Summary:
A patient’s perspective, priorities, and process for making decisions all shift when faced with a serious or life-threatening condition. This is particularly true for cancer, serious neurological conditions, serious cardiac diagnoses and complex orthopedic surgeries – and this has implications for how you should position your physicians and your service lines.
Stratgies:
Marketing services for serious care, including cancer, serious neurological conditions, serious cardiac conditions and complex orthopedic surgeries should include the following strategies:
Position yourself appropriately vis-à-vis your competitors. It’s important to understand your market, and know not only how consumers perceive your hospital or system’s brand but also how your competitors are positioned. The best positioning and marketing not only address any perceived weaknesses in your system’s brand and build from your strengths, they also take into consideration your competitors. If consumers are likely to question their medical professional’s referral to your system in light of other expertise in the area you need to have a well-articulated case why they should receive their care with you instead – and you need to arm referring physicians with that knowledge as well. This requires an understanding of how consumers perceive your competitive marketplace.
Secure referral sources. Remember, consumers will be heavily influenced by health care professionals. Ensure physicians will refer patients to you. Be sure to assess and address any barriers to physician referrals, including lack of awareness that you offer specific services or have particular subspecialists, lack of familiarity with the providers on your team, issues with timely access, or issues with the process of making a referral.
Optimize online information about your team. Make sure Google searches for your specialists will return information and links to articles that will build consumer confidence in their experience, expertise, and patient-focus. If your physician has particular expertise with a specific condition or procedure be sure to feature that, and when possible accompany it with statistics that back up that expertise, such as procedure volume and positive outcomes. Google searches that yield links to a variety of sources that position your team member as an expert are particularly effective, such as links to published, peer-reviewed articles and merit awards on sites other than your hospital or system. Being the expert other physicians turn to regarding a condition or procedure is comforting to patients, so any evidence of that should be elevated.
Feature your hospital or system’s state-of-the-art technology and strong reputation. Update physician bios to make key information easy to find and focused on what consumers want to know (experience, expertise, patient-focus), then include links from physician pages that address your hospital’s state-of-the-art equipment and recognitions that speak to quality of care, such as accreditations, awards and affiliations. Ensure that information regarding affiliations makes it clear how those affiliations lead to better patient outcomes.
Pay attention to star ratings and reviews. Few star ratings and reviews for your providers will undermine the perception that the provider is highly experienced. However, the most important thing to address are low star ratings and poor reviews: our research has shown that while few patients will abandon a search due to a lack of ratings or reviews, over 3 in 4 will abandon consideration of a provider who has a low star rating total – in fact, a mediocre overall star rating seems to be more damaging than a handful of very weak reviews.
Address any brand issues. Ensure patients will be receptive to a referral to a physician at your hospital or system by addressing any brand issues. For example, if your brand image for competence/expertise of physicians is low, or even just lower than your competitors, you might focus on ensuring the qualifications of your team are front and center and pushing that message out in appropriate ways. If your brand image has been tarnished by inconsistent patient experiences or service challenges in the past you might focus more resources on using the voice of the patient to invite consumers to see you through a new lens.
