trust and respect in customers. But content marketing is also useful in creating interest in customers by providing them with valuable information about their problems.

Finally, customer experience and satisfaction are also increased through the proper and timely use of healthcare content.

Content marketing and content creation is not a shift that will change your demand generation metrics overnight. Providing valuable, often free, content to customers to improve your inbound leads is a process that is cumulative over time. But the results are undeniable and content marketing is proving to be a critically important tool for improving demand generation.

Conclusion

Content marketing can often be tough for healthcare businesses. There’s a plethora of content already available on the internet and it can be hard to stand out. Measuring what content is doing well and what needs improvement can also be hard to measure.

By partnering with BraveLabs, you gain access to a team of experts that will guide you on your content marketing journey. Through our domain expertise and experience, we give healthcare businesses the tools they need to succeed in the digital age.

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