Strategies For Healthcare Marketing Essay.

As healthcare has evolved so has the concept of a patient or consumer of healthcare. Technology and culture are among the many variables that have affected our concept of a healthcare patient. Consider these items among the others noted in your text:Strategies For Healthcare Marketing Essay.

• What has most influenced the way you view yourself as a consumer of healthcare?
• What factors led to the redefinition of the patient as a consumer in the late twentieth century?

To support your work, use your course and textbook readings and also use the South University Online Library. As in all assignments, cite your sources in your work and provide references for the citations in APA format.

Your initial posting should be addressed at 150-300 words. Submit your document to this Discussion Area by due date assigned. Be sure to cite your sources using APA format.Strategies For Healthcare Marketing Essay.

The marketing of traditional health care services such as hospital services has matured during the past decade with the integration of research from the medical sociology discipline and the marketing literature. Similarly, more effective marketing strategies for health care packaged goods have been developed by integrating the knowledgebase available in the health care disciplines. Health care systems do not function on their own. On the contrary, it is a system that consists of divisions that provide necessary support to all wings ultimately enabling the service of healthcare to clients referred to as patients. Healthcare system has a team consisting of doctors, nurses, social workers, occupation therapists, case workers, psychologists as well as dietitians. All these health care members provide independent services that are critical for good health of the patient.

For around 30 or fewer years ago, marketing enormously has been introduced into health care organizations-a easy way of addressing an increasingly competitive health care environment. The consumer has responded to these changes in several ways.Strategies For Healthcare Marketing Essay.

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The Past and the Future of Health Care Marketing

Since the introduction of effective marketing strategy in the health care marketing,  the consumer behavior has changed. The changes have resulted from change in market structure. Today many consumers have adopted preventive behaviors that do not require the consumer to interact with a health care professional as opposed to some time back. This is especially common amongst the more self-reliant consumers  as explained by Future. Today consumers are able to take more responsibility for their personal health than in the past. Consumers are well educated both academically and through the internet, with a greater understanding of health care and other choices available for them.

Today the market has become consumer-driven, and the health care market is no exception. As a result, today patients are better informed and know more about health and medical services. In fact, there is no time in history have people known so much about health care and medicine as they do today. They are in a position to ask for high quality care and, having become cost conscious, they demand quality care at a reasonable price. Twenty years ago health care was a 42 billion dollars per-year industry. Today total U.S. health care spending tops 662 billion dollars. The health care budget is actually sky rocketing. Kronenfeld, explains that within the context of these changing environments, health care organizations must function and implement their marketing plans. As the environment has changed dramatically during the decade of the 1980s, so to have the general perception of marketing and its role, value, and meaning to the health care organization.

On the argument about health care policy in the United States in discussed in1960s and 1970s there was no system of care. Brown, (1992) further states that part of this argument stressed the waste and inefficiency overall in a situation which includes many competing models of care. Since then the nons-ystem and competing systems were a vital critique for the US system twenty years ago. Based on the free market economic theory, this argument included competition in the provision of any good or service being pivotal in keeping the price of the cost of that service reasonable. It is now different from thirty years ago because most experts and business people are concerned with costs of health and its impact on the overall competitiveness of American industry and products in a global economy.Strategies For Healthcare Marketing Essay.

Advertisements have made people take prescription drugs. They have had the potential to create n artificial demand. People acquire drugs from any shop any time today. They also have the basic knowledge of how they can use most of the drugs.

Health Care Marketing Plan for Primary Care
When promoting primary health care services, there are many factors that must be considered when developing an effective marketing plan. Primary care providers are the gatekeepers of health care in the United States; many patients have to visit them before being referred to specialist providers (Bodenheimer, 2003). They are also being tasked with ensuring patients are receiving preventative services and managing more complex chronic diseases (Akinci & Healey, 2004). Recruitment of primary care physicians is challenging because they are expected to do more and are not being reimbursed proportionally for the added workload (Bodenheimer, 2003). In this paper, a group of primary care physicians in Washington D.C. is looking to research their consumer population base in order to provide them better services and recruit new primary care physicians to their practice (Colorado State University-Global Campus, 2013). A successful primary care marketing plan will recruit quality health care providers while improving consumer accessibility to their services, customer satisfaction rates, and patients’ continuity of care with their health care provider.
Office Setting and Scheduling
In order for primary care practices to be successful they have to arrange their office setting and scheduling to satisfy their consumers’ needs. Bodenheimer (2003) advocates for improving primary care accessibility by arranging their offices into teams. Strategies For Healthcare Marketing Essay.

