You might think that marketing campaigns are the same for every business in the sense that everyone has to worry about the same things. It’s all about getting exposure, fighting against the competition, and developing a strategy that brings your business out on top and gives a good reflection of your brand – correct?
Yes and no.
It’s correct in that every business across every industry will have to fight against competitors, and the end goal of marketing is the same for everyone. However, certain industries also face unique challenges that most others do not – and that brings us to today’s topic: marketing a healthcare business. This is one of the main instances where it makes sense to hire a specialist marketing team, rather than using a general marketing service for your business. You cannot promote or market a business in the healthcare industry by following the same plans and ideas as everyone else.
Instead, you face plenty of concerns that you must navigate around.
The Ethics Of Healthcare Business Promotion
Promoting your healthcare business forces you to toe the line between being promotional and breaking some ethical boundaries. In other areas of business, it’s seen as okay to almost use fear as a form of promotional messaging. For example, you can sell the fear of what happens when you misfile a tax return to promote financial services – or you can talk about the worrying consequences of not cleaning your bathroom properly to sell your cleaning products.
You can’t do this sort of thing with a healthcare business because it drifts into the realms of being unethical. Imagine you sell hormone replacement products and your entire marketing campaign is built around the dangers of low testosterone or estrogen. It may hook people, but it’s not ethical – and this can cause serious problems. Instead, you rely on proper hormone replacement therapy SEO to target the main questions people have about your products/services, and the same applies to all elements of healthcare.
You cannot afford to drift over the ethical line, as this tends to make the next challenge all the more troublesome.
Trust Matters More Than Ever
Trust will always be a key factor that consumers consider when making purchasing decisions. Nobody wants to buy a product or service from a company they’ve never heard of because they don’t trust them. Trust makes you feel safe, which pushes you to spend money as you feel like it’s actually going to be worth it.
That’s why many consumers pick certain brands and use them over and over, despite the fact that there might be more affordable or “better” brands out there.
Trust is magnified a thousand times over when you build a healthcare business, and it’s down to what you sell. Your whole business model revolves around the idea of helping people with health problems in one way or another. Healthcare businesses also tend to be quite expensive, so there’s a higher purchasing risk for customers. You must work harder than ever to build trust because prospective customers will worry about:
- The legitimacy of your business
- How effective your products/services actually are
Consequently, you’ll take up a massive chunk of your marketing strategy with ideas to build trust, such as:
- Displaying any medical credentials on your website for everyone to see
- Posting or linking studies that back up any claims made about your products
- Showing off as many testimonials and customer case studies to prove efficacy
- Providing detailed guides and educational resources to show you know what you’re talking about and provide some free advice
Other types of business can get away with doing less than this and still build trust with customers. For instance, a standard eCommerce company can simply call upon positive reviews to build trust with an audience – for your healthcare business, it requires way more work.
Regulations Can Get In Your Way
Again, when you’re marketing the average business in any other industry, you don’t need to think about regulations that much. Most industries have regulations; it’s just that they apply to the actual products/services being provided. For example, a construction company must provide services that comply with certain building regulations, or they risk being fined and shut down. Similar issues still apply to healthcare businesses, with the added annoyance of regulations getting in the way of a marketing campaign.
Healthcare marketing faces more regulations than almost any industry, particularly when it comes to:
- Making claims about products/services
- Talking about the outcomes of your services
- Patient/customer data
We just touched upon them above, but getting testimonials from customers can actually be frustrating for healthcare businesses as regulations dictate what can or can’t be published – even if this comes straight from a happy customer’s mouth! You may also face stricter regulations when it comes to email retargeting because this relates to customer data, and if you run a healthcare business, you may technically need to follow HIPAA Compliance.
It is, as you can see, extremely complex and lots of barriers stand in your way. This alters your approach to marketing as you need to tiptoe around the regulations while still getting your point across.
Harder To Stand Out
With other types of businesses, you can stand out in various ways:
- New price promotions & discounts
- Making bold claims that you’re the best around
- Creating unique products or services
For healthcare companies, most of the services/products are the same, you can’t make outrageous claims, and it’s harder to undercut your rivals. Therefore, it’s harder for you to stand out and find differentiating factors, which means you have to focus on smaller ways of standing out. This could include loyalty perks, coming up with innovative ways to deliver your products/services, or even introducing the latest technology/equipment.
The overwhelming feeling is that healthcare marketing is harder than any other type of marketing because new barriers appear in your way. You still have the usual challenges that other companies face, plus the ones above stacked on top.