Follow this checklist to stitch a winning healthcare marketing plan.
Even if you’ve outlined your digital marketing strategy for 2018, there’s still time to fine-tune and optimize your yearly marketing plan!
Answer the following questions, first –
Paid Media – Are you making full use of your paid media?
Earned media – Do you have a strategy to boost your earned media?
Owned media – Does your owned media need a facelift?
When optimizing a comprehensive marketing plan for your hospital or health system, there are several aspects to consider.
The following checklist helps you keep track of the main elements you’ll need to integrate into your strategy.
1. Target Market: Understand who your “best consumers” are and target them with the right content at each stage of their consumer journey. Now is the time to create or update your buyer personas.
2. Gap and Historical Analysis: Hindsight is 20/20 and there are valuable lessons that can be learned by assessing previous performance. What was effective? What wasn’t? Reviewing data detailing your performance will give you a reference point for the goals you want to reach.
3. Competition: Assessing competitors is another great method for discovering new opportunities. It is crucial to have an impartial understanding of their weaknesses and strengths.
4. “Buying Cycle”: As you coordinate your marketing strategy, ensure you take into consideration the various steps in the consumer selection process, the patient journey, and how you hope to push leads and prospective patients further through the funnel.
5. Goals and Objectives: Prior to addressing your digital marketing objectives, you must take into account your hospital’s goals and then figure out how digital marketing can help achieve those goals. Once you have determined that, your digital marketing objectives can be more precise.
6. Activation: Put your digital marketing plan into action!
7. Measure: Measuring performance is frequently taken for granted in strategic planning. If you are unable to answer, “How will we measure success?” with a clear reply, you need to go back to the drawing board.
8. Conversion Rate and Landing Page Optimization: Regardless of how strong your performance has been in the past, there’s always something to be learned or gained by seizing opportunities to enhance your conversion rate.
9. Performance across Devices: It’s crucial to know historical performance across multiple devices. Have paid ads performed better on mobile? If so, what mobile devices should you focus on? Once your yearly objectives have been established, you can begin to manage specific tactics at the device level. This will enable you to intentionally develop techniques that cater to the most important mobile devices.
10. Tactics and Channels: Use a combination of tactics and channels to make it easy for the right people to find you! Assessing your performance and doing a competitive analysis are fun phases in your digital marketing planning, but nailing down tactics and channels is the most vital aspect of the plan.
11. Promotions: We typically don’t talk about “promotions” in healthcare marketing, but think of these as opportunities to engage your audience with targeted and relevant content. When promotions are planned and prepared in advance, you will have a better chance of success. Planning minimizes the overwhelming last minute rush to get landing pages and creative approved.
12. Timeline: To execute your plan, it is important to have a timeline in mind. While the timeline will likely need to be flexible, having a schedule lets you visualize the tactical execution and make sure you are on par with projected results.
13. Resources: Determine which resources will be required to get the plan started. Establishing who is responsible for what will create accountability across teams, which is needed for a successful implementation of the plan and measurement of results.
14. Revisit, Adjust, Adapt: At some point, things will not go according to plan. But don’t beat yourself up over it. The digital marketing strategy for your healthcare organization is meant to provide a foundation, upon which you will continually learn and grow.
The important thing is to keep it simple, make it easy for people to act. Develop your marketing strategy with the right expectations. Start with a prioritized plan and focus on consistency and continual improvement.
