When you think of the advertising industry and advertising campaigns, what types of ads are the first to come to mind? Your first answers may revolve around products like food and homecare, as well as services like delivery or cleaning.
In decades past, ads pertaining to healthcare or medical practice weren’t as ubiquitous as those for consumer goods or essential services. Most individual doctors, hospital administrators, or other healthcare providers didn’t believe in advertising in the same way that these industries did. Perhaps it was because they believed they would secure patients regardless, as healthcare has always been a timeless and urgent need among consumers. Or perhaps it was because of the belief that if you needed to advertise your healthcare practice that hard, maybe you weren’t worth trusting.
But times have surely changed, both for the modern patient and the healthcare providers that they look for. For one, advertising methods for any industry are no longer limited to traditional media like print and TV ads. In fact, many agencies specialize in campaigns exclusively for the web and for mobile device consumption—and that includes healthcare campaigns. For another, brand visibility matters a lot to patients when they’re looking for providers. As opposed to the trend of previous decades, patients tend to trust care providers who actively advertise themselves. A more prominent brand name communicates the healthcare provider’s reliability, credibility, and accountability to the patient—which ultimately leads the patient to choose them.
In this article, let’s take a look at the importance of healthcare advertising and why it’s a worthy investment for your healthcare company. The right advertising strategy can improve your healthcare practice and take your business revenues from it to new heights. Here are six good reasons why your company should pool some of its resources into a new healthcare advertising campaign today.
You Need to Adjust to the Changing Landscape of Healthcare Delivery
The most compelling reason to invest in healthcare advertising is that it’s the right thing to do given the current landscape of the industry. The digital era has evolved the healthcare experience beyond the walls of brick-and-mortar clinics, hospitals, and specialized care centers. Advertising and finding new patients are just a couple of ways for you to build an overall modernization plan for your healthcare practice, which may include patient portals and telemedicine.
You Need a More Data-Driven Approach to Getting New Patients
To healthcare providers, an up-to-date advertising campaign won’t be just a matter of getting one’s brand name out into the public. A marketing agency, especially one that deals with digital campaigns, will likely implement exhaustive data-driven work to find out more about your potential customers. The campaign can help you get the particulars of how many people are looking for your healthcare services and the best way to reach them. Once you’ve gotten this data, your efforts at establishing new patient and provider relationships will be all the more purposeful.
You Need New Strategies for Reaching Out to Your Consumers
Another great reason to invest in healthcare advertising is that it can help you go beyond traditional information dissemination methods, like TV and print. These two mediums are too expensive for you to rely on by themselves. Pooling your resources behind a modern, digital advertising-based campaign will ultimately be more profitable. You’ll be able to advertise more extensively, especially on the web where a lot of local searches are made. You may even lower your cost per patient acquisition because a digital strategy costs less than TV and print ads but attracts more patients overall.
You Need to Set Yourself Apart from Other Healthcare Providers
It won’t be enough to simply ensure that your name, credentials, and company brand can be found by patients. You have a lot of competition by way of other practitioners and healthcare institutions, but you would like for patients to choose you over them. Investing in healthcare advertising will help you take the next step in building a strong and trustworthy brand for yourself and your company.
It Helps You Leverage Specialty Healthcare Services
As you must already know, medical practice isn’t supposed to be a catch-all concept. Something that distinguishes healthcare is the level of specialization practitioners have. The right healthcare advertising strategy can help your company build its name for particular areas of practice. Whether your healthcare business wants to be known as an industry leader for cancer treatment, home care, or rehabilitation, use your campaign to hone in.
It Helps You Craft More Responsive Patient Experiences
In olden times, advertising was meant to be more passive in nature and only concerned with mass dissemination. But today, advertising is a two-way street that enables better communication and relationship management between companies and their intended audience. This is a game-changer in terms of healthcare, as it allows providers to interact with patients more and tend to their needs more efficiently.
Advertising can introduce patients to new channels, like dedicated patient portals or mobile apps for telemedicine and prescription management. It can also guide providers to personalize their future healthcare experiences with patients, which will keep their services relevant. If you’re a doctor or work in a healthcare business, the results of this will be plain to see: higher retention rates and more referrals.
Final Words
To make good on your investment, you’ll need to partner up with a marketing agency that has prominent healthcare-related experience in their portfolio. The best people will help you find your voice and set your healthcare services apart as excellent and trustworthy. Moreover, they’ll tailor-fit the campaign to help you achieve specific goals in your healthcare practice.
Put in the resources for healthcare advertising today, and find an agency that can realize your vision with you. May the rewards be evident in the number of people you’ll be able to reach—and the number of lives you’ll be able to save.
Throughout the year, our writers feature fresh, in-depth, and relevant information for our audience of 40,000+ healthcare leaders and professionals. As a healthcare business publication, we cover and cherish our relationship with the entire health care industry including administrators, nurses, physicians, physical therapists, pharmacists, and more. We cover a broad spectrum from hospitals to medical offices to outpatient services to eye surgery centers to university settings. We focus on rehabilitation, nursing homes, home care, hospice as well as men’s health, women’s heath, and pediatrics.
