Dear reader,
I hope you’re doing well.
What is the purpose of marketing? Selling products? Selling yourself? Promoting new ideas? Establishing a relationship with your patient?
Marketing is first and foremost a series of methods to try to draw a potential patient’s attention to an idea, product or service.
Marketing is also finding out the patient’s needs in order to provide them with the appropriate product or service.
Marketing is about giving the patient value and creating a relationship between your patient and your organization.
Is marketing limited to promoting products and services? No. The goal of strategic marketing is to get a better understanding of the customer’s needs, wants and concerns.
Marketing is to listening, creating and persuading.
Marketing perceptions
In my opinion, the majority of health professionals are aware of the fact that, sooner or later, they will have to use marketing and tools in order to make themselves standout in their market.
A healthcare practitioner must use marketing in order to deliver important information to their patient and make them aware of the quality, originality, competences and value of its services.
It is a shame that a large number of professionals believe that “advertising” is equivalent to “marketing”. In the worst cases, some will spend fortunes on advertising and publicity in the hopes of getting their head out of the water and saving their business.
The problem is that traditional advertising agencies will create pretty, and without a doubt very entertaining, ads for their clients without taking the marketing assets of their business into consideration.
Marketing is thus a lot more than just advertising.
For an organization, marketing encompasses any action aimed at satisfying the needs of consumers. Advertising is a form of communication, the goal of which is to attract the attention of a target with the aim of encouraging them to adopt a certain behaviour.
Advertising is only one part of marketing. Modern marketing consists of defining the uniqueness of your business, familiarising yourself with, researching and carrying out the needs of patients, competitors, product positioning, market expectations, etc.
We must stop believing that by investing our entire marketing budget in advertising, the end results will be remarkable.
In the current era, advertising alone is no longer a profitable strategy. However, traditional advertising agencies continue to promise superior results to their clients.
As you can see, a marketing strategy goes well beyond the creation of ads and the traditional model of interruption marketing.
My question to you today is: How do you market your own healthcare service?
I hope you enjoyed this article. Feel free to share your thoughts and comments below.
Take care and see you soon.
Thanks!
Chris