How to Map Consumer and Patient Behavior to Deliver More Marketing Impact

“In health care, it isn’t just the care that’s changing,” notes Claire Hovis, Vice President and Account Director of Capstrat, an agency that helps health care clients and others tell their stories with power and persuasion. “Power is changing.”

She says “expert-driven” communications—which in the past have given providers and large corporations a strong position in the information marketplace—are “giving way to a generation of empowered consumers who are more engaged and have higher expectations.” These highly informed consumers also have access to a much wider range of care options, including retail-based clinics, 24/7 nurse hotlines, and even video chats with physicians.

What does all of this mean for your marketing efforts? In a nutshell, you need to work harder—and smarter—to stand out from the rest of the crowd.

“As media fragments and channels multiply, it gets tougher to build a marketing strategy that can reach prospective and current patients at the right time. To meet that challenge, health care providers can take a page from the retail industry—by working to map consumer/patient behavior so marketing communications deliver more impact,” advises Hovis.

Fine-tuning marketing efforts so that they reach the right consumer at the right time with the right message is a multi-faceted process. Hovis advises prioritizing objectives first:

• Which service lines are revenue drivers?
• Which departments need patients to reach full capacity?
• Which part of the funnel do you need to grow?

Once you’ve identified strategic areas of focus, she says, you should map that back to one or more audience segments—which you must then research in depth.

Learn more about Hovis’s audience-reaching strategy, including a detailed look at the four key steps to success she recommends, in our new article: How Marketing Communications Can Navigate Patients Right to Your Door: 4 Steps to Get Your Facility on Your Customer’s Map.

Best regards,
Matt Humphrey
President