Pawan Gupta, Co-founder, Curofy, explains that the influx of social media and technology has determined a new set of rules and requirements for the healthcare segment
Healthcare marketing is relatively a new phenomenon which has now become mainstream in the industry. Rigorous changes in healthcare policies, consumer expectations and attitudes within the sector itself are the primary factors facilitating the growth of marketing in this sector. Primarily, policy changes in healthcare were encouraged in the West, where this industry is very organised. It engendered the importance of healthcare services, their delivery and end consumers in the sector. Moreover, the approach of the commoners towards healthcare has changed a lot through education and awareness. Their efforts to reduce cost made them dig deeper into market policies such as insurance and health benefits plans.
As global recession engulfed countries during the early 80s, fiscal constraints enforced governments to cut short their expenditure on heads such as public health. This encouraged broad privatisation and commercialisation of healthcare. Further, with the growth of pharma and medical equipment industries, the process received massive impetus. International collaborations and mergers began in the 90s as entities such as insurance companies started to play pertinent roles. Thus, importance of business-oriented healthcare gradually took root in the landscape. Healthcare transformed rapidly into a business-oriented industry with increasing influence of global enterprises that forayed into this sector. Along with these developments, concepts like marketing gained ground rapidly.
The influx of social media and technology has determined a new set of rules and requirements for the healthcare segment and marketing is deemed to be essential to address these requirements. Social media is greatly influencing the mindset of consumers, about 54 per cent of consumers prefer to take advice from social channels, more than half of all the chunk. People in the age group of 18 to 24 tend to use more of social media compared to the older generations. This makes it necessary for the healthcare sector to tap and influence their future consumers, drive their business and benefit the consumers. Most organisations have now implemented social media guidelines where they state what to write and what not to, around 31 per cent of healthcare professionals are using social media channels to monitor and reach their clients. These mediums have affected the masses to such an extent that 41 per cent of the people will reach out to social media to take a decision regarding doctors and hospitals.
Social media is slowly helping to improve the way people feel about transparency and authenticity, which will hopefully lead to more productive discussions and innovations regarding an individual’s health. This statistic shows that social media platforms can be vehicles to help scale both positive and negative word of mouth, which makes them important channels for an individual or an organisation in the healthcare industry to focus on, in order to attract and retain patients. Consumers are using social media to discuss everything in their lives including health, and it is up to your organisation to choose whether it’s time to tune in or not.
The most important way for industry stakeholders to reach out to patients is marketing through healthcare professionals (HCPs). Traditionally, the whole industry focused on feet on the street sales to reach out to the doctors. The underlying reason being that there was no online world of doctors where the industry could best reach out to them. Till date, the significant marketing expense is towards massive sales force hiring, training and deploying them for sales. Repeated efforts have demonstrated that e-mails, Facebook and other online sources are not effective ways to reach out to HCPs. They are always spammed by industry stakeholders thus encroaching personal space. Privacy concerns, especially with drug companies, also need to be addressed in order to guarantee that sensitive data is not accidentally released to the public on social media. It shows how many companies in healthcare still don’t know the first thing about the use of social media. This can be corrected by creating clear and concise guidelines on how social media should be used by the organisations and their staff. Also, every major pharma and medical devices company have started making websites and apps of their own to engage with their key opinion leaders (KOLs). If this phenomenon is to continue, each doctor would be flooded with more than 20 websites and mobile apps with repetitive content everywhere. The way out would probably be a central app which can moderate all the communications for a doctor. Show that you have a solid editorial statement and a strategy to back it up, it’s time to think about the content itself. The healthcare industry is always releasing new reports and information. While you want to keep your consumers informed, you also want to make it relevant. Do the grunt work for your audience by discovering what interests them and publishing content on those topics.
Find out by running a focus group or inviting existing patients to fill out a short survey. Try to find out what are the most studied issues. Once you have finalised the topic, consider the different platforms — videos, e-books, newsletters, white papers – that you can use to communicate your message. Decide which platform works best for your topic and audience. Now start serving your customers with the content they care about, and that shows you care about them.
Marketing directly to patients has also taken a different turn altogether after the success of social networks. Social media and internet utility such as blogs have become prominent channels for consumer rating and feedback. Heathcare organisations are allowing users to share their experiences online and even link their blogs to official websites. Peer review is an important marketing technique as it helps to mould strategic decisions. Product reviews and ratings by consumers are reliable information to improve the prospects of the business. These, in turn, assist organisations to adopt new health marketing strategies. All the major hospitals, labs and diagnostics providers have developed their own online audience as against door-to-door and affiliate marketing that used to be before two years. Video marketing converts to traffic and leads much more easily than other forms of content because it efficiently gets across the point, shares a human element and is able to highlight the value of the facilities more quickly. YouTube traffic to hospital sites has increased 119 per cent year-over-year. This is just the onset of a revolution in healthcare marketing. With time, the expense in offline and online marketing is expected to undergo a paradigm shift. The positive outcome of the shift could be because online marketing is quite cheaper compared to offline marketing. This would result in cost savings for the caretakers ultimately.
Thus, with time, the industry as a whole is undergoing an evolution. Starting with all offline activities, immense expenditures have been incurred on creating a massive sales force. Times are indeed changing with the advent of various online platforms which grabs the attention of care providers and caretakers. The opinion and viewpoints of the people in our online social circles are continuously influencing our decision making, even when it comes to our opinion on healthcare options.
Healthcare professionals should take note of this fact and use social media in an impactful way to ensure that they become a part of the process which forms an opinion of a person’s healthcare options. The fact that most hospitals use Facebook over other social media channels should be noted because time, staff and budget are always limited, and your efforts on social media should be targeted and focused on where your organisation can make the most impact. This might lead to a few people losing their jobs but would ultimately benefit the caretakers owing to lower cost in the online marketing world.