Is it just us, or is it getting harder to attract (and keep) patients?
Between traditional medical practices and emerging models like retail care, telehealth, direct primary care, and concierge care, patients have an abundance of choice when it comes to their healthcare. As patients’ options increase, providers have to work even harder to acquire new patients and retain the ones they already have.
Whether you’re part of a marketing team at a private practice, physician group, or hospital—and no matter which care model you work within—your ability to draw in new patients directly impacts your business’s success. Although expanding your patient base is essential for continued growth, you’ll need to pay attention to your existing patients, too. Here are four effective marketing tactics to help you boost both patient acquisition and retention.
1. Define your ideal patient personas
A targeted patient acquisition strategy tailored to specific audiences achieves two significant goals:
- It can effectively engage the patients who help your organization meet its specific needs, whether those include expanding a service line, increasing certain procedure volumes, or bringing increased traffic to an underutilized practice.
- A targeted strategy also conveys that your organization understands and cares about patients’ specific needs, helping you stand out among your competition.
Defining patient personas will help you align your marketing efforts around your ideal patients and more effectively target and engage them.
Start with demographic factors like age, gender, race, and/or income (any of these identifiers may or may not be useful, depending on your goals). Then add details like where they live, whether they rent or own, and how they travel to and from your facilities. Be sure to identify the specific medical conditions they might have, if any, and their propensity to develop certain conditions or need specific procedures.
If your goals are as broad and simple as “increase revenue,” you’ll likely want to develop a wide variety of patient personas to maximize your reach. But even if you’re only looking to grow a service line at a particular facility, it’s worth taking the time to define multiple personas. Chances are, there’s a diverse array of patients who can benefit from the services you’re hoping to expand.
2. Hone your brand presence
According to a 2020 survey by Doctor.com, 71% of patients use online reviews as the first step to finding a new doctor. While the quality of your facilities and friendliness of your staff will go a long way toward keeping patients happy once they’re in the door, your online presence will provide most prospective patients with a first impression of your organization, so be sure to give it the attention it deserves.
Online reviews and ratings on platforms like Google and Healthgrades play a significant role in shaping patient perceptions and building trust. Encourage current patients to share their positive reviews through a combination of in-person engagement, text and email reminders, and take-home collateral like business cards or brochures.
Stay engaged with any feedback, whether positive or negative, by publicly noting your organization’s appreciation for the reviewer’s time. Don’t discuss the details of patients’ complaints publicly; instead, thank them for their feedback, apologize (vaguely but earnestly) for their negative experience, and provide a means of offline contact where they can share their thoughts with a member of your team.
A strong online presence should also include a professional, accessible, and user-friendly website that clearly communicates your services, values, and patient testimonials. Keep the site fresh by routinely publishing and updating engaging and informative content that delivers value to visitors and establishes your organization as a trusted authority.
Don’t skimp on search engine optimization (SEO); the right keywords and site structure will make it easier for potential patients to find you. You can pair SEO tools with demographic data and social determinants of health (SDOH) to tailor your online presence specifically to the patient personas you’ve already crafted.
When in doubt, focus your branding on the patient and the people delivering their care. A 2022 survey by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions found that only 34% of patients reported a high level of trust in healthcare organizations, compared to 76% who trust their individual healthcare providers. By reminding patients that your organization is a group of caring professionals, not merely a revenue engine, your brand can share in some of that trust.
3. Segment your audience and craft tailored messaging
Once you’ve identified your target audience, you should segment them based on factors such as service line, age range, and income bracket. Develop marketing campaigns with tailored messaging for each segment. An omnichannel approach, utilizing social media, email, search engine advertising, and sponsored content, ensures you cover all your bases and engage patients effectively.
To execute an effective omnichannel strategy, you’ll need to determine which marketing channels each segment is most likely to engage with. If you don’t have insights available from previous campaigns, this process may start with some guesswork, but you can easily gauge engagement channel by channel as your campaign gets underway. Check out our tips on how providers can optimize marketing campaigns.
Alternatively, you could partner with a data vendor to get consumer intelligence and claims data from the start. Cross-referenced together, you can use this data to determine how patients receiving certain procedures are engaging with other providers and brands and plan your outreach accordingly.
For instance, if you’re hoping to perform more colonoscopies at your practice, your ideal patient personas likely include adults between the ages of 45 and 75. You could break these personas into four segments divided by working/retired status and history of colorectal cancer, informing the channels you target and the language you employ for each segment.
Many potential patients may already have established relationships with other practices. You can utilize claims data to track patient journeys within your market and identify opportunities for acquisition or retention. Reference and affiliations data can help you pinpoint physicians who are likely to refer patients out of their network and into yours—or, highlight in-network physicians who are leaking patients to other providers.
Use consumer data and patient feedback to help craft messaging that highlights your practice’s strengths, such as access to innovative technology, short wait times, high patient satisfaction scores, and convenient locations, based on the patients you’re targeting and their relationship to your competitors.
4. Track campaign performance and adjust accordingly
A patient acquisition or retention campaign is not a fire-and-forget tactic. It’s an ongoing process that should continually become more effective, so long as you incorporate new data and findings into it and adjust as needed.
Once you’ve activated your patient marketing campaign, be sure to capture leads in your CRM and gather data throughout the process. As leads and engagement data build, conduct return on marketing investment analyses to assess the effectiveness of your strategies. Modify your tactics based on performance data, and use population insights to assign leads to additional nurturing programs tailored to their healthcare needs.
If you’re focused on patient retention, use reference and affiliation data to see how in-network referral patterns have changed, and address any growth in out-of-network referrals with the appropriate providers through targeted engagement.
Get the right data to shape your patient acquisition strategy
Collaborating with a data vendor can make the entire process faster and more efficient. Definitive Healthcare offers a comprehensive range of healthcare commercial intelligence solutions, including claims, reference, and affiliations data, along with powerful analytics to inform your patient marketing strategy from start to finish. Specifically useful for new patient acquisition, our Population Intelligence product provides predictive patient targeting and insights into consumer demographics, behaviors, and media habits, allowing you to better understand your market and reach those who can most benefit from your services.
Ready to enhance your patient acquisition and retention strategies with data-driven insights? Sign up for a free trial of our platform today and start planning your next patient marketing campaign.
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