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Many industries took full advantage of the golden age of advertising from the 1950s to the 1970s, but the healthcare sector was not one of them. It wasn’t until the 1980s that healthcare marketing began to emerge. That’s when hospital administrators realized that patients wanted to have more of a say in their patient journey.
However, it didn’t take long for healthcare marketing to shift into overdrive as competition grew. By the 1990s, direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising and marketing began to take shape. Fast-forward to today, and you’ll find direct-to-patient marketing is a goal for most healthcare providers — from hospitals and medical practices to medical device firms and pharmaceutical companies.
Technological and communication advances are helping healthcare providers market to patients in a highly personalized way, at scale, across offline and online channels. If you’re looking to better understand the value of direct-to-patient marketing and help your healthcare business become more effective at this process, this article can help.
Let’s start from the top with a quick definition of direct-to-patient marketing. This practice, sometimes referred to as DTC (direct-to-consumer) healthcare marketing, involves providers such as medical practices, health systems and medical device manufacturers marketing directly to patients rather than via third parties like insurers or pharmacies.
Direct-to-patient marketing is popular among medical marketing professionals because it allows them to personalize communications and more closely target patients. Direct-to-patient marketing’s impacts include building stronger relationships between patients and healthcare providers and reinforcing brand loyalty.
Here are eight strategies to consider as you work to develop a successful direct-to-patient marketing campaign for your healthcare business.
To build an effective direct-to-patient marketing campaign, you need to have a basic understanding of your patients’ needs, concerns, expectations, and preferences. Actively gathering patient feedback from multiple sources can help you gain that critical insight.
As you gather patient information for marketing purposes, be sure to stay in line with relevant state and federal regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and do what’s needed to protect patients’ personal health information (PHI). Noncompliance can lead to strict fines and sanctions for healthcare organizations.
With these guardrails in mind, consider using the following strategies to collect patient data:
For the latter tactic, you can use tools like HIPAA-compliant call tracking and conversation analytics software, so you can digitize and analyze every phone conversation with patients and pinpoint patterns and trends to act on. For example, you might learn that 30 out of 100 callers to your dental practice inquired about a new teeth-whitening treatment in the past six months. A direct-to-patient campaign explaining the benefits of this treatment might result in more appointments.
Your direct-to-patient marketing campaign will reach more patients if it’s supported by a multichannel strategy. Your patient surveys, call data, and other data sources will shed light on which channels your patients prefer to use so you can meet them where they are, whether it be online, on social media, or via direct mail.
If your target audience doesn’t engage much with digital ads but frequently responds to print ads and direct mail efforts, then tailor your marketing materials accordingly. Focusing on their preferred channels will increase patient engagement and reduce acquisition costs.
Make sure digital channels, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Google ads, blog posts, podcasts, or webinars, are fully integrated with offline channels, like direct-to-consumer advertising and direct mail, and carry the same consistent personalization and messaging.
Above all, ensure the content you deliver across channels in direct-to-patient marketing campaigns is authentic, honest, and designed to resonate with your target audiences. Healthcare marketers can provide patients with valuable insights into treatments and health conditions and strategies for better patient outcomes while also building trust.
That’s what Spectrum Retirement achieved during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Using Invoca’s Signal AI, Spectrum analyzed phone conversations at scale to detect concerns among patients and their families. The retirement home operator then developed a proactive plan that built trust with its residents by addressing their concerns head-on. The plan’s relevant, timely information even helped Spectrum keep down the COVID-19 infection rate.
You’ll get a better response if the content of your direct-to-patient campaign is educational, informative, and supportive. Healthcare is an emotional subject, and patients want their questions and concerns fully addressed in a way that is informative but also empathetic. They’ll be turned off by pure marketing-speak.
Also, be sure to make good use of digital channels for sharing educational content and encouraging people to seek help if their issue requires expert attention. For many people today, the internet is a go-to tool for researching health information. According to a recent National Health Interview Survey, well over half (58.5%) of U.S. adults use the internet to look for health or medical information, 41.5% use it to communicate with a doctor or doctor’s office, and 46.1% use it to look up medical test results.
So, consider using online webinars and patient workshops to engage with your audience directly. Interactive educational tools within apps and on websites can offer enhanced information and support for patients. In fact, doubling down on online and other support is an excellent idea when conducting a direct-to-patient marketing campaign since it provides great value to patients and caregivers.
Creating customer personas is a key part of any marketing strategy. Developing detailed profiles of ideal patients will help guide and target your direct-to-patient marketing efforts. To develop meaningful personas, you must bring in the data insights you’ve gleaned from surveys, phone calls, and other sources about patient behavior and preferences, as well as nonclinical demographic data such as age, location, and ethnicity.
