Automation is one of marketing’s hottest trends—especially healthcare marketing automation. These powerful tech tools enable marketing managers to “set and forget” tedious labor-intensive tasks.
Rather than getting bogged down by frequently asked questions or individually responding to contact forms and emails, marketers now automate these and other typical communications that used to take over their to-do lists. Automations free up healthcare marketers’ time to do what they do best: dream up innovative new campaigns to attract new patients and inform their target audiences about their services and areas of specialty.
As a healthcare marketing manager, you know all too well that there’s additional things to consider when determining whether the latest promotional fad will be well-suited to your sector. Before incorporating new tools into your marketing strategy, carefully consider their impact on patient care, whether they’re compliant with legal requirements, and if they’re compatible with healthcare ethics.
Properly implementing the right tools to fit your specific needs and requirements can boost your digital marketing strategy quite a bit!
The Benefits of Healthcare Marketing Automation
One of the primary KPIs of a successful marketing strategy, whether for a hospital system, a dental office, or new coffee shop and café, is to get the best return for every marketing dollar spent supporting your organization’s goals. Well, when it comes to ROI, implementing automation pays off. Organizations using automated marketing software experience a 451% increase in qualified leads.1
That’s a pretty impressive statistic, and a strong endorsement for incorporating automation into your marketing strategy yesterday. But for healthcare marketers, there’s generally more to consider when crafting your promotional strategies than just their impact on the bottom line. You also need to take into account how these tools will affect patient care. Fortunately, healthcare marketing automation delivers patient benefits in a myriad of ways.
1. Capture Patient Insights
Automation helps medical practices learn more about their patients and prospects. By using the right automation tools, you can learn essential information about your target audience.
One way you can do this is by using a customer relationship management platform. This technology allows you to automatically collect certain types of data, like demographics and behaviors, from your site users.
The more you understand how people interact with your website and content, the better you’ll understand the motivations of your audience. Understanding what your target audience needs lets you craft messaging that addresses their concerns and explains how your services can help.
2. Enhance Patient Experience
Patients want positive experiences during their visits and throughout every part of the searching, scheduling, and billing process. Two-thirds of users say a poor website experience hurts their opinion of an organization.2
Automation ensures a great experience with your practice from the moment they set out to find you online to the follow-up email they receive after their appointment.
3. Incorporate Consistent Messaging
One of the most significant benefits of automation is taking human error off the table—no more fumbling your words on follow-up phone calls or typos in emails and other manually produced marketing. Instead, you can strike the correct, error-free tone every time with automation.
This continuity has another positive side effect. The more consistently you communicate with your patients, the more your brand awareness grows. Patients open emails sent via automation tech 70.5% more than generic communications.3
How to Use Healthcare Marketing Automation
By now, you should be thoroughly convinced automation is a solid choice for your marketing plan. But how do you get started?
1. Consider the Patient Journey
Think about the path your patients take to find you. Most will start their patient journey on your website. When they get there, what will help them? A chatbot to answer common questions? An appointment scheduling tool? Or a series of personalized communications?
Whether you incorporate one or many automations into your digital marketing strategy, the task is far easier said than done. Most marketers struggle to implement impactful automation because they don’t understand the technology’s full potential.4 So take time to carefully consider how and what tools suit your practice’s needs.
2. Let Automation Run Your Campaigns
When most people think of marketing automation, auto-generated emails come to mind. But this innovation is so much bigger than just email communication.
When you’ve determined which automation tools will work for your practice, set them up, and let them run. A few of the most common marketing automation tools are:
- Scheduling appointments
- Sending appointment reminders
- Collecting patient feedback
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
- Pay-per-click advertising
Many of the routine digital marketing tasks that currently clutter your daily calendar can be handled through automation—freeing you up to innovate and create.
3. Assess Campaign Efficacy
Now you know there are many ways to automate your marketing processes, but you need to know which result in the best ROI. Of course, very few of these tools are free! So, to make the most of your defined budget, plan on regularly assessing the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Many marketing automation tools have built-in analytics that show how well they’re performing in real-time. Make a habit of checking these resources regularly to ensure your campaign is operating as intended.
Ready to take advantage of what healthcare marketing automation has to offer? Dreamscape Marketing can help. Call 888.307.7304 to schedule a strategy session today and get started.
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