A Profitable Match: Healthcare and Relationship Marketing

For a healthcare facility to be successful and profitable, relationship marketing is essential! Unlike mass-marketing type efforts in print or TV, relationship marketing is designed to develop strong connections with potential patients by providing them with information directly suited to meet their needs and interests. This type of marketing is only successful if the customer (or in this case, potential patient) provides information to the facility.

For a healthcare facility to be successful and profitable, relationship marketing is essential! Unlike mass-marketing type efforts in print or TV, relationship marketing is designed to develop strong connections with potential patients by providing them with information directly suited to meet their needs and interests. This type of marketing is only successful if the customer (or in this case, potential patient) provides information to the facility.

Here are a few tactics to make relationship marketing successful:

• Conduct surveys on and offline. Before a patient gets discharged from your facility ask them a few questions about their experience, what they liked and what they didn’t like. This data can then help your marketing department improve the overall patient experience in your facility.

• Monitor, listen and respond to medical review sites that current and potential patients are writing and reading. Some top sites you should check regularly are healthgrades.com, vitals.com and even Angie’s List. Listening to what consumers are saying can help craft and implement your marketing message across all advertising platforms.

• Don’t only use social media as a content and sales tool! Use it as a personalized engagement tool to interact with others. Making a healthcare-related decision can be a lot tougher than purchasing a television or automobile. A personal touch via a social network interaction can go a long way in getting a stranger to become a patient for life.

If you can provide your patient or potential patient with a lasting, meaningful and personalized experience, you have been successful in your relationship marketing outreach.