In today’s healthcare landscape, it can be difficult to reach the right patient at the right time. That’s why a projection released by CMS (Centre for Medicare & Medicaid Services) earlier this year suggests that national health spending has reached nearly 3.4 trillion dollars. That number represents nearly 20% of the country’s GDP. The US population rapidly aging, there is no sign of health spending slowing down.
For those in the durable medical equipment (DME), you know that developing an effective marketing campaign can be difficult.
Today, we’re going to share a marketing strategy with high ROI.
This strategy is patient education.
For today’s patients, using the Internet to search for symptoms, conditions, remedies, and everything in-between has absolutely become the norm. Having your brand, your company, and your DME products and services front and centre for these types of patient inquiries is imperative to a strong campaign, and providing high quality content on patient education is one of the best way’s to do it.
With that, here are four advantages to including patient education as part of your next health marketing program:
- Builds Trust and Credibility
When patients take to the search engines to find answers, chances are they are scared, uncertain, and are looking for help. If your brand or your product can be the one to provide the answers they are looking for and – better yet – provide a long-term health solution in the form of a DME product, that lays the foundation for a lasting relationship with that customer.
You are selling your products because you want to provide people struggling with various medical issues with some piece of mind in their day-to-day life. Pairing patient education with your health marketing campaign just takes that effort one step further, and strengthens your credibility among prospective customers.
- Opportunities for Collaboration
Building a content strategy around patient education is the optimal opportunity to leverage any strong relationships that you may have in the sector to make your content both high quality and one of a kind. Collaborating with doctors, healthcare professionals, former and current patients, or success stories are all wonderful ways to bring some authenticity and real world perspective to your patient education content. If the patients can see themselves in what you are saying, or respect the people you are collaborating with – you will have a much more successful outcome when it comes to trying to convert that patient into a prospective customer.
- Think Local
Not unlike collaborative with relevant external stakeholders, developing a patient education health marketing program is also a great way to engage on a more local scale. Do you have markets where you are doing especially well, or perhaps even markets where you have less market share than your competitors? Consider using some of this patient education content to engage customers in those markets in their own communities. Whether it is at local health fairs, hospitals, pharmacies, or wherever is most appropriate for your customer base – having a local presence is always a fantastic way to convert prospective patients into new loyal customers.
- Higher Conversion Rate
Long story short, each of the above aims to do one thing: keep a potential sales lead engaged with your brand for longer. By being more credible, more authentic, and more present – the rate in which these “leads” will convert into customers will only increase. This is exactly why effective content marketing, specifically through patient education, is a great building block for your company to launch a successful healthcare lead-generation campaign.
Do you want to know more about lead-generation and getting ROI from healthcare marketing?
Get in touch with our team today.