Healthcare marketing strategy is an inbound marketing process where we bring forth all the resources that could bear against various opportunities and threats of a highly competitive healthcare business. The resources could be any original content, including blog posts, articles, podcasts, informational videos, and interviews on medical topics, while the opportunities and threats are concerned with persuading your patients to come to you. It’s a vision document that lays down a detailed healthcare marketing plan over a specific period of time with a clear objective of exceeding the present performance of your healthcare business. It talks in detail about target marketing, competition analysis, SWOT analysis, and marketing tactics, budgets and system which are the most important elements of a healthcare marketing strategy. Having the right healthcare marketing strategy in place can help your practice by increasing your patient inflow and lowering your marketing budget which increases your ROI (return on investment).

Why Do You Need a Healthcare Marketing Strategy?

Nowadays, the criteria of patient satisfaction have changed dramatically! In your patient’s mind, you can’t excel as a healthcare service provider just by providing the right treatment (even though that certainly should be your priority). You’ll also need to offer and provide a great customer service experience to your patients. People in this digital age are already occupied with a lot of information about all their life and work related issues, requirements and solutions, which includes their healthcare needs and wants. This has turned them into customers (rather than just being patients) wanting more. A McKinsey study found that patients have the same expectations from healthcare companies as they do from non-healthcare companies. Your patients now want:

• great customer service
• your deliverance on their expectations
• to make their life easier with the service they buy from you
• great value

So, how do they get to know whether your healthcare service offers these qualities or not? The answer is – the online resources. According to a Kantar Health Report, about three-fifth (60%) of millennials view online resources and word-of-mouth referrals (including the social media referrals and recommendations) as the best source for healthcare information. This makes it essential for your healthcare service as well to have a right marketing strategy at place so that whenever your prospective patient searches for a medical care on the internet, it’s you where their search should stop, and not to your competitors.Strategies For Healthcare Marketing Essay.

How Do We Develop a Healthcare Marketing Strategy?

Creation of a marketing strategy starts with creating goals, objectives and the benefits that you intend to achieve from it. After that, we assess all the available resources as well as the resources that would be required, and devise a final strategy about what, when, and how to achieve those goals. Healthcare digital marketing is unique in a way that it provides you the most cost-effective way to reach the most relevant customer or prospective patient at the most relevant time so that you never lose on reaching to your prospective patients in the time of their need. For that, we focus at creating a healthcare marketing strategy that keeps all aspects of your business including your prospective patients and competitors in mind:

If you want to know how exactly we do it, fill in your details below. OR, read on to explore the various elements that go into the creation of a marketing strategy!

We conduct a comprehensive online and offline research based on the geographic, demographic, psychographic, and behavioral information to identify the most relevant target market for you. Then in our marketing strategy, we concentrate all our marketing resources towards grabbing the attention of those relevant customers. Establishing your target audience ensures that we’re creating the right content for the right people. It also helps in achieving efficiency and effectiveness of the marketing strategy.

2. Study your competition

Your target audience is also targeted by your competitors. That’s why we give greater consideration on identifying competitive issues and influences to have a proactive plan and strategy in our healthcare marketing strategy to stay ahead of your competition. We make use of internet, local media such as TV and Radio commercials, billboards or other media, referrals, and data analysis to compile good research on your competition.

3. Internal and external evaluation

We do a SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, and Threats) analysis of your business to evaluate your internal and external environment. By knowing your strong as well as weak areas, and also about the opportunities and threats of the outside business environment, you are better able to determine the best use of all your resources for the best result.Strategies For Healthcare Marketing Essay.

4. Decide your long-term and short-term goals

Most marketing plans or strategies are conceived for around a year, but the best marketing plans are the ones that keep a long-term interest always aligned with the short-term goals of the brand. We evaluate, prioritize, and organize the combination of specific marketing strategies and tactics that will be best suited for you in pursuing your goals.Strategies For Healthcare Marketing Essay.

5. Plan your marketing budget

Marketing is generally concerned with generating and protecting sources of revenue. We make a clear objective and task budget for you that specifies exactly what goals and outcomes are expected. For that, we specify quantifiable and measurable goals, define marketing strategies and tactics (such as brand development or enhancement, advertising, public relations, networking, etc.), evaluate profitability and marketing plan, and launch plan, monitoring and tracking closely to adjust strategies and tactics as necessary to achieve, maintain, or exceed the expected profit level.