When you have high-quality data about your patients at your disposal, you can divide your target audience into segments, such as loyal patients, occasional patients, and new patients, and target each one with customized messaging. This is what Banner Health, an Arizona-based nonprofit hospital system, did using Invoca’s conversation intelligence.
The data from phone calls captured by Invoca gave Banner Health visibility into which marketing materials and channels were driving the most appointments. That allowed the hospital system to optimize its marketing spend by focusing on only the best performers. The results for Banner Health include a 35% increase in the phone call conversion rate and a 74% decrease in overall patient acquistion cost.
Social media platforms can help healthcare marketers connect directly with patients, share information, and build community. You can use social media to monitor what patients are saying about your healthcare system and respond to feedback and complaints. You can also deploy direct-to-consumer advertising in these channels.
Facebook and other platforms provide a forum for engaging patients and testing creative ideas. For example, many marketers are embracing gamification, or the use of gaming techniques in a non-gaming environment, to engage with health-conscious consumers, especially in the Gen Z demographic. Gamification offers a way to reward patients for achieving health and wellness milestones, such as awarding badges for getting vaccinated, giving blood, or completing exercise targets.
Your direct-to-patient campaign will be nothing without accurate attribution. Attribution often falls into the abyss when marketers rely solely on digital attribution. What about all the campaign conversions that occurred because of a phone call from the patient?
Invoca’s data shows that 67% of patients are likely to make a phone call when selecting a healthcare provider. Attribution for those phone leads and conversions is critical for healthcare marketers to understand which campaigns are drawing in new patients.
A call tracking platform can provide healthcare marketers with a complete attribution picture and highlight which channels patients are using most. This insight not only helps marketers defend their spend, but it also helps reduce wasted marketing dollars while driving more leads.
Like any marketing initiative, your direct-to-patient campaign will pay dividends if you create a frictionless experience for patients throughout the entire customer journey. You can ensure this happens by mapping out the patient journey and identifying key touchpoints along that journey, such as initial inquiry, diagnosis, admission, treatment, and discharge.
Journey mapping allows marketers to prioritize key points of the direct-to-patient campaign and optimize the patient journey. For example, tools like Invoca’s Intelligent Call Routing (ICR) and PreSense help maintain consistency when patients switch from online channels to an offline channel, like the phone:
The strategies we’ve outlined in this post can help you develop a robust direct-to-patient marketing campaign. Technology creates change at a rapid rate, however, so here are five future trends you should be aware of and be prepared to embed in your future campaigns.
Be honest. You’ve used Snapchat’s face lenses to turn that snap of your friend into a puppy, right? Augmented reality (AR) can also be used for instructional marketing content and ads deployed on social media, such as an animation showing how to correctly apply a bandage.
The vast amount of data available to healthcare organizations today makes advanced predictive analytics achievable. AI powers this capability and will allow healthcare marketers to anticipate patient needs and preferences.
The increasing popularity of telehealth services as an alternative to office visits requires tailored marketing strategies to reach patients remotely and effectively.
As more types of healthcare data, including offline data from phone calls and one-on-one interactions, become accessible to marketers, they will use it to deliver hyper-personalized messages directly to patients to help drive engagement and increase patient satisfaction.
AI is behind many of the trends described above. And AI technology from Invoca is helping marketers bridge the attribution gap between patients’ online and offline journeys and understand which leads generated by their programs come from phone calls. AI can also extract data at scale from phone conversations, equipping marketers with spot-on insights they can use to shape successful direct-to-patient marketing campaigns.
Whether you are already conducting direct-to-patient marketing campaigns or plan to do so in the future, Invoca’s call tracking and conversation analytics can make the process easier and more cost-effective for your healthcare organization.
Because Invoca can attribute leads and conversions to specific campaigns, you can make the most of your marketing budget. You can also use conversation analytics to increase your competitive edge. What’s more, tools like intelligent call routing and PreSense can help you create a better experience and smoother journey for every patient who engages with your healthcare business.
Also, with Invoca’s HIPAA-compliant call tracking, you can capture valuable information about every caller and their digital journey prior to picking up the phone (e.g., marketing channel, ad, keyword search term, website interaction). With that insight, you can make automated, in-the-moment optimizations to your campaigns to help reduce wasted spend and ensure your media budget delivers measurable results.
Looking for more information that can help you achieve your healthcare marketing goals? Check out these resources from Invoca:
When you’re ready, you can set up a customized demo with Invoca to see how our technology can help your healthcare business increase its marketing success — and revenue.
