With the majority of the country flocking to social feeds to guide their medical decisions, prioritizing patient trust needs to be the first thing on the agenda for healthcare marketing.
According to the National Academy of Medicine, 90% of Americans consult social media for health-related information before they go directly to a professional.
Deciding on the best healthcare marketing practices can be difficult when considering HIPAA compliance, keeping up with regulatory shifts, more stringent budgets, and overcoming other limitations the industry might present. What makes it even more challenging is successfully going beyond targeting your message to the right people and boosting engagement and trust along the way.
For any marketer in the healthcare space, building and maintaining patient trust can present several complexities. Keep reading to learn how to curb these difficulties and navigate them effectively.
Why You Can't Afford to Put Your Healthcare Marketing Agenda Before the Trust of Patients
The healthcare marketing landscape might appear to be more fragmented when compared to other industries. This means that marketing in this sector may require a bit more creativity and a level of consciousness. With limited budgets and more resistance toward innovations within marketing, you have slightly less to work with.
Building public trust is a top priority for any practice, and public perception can be hard to obtain and sustain without the right healthcare marketing tactics. However, given the difficulty of advertising in the industry, you can't lose sight of what the patient would benefit from to push your agenda.
In this case, the important lesson is that healthcare marketing isn't the same as marketing in other industries. You have to consider general interest and demand across the industry, psychographic data, and patient privacy. To help form a better idea of how you should prioritize your marketing approach when considering the potential patients you'll be providing care for, think of the following key points.
A Patient’s Trust in a Provider Leads to Better Patient Outcomes
When patients trust their healthcare providers, they are more likely to comply with their treatment plans. Better adherence to treatments can typically lead to better care outcomes. More trust also means patients are more likely to engage in preventive care.
Your Practice will Gain a Competitive Advantage
As of the start of 2024, there are about 338,899 active physician groups, according to Definitive Healthcare.
With stiff competition, eliminating operation inefficiencies and reducing care costs are ways to stand out. However, one simpler method that can set you apart is structuring your healthcare marketing plan.
This would mean avoiding generic public messaging and limiting impersonal marketing efforts. Share your patients' stories with their consent. You can also focus on patient needs and requests rather than just trends. Small steps like these can make your practice more recognizable than competing practices.
Being Patient-Centric Strengthens Any Reputation
A patient-centric approach directly affects a healthcare provider's overall reputation. Patients who feel heard, valued, and respected are more likely to recommend your practice.
Healthcare marketing isn’t only about posting about your products and services on social channels. It’s also about resonating with your patients at each step of their treatments and recoveries.
The Chance to Indirectly Enhance Organizational Success
Healthcare marketing is more than short-sighted tactics. Instead, practices should focus on building long-term relationships with patients.
Trustworthy healthcare organizations tend to attract and retain more patients, which can lead to increased revenue and growth opportunities. Additionally, a solid reputation can attract top-tier talent, enhancing the quality of care your team provides and how you form your staff.
Proper Targeting Leads to More Patient Confidence
Patients' confidence in a provider, procedure, or overall practice comes from the message they get from the marketing they see. Consider campaigns that are hyper-focused on the sales aspect of a message rather than the aspect of trust.
While you may have a good chance of seeing a strong number of sales, you are far more likely to retain patients if you gain their trust and resonate with their unique needs rather than the broad wants across the industry based on trends. Higher rates of patient confidence can also spark a ripple effect.
For example, a survey by Software Advice reveals that 77% of consumers decide whether to pursue a provider solely based on the online reviews they find. With online searches and reviews being the first step people take when looking for a new provider, more healthcare marketers have to hone in on the personal aspect of campaign creation over pushing the potential of closing sales.
6 Top Performing Practices in Healthcare Marketing and How to Implement Them
Marketing strategies aren’t one-size-fits-all. In healthcare, you have to be very intentional about the methods you use to gain a patient’s trust. Incorporating the right approach can increase patient retention, foster better active communication and listening, and enhance brand awareness.
To help guide your efforts, let’s talk about some of the top-performing practices that build trust in healthcare marketing.
1. Incorporating Patient Feedback into Campaigns
If you want to capture a potential patient's interest while prioritizing their trust, you should show them what you do for the patients you already have.
A patient’s testimony is worth its weight in gold in terms of marketing because it provides social proof to the public and shows that patients don’t mind speaking publicly about their experience with your services.
2. Making Use of a Marketing Lead Bucket
There is nothing wrong with being sales-focused while marketing in healthcare as long as you don’t lose sight of the patient. Setting up a marketing lead bucket can help you organize your leads by source.
For example, with a lead bucket, you can drop potential patients into three categories:
- Just Browsing
- Directly Contacted
- Interested
This will make it easier to cater to patients appropriately while limiting what might be seen as pushiness.
3. Go the Multichannel Route
While it might be tempting to prioritize marketing on social media platforms like TikTok because of its popularity (this isn't to tell you not to do it), you shouldn't forget about 'all' of your patients. Chances are, if you specialize in geriatrics, your target audience isn't on TikTok, or if you're a family care physician, you may have a 50/50 chance of successful outreach on that platform alone. Instead of only following social trends, embrace multichannel marketing.
For example, if you prioritize those who go to a traditional search engine over a social platform search bar, you're likely to lead them to one of your many social handles. Overall, with a multichannel approach, you remove hurdles rather than marketing around them.
This means that you will meet your target market and even those outside it where they currently are and where they might land.
4. Start Displaying Empathy
Showing empathy means being capable of seeing the world through a patient’s eyes. Not only does this drive better patient care, but it also significantly differentiates a practice, helps with brand identification, and builds trust.
5. Plain Language Is Best
No one likes industry jargon. Plain language helps improve patient communication and builds better provider-patient relationships. Remember that you want patients to understand what you’re saying and how they would benefit from your care.
A better way to understand the importance of this is to consider a study that specifically examined the use of unnecessary jargon when communicating with patients.
A study by the Journal of Patient Experience found that 91% of the patients preferred that their doctor talk to them without using medical jargon. Overall, it’s best to take this approach throughout your healthcare marketing strategy.
6. Give Your Specialists and Specialties Featured Attention
Two out of three patients say that their trust in healthcare has decreased over the last few years. This indicates that a large gap exists between the need for care and trust in those who provide it.
To start filling that gap, do what you can to showcase the credibility of your practice, especially if you are a specialist or specialize in certain services.
Combining Patient Prioritization and Outreach All in 1 Step
Building patient trust through effective healthcare marketing requires transparency, personalization, and strong community relationships. By implementing these best practices, healthcare marketers can begin building and retaining trust over longer periods.
As mentioned, small steps like this can lead to better health outcomes and a stronger organizational reputation. Additionally, marketers will find that focusing on the patient as one person rather than the just public alone will bring them more positive results from their campaigns.
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