The arrival of new therapies and increasingly personalized devices, robotics and ICT technologies represent a real tsunami for health systems. The traditional paths of prevention, diagnosis and treatment of a patient change profoundly and the concept of health itself changes.
Health marketing applied to dental clinics , aesthetic medicine, plastic surgery, assisted reproduction, ophthalmology, orthodontics, even for many private hospitals is, still today, a great unknown for most centers and doctors. Until recently, talking about marketing in healthcare settings seemed nonsense.
But more and more clinics, hospitals, physicians and doctors are asking questions such as:
- Should I do marketing in my clinic or practice?
- How can marketing help my clinic?
- What marketing should I do?
- How to do it?
The Internet has been the gateway for many private doctors, clinics or hospitals to digital marketing. The need to have a website to be visible on the internet, the fashion of having to be on social networks and, in some cases, the need to promote the center, has been the first approach of many clinics to marketing.
But the reality is that marketing is much more. Marketing is the art of creating differentiated products, with prices that the patient/client understands are fair, whose products or services can be easily purchased and that are made known effectively with the help of hospital consultancy services.
But in addition, health marketing is based on 7 pillars: Product, Price, Place (location), Promotion, Processes, People and Physical Proposal. The key to success is in the mix of these 7Ps.
Each clinic will decide what weight and importance each variable will play in its value proposition to the patient and this will determine the most appropriate positioning and, therefore, the success or failure of the marketing strategy.
According to the top hospital consultants in India, health marketing must be the necessary complement to the quality of care offered by doctors and the quality of results.
Marketing is not intended to replace quality of care. The one is not at odds with the other. Excellent quality of care is perfectly compatible with excellent marketing, since the combination of both is a guarantee of business success and we must not forget that a clinic or private practice is a business just like a bakery or a supermarket and must be run like a business.
So to conclude, we want to give you 5 healthy reasons to apply marketing in a hospital practice:
1. To differentiate yourself. Marketing will allow you to develop a unique healthcare model that differentiates you from other clinics
2. To attract more patients. Marketing will help you attract more patients, retain those you have and retain those who are not 100% satisfied with the results.
3. To make you known. Marketing will help you to publicize your clinic in your sphere of influence, be it local, regional, national or international and not depend so much on attracting patients through insurance companies.
4. To better segment your patients.Marketing is the technique that will allow you to determine which patient/customer segments you want or are more profitable to target. It is a mistake to determine that for a clinic, patients are “everyone”
5. To earn more money. As per the hospital consulting firms in India, marketing will be the only “commercial” lever that will allow you to sell more and with greater profitability, and therefore your clinic can obtain greater benefits.