Top 5 digital transformation priorities for new healthcare providers
Social media is no longer a “passing fad”, but has proven that it is here to stay for the long haul, even for the “serious” healthcare industry. “Word of mouth” has been the most effective way for patient acquisition. Social Media is “word of mouth” on steroids. Social media posting may look casual but the successful social media campaigns share the same characteristic of clear intention, meticulous plan and schedule, authentic, original contents vs. canned, recycled contents. The level of discipline required is something that cannot be supported by a busy, lean upcoming practice.
86% of people search online before engaging a service or purchasing a product. Most of our clients engage SEO and/or SEM services. The online visibility does not come cheap. While one may not have the budget to support both at the same time, it might be wise to plan ahead with an alternating schedule and place the PPC campaigns more strategically rather than spreading the campaigns
With 80%+patients visit the brands on mobile devices, especially for those “health nuts”, younger population focusing on proactively keeping in “top shape”, developing a HIPPA compliant, simple to use patient engagement app start to making more sense each year. They are not just tele-medicine apps but what we call “Relationship Medicine” apps, which keep pertinent tailored communications between healthcare providers and their patients, whether they are sick or not. Base on the rich transactional data such as patients encounter, health goals, key medical history, the “relationship medicine” automate many push notifications to each individual through AI driven mass customizations. Part of “Precision Medicine”. One example of a very simple virtual primary care app gearing towards concierge, direct primary care, or counseling is Dr. Link.
Smaller practices without dedicated lead follow up resources found their investment in lead generation vastly missing their expectations as they can only afford to follow up once or twice at most without converting the lead. According to the latest report from CareCredit, it takes on average 6 months, 6-8 touch points for a lead to convert into a client, especially for higher valued discretionary services not covered by insurance, e.g. med spa, Wellness programs (Hormone Treatment) and performance optimization services. The more successful practices enlist the help of marketing automation set up by professional marketers.
More and more vendors for discretionary health care services from injectables such as BD points to encourage “stickier” relationship with their customers. While most of the vendor loyalty programs shared the benefits from data insights with the practices, most of them do not have the human resources to monitor and take advantage of multiple vendor loyalty programs, which aim at driving more traffic to their practices. Most of the consumers of these services are not tied to one brand and the multiple programs simply paralyzed them rather than giving them the incentive to acquire more. Whoever normalize the data from different related loyalty programs will unlease a new source of marketing power for the “cash-based” healthcare services.
