Marketing Strategies for small healthcare setup in urban population

1.Business Objective:

In today’s world where trends are evolving and recasting at lightning speed, where everything needs to be advertised be it from a pin to concrete housing societies. It is naive to wait for a product or service to grow organically.

To put oneself out in the open, publicizing the proficient qualities and what makes one stand out from the counterparts is the need of the hour.

To commensurate the fast-growing population and its health needs, apart from tertiary and super specialty healthcare centers, there is an equal requirement to set up small and medium-sized healthcare set-ups. Which should be accessible, affordable and at the same time should not compromise at the quality of service being delivered to the client.

However, there are many challenges faced by these Health Care set-ups like rising in expectation of patients about their poor service delivery and increased competition from established healthcare brands or private set-ups.

There was little focus on marketing by Health Care Providers before the mid-1900s because they did not realize the need for it. Most Hospitals were “Monopolies” or “Oligopolies” in their Markets. (Thomas, 2005).The hospitals determined both the price and supply for services. Patients had little or no say in the whole matter.

2. Target Audience:

This is in addition to the fact that the healthcare industry is now experiencing a new dawn, where the patients have become more informed about their health needs and are no longer submissive to their physician’s instruction only but play a more active role in their healthcare-related decisions.

With the evolution of internet services, social media and drop in data prices, the entire world seems to be on the palm, thus making it essential for healthcare set up to have a solid presence on social media thus generating awareness and creating buzz regarding the quality of services being delivered.

3. Competitive Research

It is imperative to realize that to retain old patients as well as to increase the footfall of new patients healthcare set-ups should bring in to use Hospital Marketing and Public relations.

With the advancement in technology, it is unavoidable for hospitals to promote their services through multiple channels. While the IT adoption has phenomenally increased in the large multi-specialty hospitals and hospital chains, the smaller hospitals are still struggling to match up the speed.

One challenging task that every hospital, new or old, small or big, is facing today is the task of marketing itself. With increasing competition, healthcare marketing is undergoing a transition from service providers’ dominance to service seekers’ preference.

On one hand, where well-established hospitals and set-ups have a dedicated department and funds allocated for their promotion and marketing, small and medium-sized healthcare set-ups suffer colossally.

4.Tracking and Monitoring

Marketing and PR:

Though with clearly distinct roles to play and distinguished goals to be achieved, Marketing being the Promotional Mix and PR being Communication Mix. The truth is, you can’t market without doing a little PR, and you can’t do PR without a little marketing. The end goals — selling products and making people love a company — are too intertwined. If your services are terrible, your set-up probably won’t be viewed favorably by the public, and if people aren’t connecting with your overall brand, they’re probably not going to visit your hospital.

The well-defined objective is a prerequisite for creating an effective marketing strategy. S.M.A.R.T. is an efficacious tool for clearly defining the marketing strategies and helps in analyzing its effectiveness.

Challenges faced by small and medium-sized healthcare set-ups:

Lack of resources- The paucity of sufficient resources and its improper utilization are observed when it comes to small-sized healthcare set-ups. Thereby it affects the overall hiring of competent staff, be it doctors, technical, paramedical staff or dedicated team for marketing.

So marketing has to be planned within the scope of resources. Data available at the hospital need to be gathered, observed and analyzed to draw inference which would help to strategically plan the resources available.

Lack of infrastructure- To adopt the latest medical technologies or to increase the scope of services delivered, there is a very limited scope to expand and redesign the infrastructure, when it comes to small and middle-sized hospitals relative to large hospitals.

Manpower Planning-Scarcity of sufficient dedicated staff is a major concern for small-sized hospitals, whereas their proper utilization is also a demur by the management. Under-utilization as well as over-burdening the staff leads to poor output and inefficient services. It is impertinent to comprehend their skills so that they can be utilized up to their maximum efficiency, also keeping in mind, one cannot burden the existing staff by forcing them to wear multiple hats.

One way to analyze the efficiency of the staff is an effective customer feedback system. This can be though follow-up phone calls or mobile-based systems.

Customer Feedback- There’s an important lesson here for healthcare marketing. It seems the retail world is increasingly hungry for consumer feedback. A reliable measure of customer satisfaction — how products or services meet or exceed customer expectation — is a vital marketing barometer. It helps to manage and improve the business, especially the patient experience.

Though the customers are getting aware of the recent technologies and latest trends, yet there is a major chunk of patients coming from a rural background, who aren’t well versed to use the SaaS form of customer feedback.

With a patient feedback system in place, one can monitor reviews, ask for details about a specific episode of care and resolve issues that may motivate patients to write a positive, follow up review. Hence that would be added advantage for positive word-of-mouth form of marketing.

For a small healthcare set-up, it is an arduous task to record and transcribe each post-discharge/service call. So, one cost-effective way to receive feedback is to utilize the existing staff to make follow-up phone calls to receive feedback on a Likert scale of 0–5, with “0” being highly disappointed and “5” is completely satisfied.

Data Management

Hospitals, small or large, create a large amount of data every day and all the data must be captured, analyzed and transcribed to improve the overall hospital administration as well as patient care. Small hospitals need it all the more because every penny spend is important and every patient is crucial. It is essential to invest some resources in the development of software that would help capture the data that would further help to analyze it.

 Keeping in mind the challenges faced by the small healthcare set-ups, achievable goals within the scope of hospitals, need to be planned and monitored to gain the desired results. A 360-degree performance overview along with information, insights, and impact of the Key Performance measures can help the stakeholders in taking more informed strategic decisions.