Personalizing Healthcare Marketing

How Optimizing Your Healthcare Marketing Strategy Can Help ROI

Personal touches make a significant difference, especially when it comes to healthcare. It’s all about connecting genuinely with your audience. By shaping your messages and offers to fit your audience’s needs, you boost their interest, trust, and willingness to act.

Let’s tackle the basics of personalization.

What is Healthcare Marketing Personalization?

Personalized healthcare marketing is about creating tailored messages for patients and healthcare consumers. Instead of a “one-size-fits-all” approach, it focuses on understanding each person’s unique needs, likes, health conditions, and backgrounds. It’s a way of recognizing that everyone is different and ensuring how we talk about health and wellness matches their interests.

These insights help marketing teams pinpoint the right audience and guide them throughout their healthcare journey. Plus, with personalized marketing, healthcare organizations can connect to people without wasting money on ads that reach the wrong crowd or don’t resonate with audiences.

Why is Personalization Important in Healthcare Marketing?

In healthcare, nurturing trust and establishing relationships are keys to attracting, retaining, and keeping patients engaged. Personalization helps healthcare organizations connect better with individuals and groups of consumers in their communities.

When your healthcare organization has a solid, personalized marketing strategy in place, you’ll enjoy:

• Added value from your campaign spend
• Brand experience that reflects the personal nature of healthcare
• Increases in targeted audience engagement
• More high-value conversions (e.g., appointment booking)

Using personalization to enhance your patient experience can also reduce the burden on your frontline staff and call centers.

In addition to a solid business and content strategy, you need a personalization platform to support it all. Many legacy CMS/DXP systems offer personalization platforms, but they’re designed for web developers to set up on behalf of marketers, which means organizations can be at risk of “developer dependency” where only very technical users can design, test, and deploy personalized content or experiences. On some legacy systems, even experienced web developers can struggle with the product architecture and face challenges trying to realize the full potential of the software due to technical complexities.

When selecting a CMS or DXP with a personalization engine, healthcare marketers should look for one that’s fully modern and designed for non-technical users to manage day to day.

Is Personalization Just a Short-Term Trend in Healthcare Marketing?

Google estimates that 7% of all daily searches center on healthcare. That’s over 1 billion searches every day. And 58% of American adults readily turn to the internet for health and medical information. When consumers seek this information, the following statistics highlight the value they place on healthcare marketing personalization:

• 92% of consumers lean toward brands that cater to them with pertinent offers and insights.
• 80% of individuals are more likely to make a healthcare appointment if offered a personalized experience.
• 79% of consumers expect healthcare websites to personalize their experience to deliver more relevant information and services.
• 68% of consumers get frustrated when healthcare websites show or recommend actions that aren’t relevant to them.

These data points emphasize that personalization isn’t a healthcare marketing trend that will quickly disappear. Consumers demand personalization. By integrating a tailored approach, healthcare organizations can craft experiences that align more closely with patients’ needs and concerns.

How Does Personalized Healthcare Marketing Work?

For many healthcare organizations, personalized marketing centers around their CRM and marketing automation efforts. These systems allow for targeting groups of healthcare consumers within a geographic service area in a HIPAA-compliant way based on demographics, history, and their likelihood of needing a particular medical service.

Aligning your website personalization strategy with your CRM-based tactics presents a frequently overlooked opportunity. By establishing this alignment, the website can maintain consistency with other creatives, brand messaging, and actions used across other channels. Geonetric can help create this alignment.

Personalization Process

How can you personalize your healthcare marketing effectively? At its core, personalized healthcare marketing aims to enhance patient engagement and trust by delivering customized messages and services. Geonetric follows this approach:

• Start with a strategic approach by asking “why.” Why do you want to implement personalization? What business outcomes do you want to improve (appointments booked, access to urgent care information, increased blog pageviews per session, etc.)?
• Identify the involved patient audience.
• Collect data for online interactions, surveys, email marketing, feedback, and any other sources you can access for the target audience.
• Analyze the data to identify patterns and segment your patients into distinct groups. Each group shares specific health concerns, demographics, behaviors, or interests.
• Craft targeted marketing campaigns, choosing the right channels and messages for each segment.

Throughout the process, we prioritize the most valuable outcomes and focus on the groups with the greatest potential for improving the results. These actions make certain patients receive information and engagement offers that match their health journey, making interactions more meaningful and efficient.

How Geonetric & Optimizely Can Help

Navigating the digital healthcare world is complex, but the personalization path becomes clearer with Geonetric by your side. Optimizely delivers rich digital experience optimization and multivariate testing capabilities. It has a proven track record of integration and innovation that other CMS’ and digital experience platforms lack.

As the digital engine behind over 500 healthcare websites and intranets, Geonetric understands the balance between personalized patient experiences and the complexity of using other products to achieve your objectives. Marketers prefer Optimizely for its ease of use in traditional and headless deployments without heavy reliance on developers.

One of the biggest challenges of launching a personalization program is simply the time, effort and strategy it takes to get it off the ground. Many marketers worry that by the time they figure out personalization and get it implemented on their current CMS or DXP, the trend will be dying down or that it’s just too much work to make it happen. From creating an overall strategy, setting up data tracking, and defining audience segments to building out the necessary CMS fields and creating personalized versions of content, there’s no doubt making personalization a reality for your organization will take some time.

But with a solid partner and a top DXP that does much of the logistical legwork for you, personalization doesn’t have to be a pipedream. With Optimizely, you can get started with personalization and see the value much faster than other DXPs’ personalization systems, which is why Gartner and Forrester have said it has the strongest upward trajectory in the market. Yet, it’s more affordable than competitors whose capabilities lack differentiation, offer many similar-sounding products, or insist you use their DXP’s built-in personalization platform.

Beyond technical solutions, Geonetric brings a human touch to digital engagements. If you’re ready to elevate your personalized healthcare marketing, discover the Geonetric difference today!

The original version of this page was published at:  https://www.geonetric.com/optimizely/personalizing-healthcare-marketing/