Healthcare Marketing Mistakes To Avoid

Doctors, in most cases, tend to be risk adverse. They know what is on the line in their practice – the lives of their patients. Healthcare marketing is no different. However, most doctors have little experience in healthcare marketing. Due to this, they commonly make a few mistakes that could risk the success of their healthcare marketing campaign. These mistakes, no matter how few and how little, can have huge consequences however and if your website is not optimized for the search engines, new patients would find it impossible to find you. Here are a few healthcare marketing mistakes that you can avoid early in the game to avoid future disaster:


  1. Not defining your target audience

This common healthcare marketing mistake cannot be underestimated and its importance cannot be stressed enough. In fact, defining your target audience is the first step in any digital marketing strategy or marketing strategy for that matter, and healthcare marketing is no exception. A healthcare marketing campaign might be successful in gathering patients without defining your target audience, but what happens is, you could be gathering the wrong people or the people you don’t want or need and you will be wasting time and money on them. Millennials are a good target audience nowadays but you can still make your demographic targeting specific by including location, gender and age.


  1. Not challenging your assumptions

While it might be true that confidence is a virtue in business, not asking yourself if you could be mistaken is a very common mistake. The US healthcare system is changing very rapidly. Whatever you think could be true last year might not be true anymore this year. The reason behind this rapid change is competition between online groups. An example would be competition between institutions and medical providers. Private practices are being rolled up into groups and physicians and groups are getting acquired by hospitals and health systems. Pharmacy chains are joining the game in primary care and the health insurance is always getting reinvented in many ways. Not challenging your assumptions from last year and not updating yourself with fresh data can be your biggest stumble in healthcare marketing.


  1. Not having the right budget

This is the part where you will probably need an accountant or a financial advisor. You would also need the help from experts in the field of healthcare marketing. There is so much politics in healthcare that you really need good players to stay in the game. The common mistake in a healthcare marketing budget is either spending too much or spending too little with little advice from the experts. If you talk to the right people you will avoid expecting too much ROI from too little of a budget or spending too much on campaigns that are going nowhere. Talk to experts and get an estimate from them about how much money you need for a healthcare marketing campaign. You should also monitor your money by tracking accounts and you might need an accountant or track the accounts if you know accounting in order to check the direction of your healthcare marketing campaign.


  1. Failure to test

Even the best laid out plans can collapse in the face of today’s market. Make sure that you test the waters first and learn as much as possible from this experience. You can do this by starting out with a simple healthcare marketing campaign and a small budget. During this time, do not be afraid to test anything that experts have told you or anything that you have learned about healthcare or medical marketing. See for yourself which strategies work and which ones don’t. Take not of them and ask yourself why they are very effective. Remember, what is effective this year might not be effective anymore in the following year. That is why it is very important to ask why it is effective. Use all your learning experience from a test campaign to a more serious campaign until you yourself will master healthcare marketing.


  1. Never lose sight of your objectives

A marketing campaign that gives you all the ROI you want but does not align to your objectives will not give you real happiness. The important thing is that your healthcare marketing plans should be aligned with your objectives and that you are learning while you are earning. Healthcare marketing gives you a chance to really do what you love to do and it could be an extension of your practice where you can play a little with some extra time and money that you have on your hands.