- Oct 06, 2021
When it comes to marketing your products and services to hospitals, deft pitching, and astute marketing strategies are the need of the hour. In fact, this is the case with most B2B services.
You can adopt many innovative and unique marketing strategies while pitching to hospitals, like identifying your target, tapping into online reviews, maintaining a great website, engaging in product-oriented marketing, and working around regulations and hospital policies.
Get this: A top-notch, well-planned marketing strategy can boost your lead generation efficiency by three times. Additionally, in the long run, it can save you as much as 62% in costs.
Continue reading our post to know more about how to market products to hospitals.
The 5 Secrets to Successful Healthcare Marketing
In this portion, we’ve rounded up some of the most in-vogue strategies that can launch you towards healthcare marketing success and boosted revenues:
1. Know Your Target:
There might be many hospitals in your area. And many businesses and firms are trying to do the same thing as you- market their services. Therefore, you must zero in on your target and solicit them. So, how can you do this?
You can start by doing a thorough study about who’s who and what they need. For instance, a hospital might require specific equipment, like MRI scan machines or other diagnostic products.
Instead of pitching to 5-6 hospitals at random, pick 1-2 hospitals you know are in dire need of your products. Come up with an optimized marketing plan to address their pain points, and you’ll have a great chance of selling your products to them.
Once your marketing plan is ready, make it a point to pitch your services to the hospitals in person. Why is this important? Here’s why: Approximately 80% of clients say that it’s important for them to meet with the company before they acquire their services.
2. Reviews are the New Gold
When you’re thinking about how to market to hospitals, this might not have crossed your mind. But online reviews are becoming very important in the healthcare industry. A study showed that around 84% of customers, including hospitals, place a lot of emphasis on online reviews.
Let’s suppose that you have 2-3 hospitals to whom you provide your products and services regularly. Get them to write your business or firm a review on Google or other healthcare websites.
In this way, you’ll automatically fall on the radar of hospitals looking for similar services. And there’s nothing like a glowing review to impress prospective hospital clients.
3. A Great Website is the Way Forward
Hospitals are very likely to visit the websites of individuals, firms, and businesses they intend to transact with. Nothing screams non-professionalism more than a shoddy and outdated website.
You can hire website designers to build a new website from scratch or give your existing website a quick revamp. Make your website interactive and easy to navigate. Remember to optimize your website design for both mobiles and PCs.
Pay extra attention to your mobile website design. Case studies have shown that, since Google’s 2018 rollout of mobile-first indexing, the effectiveness of your firm’s mobile website could make or break your marketing strategy.
Most importantly, ensure that you put up updated and accurate information about your products and services.
Also, it would be helpful if your contact information is displayed clearly. You can also have a dedicated testimonials section on your website. If you want, you can provide quick-access links to your social media profiles as well.
Considering that around 80% of clients perform extensive online research before availing of products or services, a great website is what you need.
4. Engage in Product-Oriented Marketing
As you brainstorm about how to market to hospitals, don’t shift the focus from your products and services. If you have a wide range of products and services on offer, you will have to develop different marketing strategies for each of them.
For instance, you could be providing diagnostic products, healthcare app services, billing services, medical staffing services, laboratory products, medical specialty products, and surgical equipment.
All these products and services are very disparate, and applying the same marketing strategy for all of them might not work. A study by Gartner, Inc. found that 85% of businesses and firms are switching to product-centric models in business and marketing.
You can design individual product pamphlets and have individual product and service pages on your website. You can also make cold calls to promote each of your products and services, depending on the hospitals you’re reaching out to.
4. Show Respect for Rules, Regulations, and Policies
It’s not enough to come up with answers to how to market to hospitals. Unlike marketing to consumers, there are many rules, regulations, and policies involved when it comes to hospitals.
Since hospitals are expected to maintain standards, they tend to have similar regulations and policies for businesses and firms looking to transact with them. That is where the first point becomes important.
While studying the needs and requirements of different hospitals, also make it a point to find out what regulations or policies are in place. You can reach out to hospital personnel as well if the need arises.
Now, why is this important? If you show respect for a hospital’s policies and regulations, the chances are that they’ll be more willing to listen to what you’ve got to say. Also, this is a great way of making a good first impression.
By optimizing your marketing strategy to incorporate the rules, you’ll only be making things a lot easier for both the hospital and you. No one wants to deal with bureaucratic red tape
Final Thoughts
A healthcare marketing expert, Michelle Stansbury, believed that since trust is very important in healthcare, marketing strategies should aim for credibility. Similarly, when you think about how to market to hospitals, make it a point to involve human elements.
After all, trust, credibility, and efficiency are what hospitals are all about, and they’d expect the same from you.
If you’d like to incorporate technology into your marketing strategies, don’t forget to leverage emerging technologies to enhance healthcare marketing.
