Making The Patient Experience Central To Your Hearing Healthcare Marketing Strategy

By Geoffrey Cooling

Needed Change In Healthcare Marketing

Healthcare in general is changing, hearing healthcare in particular, healthcare marketing will need to change along with it. This change also feeds into our changing perspective on ourselves as healthcare professionals and our legacy marketing. How we approach the market, differentiate ourselves, communicate the value and benefit of our services and build our respective brands.

There is a strong urge to move away from product in our healthcare marketing. I asked in the last post what would replace it as the focus for our advertising? my initial conclusion was outcomes, proven outcomes. I would like to explore healthcare marketing in other healthcare professions, specifically private hospitals. Most of the advertising I have seen relating to private hospitals is based or centred on the hospitals and their services they usually portray themselves as top of the game with all of the high-tech tools and research.

The advertising tends to be all about the hospital, or the service, it does not seem to focus on the Patient or the consumer. I don’t believe that this style of advertising is compelling, it just is not customer focused. It does not contain any recognisable real call to action, it’s basically look at us we’re great. So if we are to move our healthcare marketing away from its current model, what will the new model look like? What should we focus on as a real differentiator, a KSP or even a USP?

Focus on the Patient

What about the Patient experience? their experience of you as a healthcare provider and the outcomes that they achieved? If we focus on the Patient experience and how the Patient benefits from it. We are then placing the Patient and their experience central to our healthcare marketing strategy. It still involves our Brand, in fact it may be a more powerful manner in which to tell our brand story. It could be leveraged as a strategy that the prospective Patient may better understand, may better see real value in. 

Focus on the outcomes

Our advertising could be based on Patient experience and Patient testimonial, relegating product to a secondary factor. In this way our profession can place themselves centrally in the hearing healthcare profession. Centrally in the process of hearing well. This type of strategy will actually meet many strategic needs that we as a profession have. Our position is under constant threat, this change in healthcare marketing strategy may allow us the best defence against those external threats.

The Advert

Visualise this, Man or Woman, central in a family group, smiling and looking straight at the camera. High quality imagery, professional production values. The tag line “I re-connected to my life” The copy goes like this, “I started to withdraw from life, the colour had gone from my day, too difficult to communicate. But Acme Hearing said they could help and they did. Re-connect to your life with their help!” Bob Anybody, Any State

Okay, so I never said I was an advertising genius, stop throwing fruit at the screen. But you get the idea right, that advert is all about the Patient and all about you as the brand that helped them. What do you think?

Regards

Geoff