Definitive Healthcare
Free trial
Free trial

How to optimize marketing campaigns for healthcare providers

Healthcare provider organizations’ marketing teams are constantly aiming at moving targets. The preferences of patients, referral sources, and professional talent are always evolving along with the technological, scientific, and regulatory landscape of the industry.  

Effective marketing campaigns for healthcare providers meet target audiences on their terms and highlight the provider’s ability to address the audience’s needs, whether for care, partnership, or employment. Because audiences’ needs differ (and change over time), campaigns need to move beyond generic messaging and use available market intelligence to deliver optimal results.

In this guide, we’ll outline seven actionable steps to help healthcare providers elevate their marketing campaigns for maximum impact:

  1. Personalize your message to your audience
  2. Choose the right type of marketing campaign
  3. Maximize email deliverability
  4. Use social media for custom targeting
  5. Leverage human behavior
  6. Have an airtight lead follow-up process
  7. Report, analyze, repeat

1. Personalize your message to your audience

The one-size-fits-all approach to marketing isn’t viable when you’re attempting to engage with prospective patients or physician partners. Your target audience has unique needs; your messaging will need to address those needs in order to drive action.

To resonate with your audience, start by segmenting them based on defining factors. For patients, this might be age, disease state, medication usage, or current relationship with your healthcare services (or those of your competitors). If you’re looking to recruit healthcare professionals, you might hone in on details like job function, organization type, and level of experience. Or if attracting referrals is your goal, you may be interested in a provider’s patient base, therapeutic focus, or commonly performed procedures.

Different segments have distinct needs and concerns, so crafting tailored messages for each ensures that your communication is relevant and valuable to them individually. Use data analytics to gather insights into audience behavior and preferences, allowing you to refine your messaging over time. The ultimate aim is to make your audience feel understood on a personal level, fostering a sense of trust and connection.

2. Choose the right type of marketing campaign

Just as different segments of your audience have unique needs and concerns, they also have unique preferences for engaging with your brand.

Email can feel a little stodgy in the world of social media, influencers, and viral marketing campaigns, but for healthcare providers, it remains a critical medium for engagement. Email marketing takes more than sheer volume or reach, however. Effective email campaigns should strategically align your content with your audience’s needs and their position in the decision-making process—i.e., is your target the patient themselves, or perhaps a loved one or caregiver?

There are a few key approaches to email marketing:

  • Outbound campaigns are ideal for introducing your healthcare products or services to potential leads.
  • Nurture campaigns, on the other hand, help to build and maintain relationships over time by providing valuable content that addresses pain points and guides leads through the buyer’s journey.
  • Retargeting campaigns are designed to re-engage with leads who have shown interest but haven’t yet converted.

If your marketing efforts are focused on retaining patients rather than attracting new ones, consider leveraging text messages or communication via healthcare apps like MyChart to highlight service line updates, share health tips, or follow up on care experiences. Digital signage in and around your facilities can also provide valuable—and relatively inexpensive—opportunities for engagement with new and long-time patients.

Choosing the right style of campaign and messaging medium ensures that you deliver the right message at the right time, maximizing engagement and driving conversion.

3. Improve your email (and text) deliverability

Messaging deliverability is often overlooked in favor of content creation or contact identification, but it’s still a critical aspect of email (and text) marketing success for healthcare providers.

To ensure your messages reach your recipients’ inboxes instead of their spam folders, follow these basic tips:

  • Refrain from using words and phrases that trigger spam filters, like “free”, “#1”, “100%”, and other terms that make exaggerated claims.
  • Minimize attachments; instead rely on links to secure, verified websites (like your own, hopefully).
  • Use alt text for images to ensure accessibility.
  • Regularly clean your contact list by removing invalid or outdated addresses.
  • Encourage whitelist requests—especially when targeting other providers—to enhance your email’s chances of reaching key decision-makers within target organizations.
  • Utilize spam testing tools to check your emails before sending.
  • Stay compliant with messaging laws like CAN-SPAM to avoid legal issues, and always include an unsubscribe button in the email (or an unsubscribe link in your automated texts).

