Investing in healthcare marketing consulting can help you reach more potential patients and grow your business. While your team may be experts in the medical field and know how to provide excellent patient care, effective marketing takes an entirely different set of skills.
This article will cover five reasons why working with an agency that specializes in medical marketing is a good investment with significant potential returns.
You don’t have a dedicated marketing team (or yours is spread too thin)
Smaller healthcare practices or groups typically prioritize hiring medical staff and specialists first—as they should. Unfortunately, this leaves many still operating without people who know how to effectively plan and deploy healthcare marketing campaigns that can help grow their business.
Even if your practice does have a medical marketing person or team on staff, there’s a good chance they have a lot on their plate and can’t manage every area effectively. Many healthcare providers try to do all their marketing in-house but don’t necessarily have the bandwidth or expertise to do it well. Bringing in a healthcare marketing consulting company to help scale your efforts can make a huge impact.
An experienced healthcare marketing agency can give your business a fresh perspective and valuable expertise. They can step in and fill an existing marketing gap in your practice or act as an extension of your marketing team, providing help they may desperately need.
You don’t have a marketing strategy
If #1 applies to you, then #2 surely does as well. It’s hard to build a comprehensive marketing strategy without a marketing team or with one that is just trying to get things done with limited resources.
A strategic healthcare marketing plan helps you focus your efforts on measurable actions to promote and grow your business. It gives you a roadmap to follow so you’re not just doing random acts of marketing that have little impact on your goals and objectives.
A healthcare marketing consultant will help you build an effective marketing strategy
An effective marketing strategy can put some guardrails around your marketing efforts and ensure you provide a better, more seamless patient journey as people interact with your brand.
By investing in healthcare marketing consulting, you can get help from an experienced team in building and executing proven medical marketing tactics and campaigns to reach patients and drive engagement.
You’re losing business to the competition
The healthcare market has become increasingly competitive, making it more critical than ever for healthcare businesses to stand out.
According to Google, 61% of people who visit a hospital website before booking an appointment visit at least two other sites before converting. That means your marketing—especially your website—needs to be more memorable and do a better job of convincing potential patients to schedule an appointment with you instead of your competitor down the street.
Healthcare marketing consulting helps you beat your competitors
An experienced healthcare marketing consulting agency will know how to help you stand out from the crowd by developing and promoting your practice’s unique selling proposition (USP).
Your USP makes your healthcare practice unique and differentiates you from your competitors. It can also include a specific niche or specialty that makes your business and team unique. Essentially, it’s the reason(s) your patients trust you with their care.
Chances are, your organization already has a great USP, whether you know it or not. By leveraging healthcare marketing consulting, you can take a deeper dive into those unique traits and how to effectively promote them in your organization or hospital marketing promotions.
You’re not attracting enough new patients
Back in the day, healthcare providers relied primarily on word-of-mouth to attract new patients, but now, most people will start by researching your practice online. No matter how great your doctors are or how much people love coming to your office, if new patients can’t find you online—or what they do find is a poorly-designed website—you won’t be able to measurably grow your business.
Leverage healthcare marketing consulting to reach new patients
A healthcare marketing consulting agency that specializes in building effective healthcare websites and medical marketing campaigns can help you put your best foot forward online and get more appointments on the calendar.
They’ll help you identify gaps in your marketing strategy and propose creative campaigns to engage your patients. They can even expand your reach and help you break into new market segments, so even more people find your healthcare practice.
Your brand reputation needs improvement
Most healthcare businesses fall into one of these categories when it comes to their reputation:
- They have an excellent reputation, they’re well known, and the phone is ringing off the hook with potential new patients.
- They have a great reputation with their existing patients, but few people know about them.
- They have a terrible reputation with patients, but not many people have heard of them.
- They have a bad reputation, and everyone knows it.
Unless your practice falls into that very first bullet, you probably have some room for improving your reputation and promoting your business. (Even if your phone is ringing off the hook, there are probably still some areas of marketing that could be improved—like, online scheduling, perhaps?)
A healthcare marketing consultant can help build your reputation
Your reputation as a healthcare brand is one of your most valuable assets, so investing in healthcare marketing consulting to nurture and improve that asset is a wise business decision.
Would you let someone with no experience service one of your expensive medical devices, or would you bring in a certified technician? The same thing applies to your marketing and the management of your brand. An expert will take care of your brand and your business’s reputation—and help repair it if needed.
A healthcare marketing consulting agency can help improve and protect your online and offline reputation. They’ll work to build your reputation through positive experiences with patient marketing and active brand-building efforts.
Healthcare marketing consulting FAQs
Over our many years in the industry, we have heard a lot of questions about healthcare marketing consulting and how it helps healthcare practices. Read on for a few of those frequently asked questions.
What does a healthcare strategy consultant do?
A healthcare marketing consulting company can help you build and execute a marketing strategy that attracts new patients, retains current ones, improves patient journeys, and increases your return on investment, or ROI. They can also help you promote brand visibility and create a competitive advantage in your market.
What are the benefits of hiring a healthcare marketing consultant?
There are countless ways you can benefit from working with an experienced healthcare marketing consulting agency. They can inform your marketing and communication efforts, enhance your appeal to patients, and raise awareness of your business in the market.
But what you get out of your healthcare marketing consulting relationship is really up to you. If your goal is to book more appointments, they can help you do that. If your goal is to rank higher on Google, they can help you do that. The best marketing consultants will work with you to establish the goals and strategies that make the most sense for your business.
How do I know I need healthcare marketing consulting?
Are you losing patients to your competitors? Do you need more marketing expertise on your team? Do you want to create healthcare marketing videos? Are there things you think you should be doing with your medical marketing but don’t have the resources or expertise to do them? If you answered yes to any (or all) of these questions, you would benefit from healthcare marketing consulting.
What services do healthcare marketing consultants offer?
Different agencies will offer various services and areas of expertise. The best ones to partner with will have experience in the healthcare industry and offer services including:
Healthcare marketing consultants that get results
To build an effective healthcare marketing plan and optimize your ROI, consider a healthcare marketing consulting agency that can help you connect with patients across every channel.
Trust the healthcare marketing experts at TBH Creative
TBH Creative specializes in helping clients build effective healthcare websites and execute marketing campaigns that convert. In 2021, we were awarded six Aster Awards—five gold and one silver—for our excellence in healthcare web design and healthcare marketing.
