A properly functioning – and integrated – healthcare marketing stack is a hospital’s best chance to accelerate growth and revenue. Learn the four keys to successful implementation.
Healthcare marketers are charged with the important task of patient acquisition and retention. With this responsibility, they play a pivotal role in business growth and development.
However, they also operate in a challenging time – changing compliance regulations, new competitors entering the healthcare space, shifting demographics, and fractured, complex customer journeys.
At the same time, customers are changing, too. Consumers are shopping around the best care and value for their dollar. They’re looking for personalized experiences and healthcare providers that treat them as individuals throughout the patient journey.
With more channels – digital and traditional – to manage, healthcare marketers need to be smarter about their budget, invest wisely, and optimize whenever possible.
In order to succeed, healthcare marketers must face these hurdles head on – and arm themselves with the right tools to created and optimize data-driven campaigns and quantify their contributions to the bottom line.
A properly functioning – and integrated – healthcare marketing stack is a hospital’s best chance to accelerate growth and revenue. At this point in time, it’s not just a competitive advantage, it’s a competitive necessity.
There are five technologies frequently discussed as essential to modern healthcare marketing: customer relationship management (CRM), content management system (CMS), marketing automation, CRM-enabled call center, and electronic health records.
Transforming healthcare marketing within your organization is an incredible undertaking – one that should not be underestimated. However, the benefits warrant the investment. With a data-driven approach supported with smart, integrated technology, marketing can be more effective in driving revenue, identifying growth opportunities, and supporting patients throughout their healthcare journey.
In this post, we’ll outline four key steps healthcare organizations should take as they implement and refine their healthcare marketing stack.
- Involve Leadership
Developing a healthcare marketing stack needs a champion – and not just the chief marketing officer. It’s not simply about obtaining budget, either. Because the implementation of key marketing technologies involves multiple departments (i.e. clinical, finance, IT), C-Suite buy-in is necessary for its ultimate success.
For healthcare marketers, they need to convey the business value of an integrated healthcare marketing stack. The most effective marketing technology stack does more than run digital campaigns with ease, it’s about creating more targeted, multi-channel personalized campaigns that are ultimately more effective in patient acquisition and retention. This will accelerate growth for key organizational initiatives.
- Invest in Customer-Centric Technologies
About three out of every four customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations. They will seek out organizations, healthcare included, that engage with them proactively and personalize their experience.
To accomplish this, health systems need customer-centric technologies, like a CRM and CMS. Software and platforms that leverage data from multiple sources to create a more complete picture of audiences and individuals.
With a CRM, healthcare organizations can build robust customer profiles that enable marketers to interact with customers and patients in preferred communication channels and contact them with information that’s relevant to their health, interests, and needs. With a CMS and marketing automation platform, marketers can create customer journeys that deliver engagement at the right time.
- Integrate Marketing Technologies
The visual of a marketing “stack” is very appropriate. Each marketing technology is a building block to something bigger. However, in order to create the strongest tower, the different pieces have to be connected. Without proper integration, the tower will fall.
In order to deliver the personalized, multi-channel customer experience your customers expect, your marketing technologies need to connect, to integrate. The most effective healthcare marketing technology stacks will ensure that all the pieces play well together.
This has to be considered in great detail during the technology adoption process. In determining the right vendor, ask critical questions about integration – and talk to other customers currently using the software. This will give you the insight necessary to ascertain if the technologies you’re considering will fully integrate and enable the type of experience you’re looking to deliver to customer and patients.
Using the five key technologies we mentioned above, let’s walk through an example of how proper integration works to support proactive patient engagement.
A healthcare CRM serves as a centralized data hub, as well as a communications and analytics engine. It leverages patient, consumer, and physician data from disparate sources, including demographics, psychographics, social, behavioral, clinical, financial and more to create robust customer profiles and audience development. Certain data points should be integrated from EHR as it is one of the most reliable and accurate data sets a health system has.
A CMS should leverage the HCRM’s customer profiles to ensure new content aligns with personalization goals and speaks to specific audiences. To deliver key content and engagements, marketing automation should be linked to other tools in the tech stack. Unique customer journeys can be designed based on real-time data and triggers to engage with customers and prospects at predetermined times.
While digital communication is commonplace, many customers and patients are most comfortable on the phone. Connecting call center agents to the HCRM gives them the information necessary to personalize interactions, proactively engage with callers, and deliver consistent messaging. It also allows agents to enter important information about prospects and patients to that can improve and personalize future communication and marketing initiatives.
- Develop a Highly Skilled and Passionate Team
While healthcare marketing technology holds many possibilities in terms of improving marketing’s effectiveness and meeting the expectations of the modern customer, it must be placed in the hands of people who know how to use it.
This point cannot be emphasized enough: To fully leverage a MarTech stack, it’s imperative to have the right people with the right skills in place. Emphasize training and continual development and work with your partners to ensure your team is capable and knowledgeable.
Equally important to skillsets is creating a team that has a passion for the data-driven, results-oriented approach to marketing that’s possible with marketing technology, data, and analytics.
Final Thoughts
Continuous, consistent, and personalized communication provides real value to today’s consumer. In today’s competitive healthcare marketplace, treating a customer as an individual can be a differentiator.
Your healthcare MarTech stack is the foundation to this transformation. The marketing team needs to focus on creating patient-centric experiences that improve satisfaction and health outcomes. Using a data-driven approach powered by technology, marketers are able to deploy targeted campaigns and drive quantifiable growth.
With increased visibility into marketing’s initiatives, campaigns can be optimized in real-time, prove ROI for the organization, ultimately improving patient lifetime value and nurturing strong patient relationships.