A focus on email deliverability will help to ensure your healthcare marketing efforts pay off and drive engagement with your organization.

4. Use social media for custom targeting

If you have the time and resources to use it effectively, social media can provide great opportunities for engaging with patients and identifying prospective recruits or physician referral partners. Searching for hashtags and keywords within your specific market can reveal trending issues and concerns among a particular patient base.

LinkedIn especially is a goldmine for talent- or referral-focused marketing due to its vast user base and detailed user profiles. Harness this platform for custom targeting by reaching out to specific individuals or targeting entire networks that fit your ideal candidate profile.

Utilize paid ads on LinkedIn and other social media sites to create highly targeted campaigns based on job titles, demographics, profile keywords, and browsing activity. Sponsored content on social media allows you to promote your valuable healthcare content to an audience actively seeking professional insights. By leveraging these data-rich platforms and applying thoughtful targeting and valuable content, you can achieve higher conversion rates, stronger brand recognition, and lasting consumer relationships.

5. Leverage human behavior

Humans are complex creatures, but we’re not immune to reacting to specific triggers. Understanding and leveraging human behavior can help your provider marketing campaigns captivate your audience and encourage them to take action.

For instance, FOMO isn’t just a social media phenomenon; it’s a deeply engrained psychological mechanism. Utilize urgency and scarcity in your messaging to create a sense of immediacy and desire for your healthcare services.

You can also try to provide immediate value—such as informative content or free consultations—to tap into the human instinct to return favors. Ideally, the audience’s sense of reciprocity will drive engagement or conversion.

As social beings, most people knowingly or unknowingly make decisions based partly on social proof, or the evidence of the larger group’s acceptance of that decision. Highlight positive reviews, testimonials, or endorsements to appeal to that innate tendency as part of your provider marketing strategy.

6. Have an airtight lead follow-up process

Building an airtight lead follow-up process is not only about securing a new patient, referral source, or physician partner, but also about building trust and nurturing relationships with prospects.

Create a structured lead management process that defines stages, roles, and timeframes, ensuring leads are handled efficiently from initial contact to conversion. Invest in customer relationship management (CRM) systems and automation tools to streamline lead tracking, data management, and lead scoring. These tools may even be incorporated into your electronic medical record (EMR) system to enable automated follow-up and engagement with existing patients. Ultimately, automation should improve efficiency and consistency in your follow-up efforts.

Be sure to promote collaboration between sales and marketing teams—and potentially your clinical teams, too—by aligning goals, holding regular meetings, and establishing a feedback loop. Cross-team alignment ensures everyone’s needs are met, leads are never dropped, and conversion rates continue to climb.

7. Report, analyze, repeat

The final step in optimizing healthcare marketing campaigns is really a process in itself: maintain an ongoing commitment to monitoring and analyzing performance.

Actively track and report on campaign metrics to gain insights into audience preferences, competitive landscape, and return on investment. Utilize these insights to optimize campaign elements, conduct A/B testing, and experiment with new approaches.

Adjust budget allocations based on performance data to ensure resources are allocated to the most effective strategies. Think of “report, analyze, repeat” as a mantra that fosters a cycle of continuous improvement leading to more effective campaigns and better outcomes. Regularly revisit and refine your strategies to stay ahead in the shifting healthcare landscape.

What it all means

As healthcare evolves to a more patient-centered, value-based approach, healthcare providers’ marketing campaigns also need to evolve to reach the patients, referral sources, and talent they want to attract. Incorporating these seven strategies into your marketing efforts will help your messaging resonate with your intended audience and drive engagement and conversion.

Healthcare commercial intelligence that incorporates claims, reference and affiliations data, and social media activity can make it easier to identify, target, and engage your ideal audience. With the right data, you can segment your audience, develop unique personas for consumers or partners, engage them through their preferred channels, and create lasting relationships built around an understanding of their interests and needs.

For more information on crafting effective marketing campaigns, explore these resources: