Maximizing Patient Engagement: A Guide to Full-Funnel Healthcare Marketing
Healthcare marketing is in our DNA at AcrobatAnt. Just like training for a healthcare career takes years of study and practice, our expertise in patient-centric healthcare marketing has been developed over 15-plus years of dedicated service.
During this time we have honed and refined full-funnel healthcare marketing strategies for our clients, which has paid huge dividends for them by building brand equity as well as driving patient engagement and retention.
Full-funnel healthcare marketing is a patient-centric approach that involves engaging patients at every stage of their journey. It isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach; rather, it is focused on deploying the most targeted and effective strategies for patient acquisition, engagement, and retention.
Here’s how healthcare marketers, administrators, and professionals can improve patient engagement and optimize their marketing strategies across the entire healthcare funnel.
What are the challenges in healthcare marketing?
Before we break down what full-funnel healthcare marketing is, we must first address the unique and complex challenges that healthcare marketers face, including regulatory constraints, patient privacy concerns, and the complexity of the patient journey.
There are also very real and important sensitivity concerns. Healthcare marketing deals with the health and well-being of patients and their loved ones. Patients take it very personally, as they should, and every marketing effort must always keep this in mind. It’s important that healthcare marketing never become too cute or clever, and certainly never come across as “salesy.”
Additionally, healthcare marketing must avoid being too dry, formal, or clinical. It’s important to convey compassion as well as expertise. Otherwise, your marketing runs the risk of leaving patients feeling cold, unseen, and unheard.
It’s a difficult challenge, to be sure. Like a complex procedure, it requires a guiding hand with expertise, experience, and finesse, as well as a strategy for success.
What is the healthcare marketing funnel?
The healthcare marketing funnel is just that—a funnel. Patients are taken on a journey through a series of stages, with specific marketing strategies and creative communication tailored for each stage.
There are five stages along the healthcare marketing funnel:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Acquisition
- Retention
- Advocacy
While the goals, messaging, and media used in each stage are unique, there must always be a consistent focus on addressing patient needs and concerns across every stage.
The five stages of full-funnel healthcare marketing.
Now that we know what the stages are, let’s take a deeper dive into each of the five stages of the healthcare marketing funnel.
- Awareness Stage: Building Brand Awareness
At this stage, the patient is introduced to your brand. Increasing brand visibility is key for driving brand awareness, and attracting potential patients. This can include sponsorships of local events, particularly those that are related to health and well-being, such as marathons and bike races. Advertising is also an important part of building brand awareness, and can include content marketing, social media, SEO, print, radio, and TV, depending on the size and scope of your budget. Simply put, the goal at this stage is to make potential patients aware of your healthcare brand, the services you provide, and the benefits you offer.
- Consideration Stage: Nurturing Prospective Patients
The second stage is when a patient gets to know your brand and weighs it against their other options, including your competitors. Remember, your “competition” isn’t just other providers in the healthcare space; it’s also patients who choose to not take advantage of any healthcare service.
So, nurturing leads and guiding them through the consideration stage involves a strategic mix of educational and personalized content. Once again, content marketing can play a critical role here, such as articles or videos that take a deep dive into a particular health topic. Targeted emails are also a great way to reach and remind patients about your brand.
- Acquisition Stage: Turning Prospects into Patients
This is the stage when prospects become patients. The key here is to make it as easy as possible for your prospective patients to take advantage of your services. This includes simple, straightforward landing pages with crystal-clear calls-to-action, including “sign up” and “schedule appointment.” There is always a temptation, and a risk, to make the messaging more complicated than it needs to be. Don’t fall into this trap. Make your message and calls-to-action as clear as possible to avoid confusion.
At this stage it’s important to deliver a quality patient experience. Therefore, it’s essential to have a seamless and straightforward online appointment scheduling system. There’s nothing more frustrating than a scheduling system that leaves patients confused and annoyed. Making sure your online scheduling system is as simple as possible is also important for the fourth stage: Retention.
- Retention Stage: Enhancing Patient Retention
You got the patient in the door with your healthcare marketing, so now what? The most important part of patient retention (and customer retention in general) is actually beyond the scope of marketing—it’s providing the patient with a quality experience in which their needs are met, their concerns are addressed, and they receive your service with as little friction and frustration as possible.
However, while the patient-provider relationship is most important, healthcare marketing still has a big role to play in the patient retention stage. Patient satisfaction surveys offer you the opportunity to learn from your patients, with the goal of continuous improvement. Follow-up communications, such as emails and phone calls, help you stay top-of-mind with the patient. Additionally, there’s also opportunity to think outside the box, such as with loyalty programs that reward patients for repeat visits or referrals.
- Advocacy Stage: Encouraging Patient Advocacy
The most powerful form of healthcare marketing—or any marketing, for that matter—is word of mouth. Again, the patient-provider relationship is the most critical component here, as even great marketing can’t fix bad service or experience. However, healthcare marketing can still encourage satisfied patients to become passionate advocates for your brand.
The goal here is activation: what are ways to turn patient satisfaction into effective marketing and communication? Online reviews and testimonials are powerful for word-of-mouth marketing, especially if the patients and their situations are relatable. Likewise, you could also institute a referral program that rewards patients in some way for recommending you to others. Make sure your marketing is measurable so that you know where patients hear about you, so you can focus your marketing spend on those areas.
What is the impact of full-funnel healthcare marketing?
Full-funnel marketing is important, not just for generating new patients but also for enhancing the patient’s engagement and experience, as well as improving healthcare outcomes. By communicating your healthcare brand and its benefits to potential patients, you have an opportunity to help even more people with their health and well-being.
As an expert in using full-funnel marketing strategies to engage patients, we’re proud of our record of success, with the client roster and case studies to prove it.
One of our proudest achievements came when we helped Saint Francis Health System (Oklahoma’s largest health system) increase the number of heart screenings for Hearth Month in February. We developed a multimedia campaign targeting adults 35 and older, using paid email, digital display, OOH, direct mail and NPR underwriting. The results were amazing: the landing page saw a 1,975% increase in unique page views from the previous year, resulting in a major lift in screening appointments. Find out more about this campaign here.
Full-funnel healthcare marketing in essential for building brand equity, maximizing patient engagement, and growing your practice so you can help more people live healthier lives. At AcrobatAnt, we take pride in our healthcare work and we’re ready to help you develop a tailored marketing strategy to better connect with patients at every stage of their journey.
Check out our experience and creative work. If you’re ready to bring creative solutions that inspire to your healthcare marketing, please contact us.