Benefits of Having a Healthcare Marketing Strategy in Place

A right website marketing strategy for healthcare industry is the one that focuses on reaching to and bringing in more and more patients to your clinic or urgent care, and on how to maximize your ROI by minimizing the unnecessary expenses on both offline as well as online marketing practices. We call it an ROI-based marketing strategy or plan. The major benefit of having a healthcare marketing strategy in place for your medical practice is that it allows you to anticipate and assess the opportunities and threats, and prepare and build a road map to counter them and find new ways to improve the outcome. Here are some other important benefits of having a healthcare marketing strategy with you:Strategies For Healthcare Marketing Essay.

• Goals and objectives

  As discussed earlier, having a sound marketing strategy helps you know what exactly you’re going to achieve and in what time frame. This saves you from getting diverted from your goals, and also provides you a clear picture of the pace of your business’ growth, and shows how expansive your reach is in the target market.

• Operating budgeting

  It helps you with creating a clear and detailed operating budget for your business in advance. By knowing your expenses, and expected future costs, and forecasted income over the year, you can plan better for all your future business challenges.

• Service line decisions

  When you’ll compare the expected results of your marketing strategies with what you were actually able to achieve, it will give you a complete idea about where it worked and where you need to improve. By knowing where you lack, you can work on improving your line of services in a manner that it certainly yields results in the next run.

• Risk management

  Risk management in business is the forecasting and evaluation of financial risks together with the identification of procedures to avoid or minimize their impact. With a clear marketing strategy in place, you can better manage those aspects of your business.

• Capital planning

  Be it a short-term or long-term plan, a marketing strategy of any duration gives you a clear idea about how to process budgeting resources for the future of an organization’s long-term goals and plans.

The best thing about having a sound healthcare marketing strategy in place is that you can focus more of your time and energy on improving your healthcare practice and leave the rest on the digital marketing team that will work according to the strategy to help realize your short-term and long-term business goals.

The focus on a marketing strategy is important for any company which specializes in providing definite products or services because marketing is the key process not only to promote different products and services but also to contribute to the effective company’s performance and competition within the industry.

In spite of the fact that the main principles of marketing are appropriate to be used in different spheres, it is impossible to state that marketing in relation to the food production has no differences regarding health care marketing.

The view that the processes of marketing hotels or foods are the same regarding the processes typical for the health care marketing is rather naïve because there are many significant differences characteristic for marketing strategies used in various industries.Strategies For Healthcare Marketing Essay.

The differences which can be determined in relation to food production marketing and health care marketing are affected by the challenges of the health care industry. Marketing strategies operated in different industries depend not only on the characteristics of this or that industry but also on the specific demands of the customers or the company’s target audience (Berkowitz, 2010).

That is why, all the associated features and characteristics should be taken into account in order to state about differences in marketing processes. From this point, it is naively to apply the general principles of marketing to the health care industry without references to the specific features of the spheres and companies’ activities because health care marketing is the unique filed which requires the distinctive approach.

Nevertheless, health care marketing is similar to marketing other products or services in relation to relying on the basic marketing principles. Thus, marketers in the health care industry also develop their plans basing on the correlation of such parameters as product, price, promotion, and place (Berkowitz, 2010). Moreover, the process of working out a marketing plan depends on the dynamic development of the industry without references to its particular features.Strategies For Healthcare Marketing Essay.

Health care marketing strategies as strategies used in any other industry can be discussed as oriented to effective competition within the industry, successful use of different advertisements, attracting customers, and improving the brand recognition and reputation. Moreover, many organizations in the health care industry as well as in any other sphere can be described as market-oriented because of the focus on the effective promotion and increased sales.

However, health care marketing is also characterized by a lot of differences while comparing its approaches, techniques, and key points with the principles significant for developing the marketing strategies within the other industries. To begin with, the target market is important for the health care industry without referring to the specific groups of consumers.Strategies For Healthcare Marketing Essay.

Secondly, while referring to customers of the health care industry, it is important to pay attention to the changes in the populations and their demographics as well as to the people’s changing demands and interests in the health care products and services. Health challenges typical for different groups of population are various, and marketers working within the health care industry should respond to different categories of the population and their needs separately (Berkowitz, 2010).

The challenges of the health care industry influence the specifics of the used marketing strategies, thus, any changes in the government health care policies such as revisions of the drug prescription policies or new insurance laws can affect the changes in the marketing environment.

Thus, although health care marketing is based on the general marketing principles, there are many differences in the approaches which should be taken into consideration by marketers.Strategies For Healthcare Marketing Essay.