State of Healthcare Marketing 2016

With the onset of the Affordable Care Act along with the ever-evolving digital landscape, there’s no way that the state of healthcare marketing could remain effective without evolving greatly through time… right? If you work in a marketing or development role in the healthcare realm, we could all benefit by reading about the current state of this field and what is expected this year.

One piece of the change started with The Affordable Care Act in 2010 made it so that many Americans are mandated to have a health insurance plan. In short, this shifted healthcare to be more consumer-focused, resulting in more people going online to shop for the right fit for them. This also means that healthcare marketing teams would have to invest more on their online marketing presence in order to stay in front of the consumer.

Alongside this change, there are thousands of resources online for patients – mobile apps for their health, blogs answering their questions, video appointments with doctors. You name it, there’s a digital resource trying to take advantage of each need.

However, as could be concluded from the research in Econsultancy’s “Healthcare Study: Organizing Marketing in the Digital Age,” healthcare marketing is a little bit behind other sectors in regards to digital marketing. The healthcare industry as a whole has many obstacles to face in order to build a digital strategy that meets the needs of its online audience and to meet its own needs.

In order to understand more about the current state of healthcare, let’s review some of the main points the report addresses. This data is collected from people facing this issue head-on: Econsultancy’s survey (conducted in September 2015) features responses from 150 professionals in the medical realm including mainly manager level or above representatives from pharmaceutical, medical device and direct healthcare provider companies.

Their major question they sought to answer:

“how [is] healthcare marketing evolving in response to a number of factors in personal and professional technology, media consumption and consumer behavior”?

State of Healthcare Marketing for 2016

1.is healthcare marketing really “lagging behind”?

• As we can see from the above graph, healthcare is a bit behind other sectors in regards to how digital technology has influenced their marketing efforts.
  • 30% of the respondents go on to describe digital marketing as separate from their marketing in general, which is not the case with other sectors. 
• Econsultancy states that “Healthcare companies are particularly challenged. They can suffer from cultural resistance to change and often miss on top talent, especially in digital realms.”
  • Since the healthcare industry hasn’t been as quick to evolve as others, they don’t hire the innovative resources they need to make big changes, which just slows down change even more.

This doesn’t mean healthcare marketers aren’t trying to make a change – many of the respondents anticipate changes this year…

2.What do Marketer’s need for change?

• The biggest shift they expect is a greater focus on patient behavior. They will seek get to know what patients want and are looking for online.
  • This means they’ll need to increase their focus on audience development. They’ll need to break down who their various target audiences are and then develop website and social media content that directly relates to each. Read about the “patient journey” (a healthcare marketer’s version of the buyer’s cycle).
  • Which also means a significant focus on their website analytics (take a look at some Google Analytics resources) and data on their users and potential clients. With this investment, they can better understand what users do on their site and social and how they might get them to come back and improve a new visitor’s UX.
• Along these lines, they’ll need to invest in both new software that helps collect this data and more staff that will manage this software. If they do one without the other, it won’t be as cost-effective.

• Similarly, they’ll want to invest in marketing automation as many of the study’s participants plan to do. They won’t be able to keep up with all their various audiences and social networks if they don’t have the equipment that can help.

3.Advice for Marketers

• One of the biggest conclusions a healthcare marketer can draw from this report is that change is here, and if they are afraid of making such changes, they put their company at risk. Econsultancy speaks to this stating, “Fear of change is the number one threat to [these] cooperation[s].”
• Another issue they address is a tendency to let go of talent with digital skills and creativity when budgeting gets tight. They advise to find good talent and keep it, making employees in the digital realm feel needed, because they very much are. If the talent doesn’t see that a company is committed to keeping them onboard, they won’t sign on to help in the first place.

If you are working as a marketer in the healthcare realm and want to stay on top of the latest in healthcare marketing, subscribe to our newsletter, check back into sites like Franklin Street’s blog “The Next Idea” or follow Twitter influencers like @Legacydnagroup or @davidafeinberg.