Last year changed the landscape of healthcare in response to the Coronavirus. As the healthcare industry looks toward the new year and continuing challenges, it must be your goal as a healthcare marketer to transform the way you communicate with patients in this new landscape. These are 4 Strategies Healthcare Marketers Must Adopt in 2021.
- Focus on Deepening Relationships and Brand Loyalty
In 2021, healthcare organizations must prioritize their marketing operations. Dedicating an enhanced focus on adapting marketing strategies seen in other industries is critically important to building brand loyalty with patients. You and your team can accomplish this by adopting highly-personalized messaging and engagement with patients at every part of the patient experience, like providing patient surveys and educational content specific to your patients’ needs.
- Create Content that Supports Home Health and Telehealth
With fewer people wanting to go to their doctor’s office in the wake of the pandemic, more physicians are accommodating their patients by making telehealth readily available, and in some cases, offering home health options.
Healthcare marketers must adapt their content strategy in a way that supports patients electing telehealth and home health options. While patients are likely to utilize these services, a strong content strategy will build trust and loyalty between your patients and providers by fostering confidence in the process, creating clear expectations for appointments and follow-up, and teaching them how to get the most out of their home health options.
- Make Producing Video a Priority
At the end of 2020, Google began testing short-form video carousels. This is in response to the rise in preference for short-form video content led by platforms like TikTok. Now that content creators have their videos populate in Google searches for various health questions, it’s important for healthcare experts to dominate these results. In fact, in 2020, three of the top five searches were healthcare-related, and a total of almost 10% of searches every day pertained to health-related questions. As a healthcare marketer, you must prioritize creating visible content in 2021, making video a vital component of your content marketing strategy.
- Improved Communication to Patients and Other Doctors
The digital transformation is primarily focused on the customer-facing experience, however healthcare marketers are going the extra step to create a hyper-personalized experience through intra-system communication. You can do this by providing physicians with easy access to relevant content from subject matter experts to share with their patients before and after their appointments.
You can also provide additional support to physicians by curating and regularly distributing educational content they can share with other doctors on latest techniques and clinical studies.
Furthermore, patients want to understand the safety measures being taken by doctors and hospitals to ensure they are safe from COVID-19 and receive updates on vaccine rollout. Stay at the top of your patient’s minds by creating messages that keep patients updated with your facility’s COVID-19 precautionary measures, digestible CDC guidelines, and standard procedures for testing, quarantining, and vaccination.
Liger Partners has a dedicated team of marketers who work with healthcare teams across the nation to transform their strategies as the world changes. If you are a physician looking for marketing expertise, Liger is here to help. Give us a call to talk about your marketing in 2021.