MARKETING
4 Tips to Begin Discovering New Patients, Services with Intent Marketing
Gone are the days when patients type a simple “doctor near me” into their desktops and await the search results to file away for later. Nowadays, they’re speaking a complex and very specific chains of phrases, often into a smartphone or voice assistant, with the intent to act on that information as soon as possible.
A more common query in 2020 might include “doctor near me who treats eczema, is accepting patients and Blue Cross,” said Carrie Liken, a health care branding expert with Yext. About 82% of health care searches are more than three words long, the firm found recently, with one of her health system clients logging a whopping 136-term query.
Hospital marketers and strategists must find a way to seize upon this “intent” from patients, present answers to these questions and leave a trail of bread crumbs that lead to their services. They’re sitting on massive piles of information to do so and failing to act may open the door for data-savvy disrupters like CVS and Amazon, she added.
“Every time someone asks a question, they’re signaling an intent,” said Liken, who studied health policy at Harvard and worked at Google for eight years prior to joining Yext. “What we need to start thinking about in health care is how we can begin answering these questions and personalizing the experience. Otherwise, you risk losing patients.”
Hospital giant LifePoint Health is one provider that’s attempting to corral search results and convert them into customers. Its intent-marketing efforts have homed in on entryway points into the 88-hospital network. No patient starts their health care journey by looking for a cardiothoracic surgeon, especially not on a billboard. Rather, it’s a zigzagging path of Googling symptoms, reading about diagnoses on WebMD and scouring primary care doctor reviews before eventually arriving at that end point.
Andy Hobbs, Sr. Director, Digital Access & Engagement and colleagues targeted data sources — such as LifePoint’s own website search history, online scheduling activity, Google Analytics and AdWords, among others — to better understand patients’ intentions. In one instance, they found a series of searches for “female OB/GYNs” in the service area of a Virginia hospital. And yet, its practice employed all men in those positions. So, marketing used that information to spur a conversation with the CEO about meeting this need and, at least, better promoting its many female midlevel practitioners.
Hobbs believes such examples are a much wiser marketing dollar spend than a billboard with a smiling surgeon and his digits.
“To drive home our point, we leveraged a vanity trackable phone number on a physician billboard in one of our markets,” said Hobbs, “After 3 months, there was only one call … from the practice manager to say that the number on the billboard wasn’t right.”
Where to Start
At first blush, this may seem like a daunting task. But Liken urged leaders to start off small, pinpointing one or two pain points that keep popping up in searches — whether it's billing or urgent care. Then map a path for consumers and ensure that your system is “discoverable” in typical searches
Most in the health care space are still figuring this issue out, but beginning with the information you already have is always a good first step.
“You don’t have to boil the ocean, but you can start with very, very strategic priorities. A lot of times, the data is already there telling you what you should be looking for,” Liken said.
She offered leaders four tips to begin their journey toward intent marketing:
1. Structure your data based on what you’ve learned from collecting all of this information and rooting out the trends that consumers care about. It needs to be categorized and stored accessibly to avoid wasting the department’s time on analyzation every time a new search trend emerges.
“A lot of health systems are sitting on mountains of data and don’t even know what to do with it,” Liken said. “The more this knowledge can be structured, the more you can start to add elements, take elements away and begin to convert.”
2. Solve for the enterprise, rather than on a hospital-by-hospital basis, so that solutions can spread throughout the system.
“It’s easy to get caught up in the most urgent hospital issue on any given day,” said Hobbs, who leads a team of two in digital access & engagement across LifePoint’s 29-state service area. “Instead, we really focused on driving the strategy and then letting our marketing coordinators and directors at the hospitals implement the tools.”
3. Create a plan, commit to it and execute. It’s easy for marketers to get pulled in a thousand different directions, Hobbs said. Holding that stage-setting planning session at the start of the year to devise how you’ll implement your intent-marketing strategy really helps, and bringing aboard all of the key stakeholders, including the CEO, during the “commit” stage is also essential to ensuring that all are marching in unison.
4. Stick to your access points, such as primary care or the emergency department, where patients make their first foray into the system. Marcomms’ job is to get patients to show up, and clinicians can then work on outlining their next best steps, Hobbs believes.
“This sounds like a lot of work, but our marketing goals are centered on these access points,” Hobbs said. “We think about the access points as the most likely place of contact with our system that will help drive loyalty. Once you get through the door, it’s up to our providers to deliver the care and experience that’s going to keep consumers aligned with our health system.”
This article features interviews with:
Carrie Liken
Head of Industry, Health Care
Yext
New York, New York
Andy Hobbs
Sr. Director, Digital Access & Engagement
LifePoint Health
Nashville, Tennessee
Image credits: istockphoto.com/courtneyk, istockphoto.com/fizkes