Healthcare Marketing Trends for 2019

Marketing in the healthcare sector has some unique challenges and opportunities compared to other verticals. But even non-healthcare businesses can take advantage of current trends in this sector.

Long-term engagement is the name of the game

Creating lasting relationships is a major goal of most marketing programs. Healthcare marketing is no exception. While you might think of healthcare marketing as simply a doctor’s office or dentist’s attempt to attract and maintain clients, there are other facets of the industry that also fall under this umbrella.

Healthcare publishers might reach individual consumers via universities or conference sponsorships, some relying heavily on this type of networked marketing to make sales. Pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers might take entirely different tacks when marketing their products to consumers.

And while a huge chunk of healthcare marketing is business-to-consumer focused, there is also a lot of B2B action. Insurance companies, hospitals, and other entities might foster relationships with local businesses in order to reach large groups of potential clients instead of targeting individuals.

Whatever your approach as a healthcare marketer, there are some prominent trends taking place in the industry that you should know about.

Relationship is not just a buzzword

Making a connection with your buyers is critical in the healthcare vertical. Keeping people engaged with your company is crucial. There are myriad ways to do this, but technology is taking center stage right now for this piece of your marketing puzzle.

Patient portals are a great way to keep clients engaged with their health and with you as a caregiver. These tools have been around for a while, but are constantly improving. Keeping people in the loop with their data – and your business – is easy to do with a quality system in place. It doesn’t get much more personalized than individual health information, and personalized content is the best way to keep people engaged.

Harness the power of search data

You’re familiar with web search. It’s been around since the dawn of the internet and search engine sites like Google are the starting point for most people when they take to the web.

Google’s predictive search strings – you know those auto-complete options that pop up when you start typing something into the search bar? – those are based on an incredibly powerful data set. Google is aggregating the most searched for data strings and serving those up as search suggestions via those little auto-complete options. What this means for marketers is you can actually find out what terms and questions people are searching for answers on JUST BY KEYING SOME PHRASES INTO GOOGLE YOURSELF. This can be a hugely powerful means for creating content that people want to know about.

And this is definitely not limited to healthcare marketing, all marketers have the power to open a new tab and quickly learn what users are searching in Google just by typing in some words related to their industry. There are also services that will compile this data for you and give you comprehensive packages of information that you can build your marketing content on top of. Once you know what people want to know, you can position your company to be the place they find those answers.

Spend wisely

Today’s proliferation of data means that as a healthcare marketer (or any other marketer, really) you have the tools at your disposal to really target those individuals and groups who are a perfect fit for your product or service. You can reach the people who will most benefit from your offerings and who are ready to buy. With the available capabilities for capturing history and predicting future behaviors, you can dial in all of your marketing dollars to reaching those who are most like likely to buy. Gone are the days of needing to spend money blasting your marketing widely and hoping for a decent return on that investment. With strong data, you can trim your budgets and market with efficiency.