What are my treatment and therapeutic options? These simple questions form the basis for how medical and healthcare inbound marketing is now working digitally to help patients quickly find appropriate treatment options, as well as helping patients to be proactive in choosing preferred treatment pathways.
Global attitudes to marketing vary considerably, normally depending on who pays the bill. Medicine in the UK has always been very reluctant to allow 'direct to consumer advertising', and all new medicines have to go through a convoluted process prior to being granted a marketing licence.With globalisation, the difficulty for healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies and beaurocrats is that the internet, unless banned by the State is international. This means that UK patients can have access to the same exposure as US patients to direct to consumer advertising.
Most private medical insurance companies limit the level of healthcare that they are prepared to provide in return for your level of premium. It's a case of 'buyer beware' and as ever with insurance companies customers need to read the samllprint. 'You pays your money, you takes your choice'. The NHS naturally finds it very difficult to operate the same commercial terms and there is politcal outrage if the NHS refuses to provide a particular new (seemingly effective) treatment. Instead the NHS has to uses layers of bureaucracy in order to help manage potentially limitless domestic and international demand.
The one thing that the internet means then is that the global patient now has access to all required information on potential treatment options. Some of these options may be available through the NHS or via their policy, or they may be prepared to pay for it directly. This means that everybody is now a potential customer and healthcare companies will need to reach you with their own brand of message. Because if they don't, someone else will.
There have been interesting changes to how marketing has been conducted over the past decades. The seventies were about sales and selling. The eighties saw the rise of the advertising companies. The nineties was the decade of PR and spin, which continued into the naughties and morphed into web promotion.
Attraction is the new Promotion
To a large extent the internet and in particular search engines such as Google has turned marketing on it's head. The emphasis is now on 'pull' as oposed to 'push' marketing and the best form of promotion is now attraction. It is about SEO (Search engine optimisation). Digital marketers now spend much of their time trying to work out what search terms their target audiences are using and providing web optimised content to match these searches, and if you haven't got the right content, you can use web advertising with adverts that only appear for those search terms.
Medical Inbound Marketing - symptoms and diagnoses
In other words, the type of potential customer we are is defined by the search term we use, and this feature is what underpins the whole new marketing approach which has recently been coined the term 'inbound marketing'. In the medical arena, the search term will usually revolve around either the symptom - in the primary care setting, or the diagnosis - in the secondary care setting.
The Patient Forum - and Marketing Segmentation
Good marketing is also about 'segmentation', which means that if you are a healthcare supplier or pharmaceutical company you will want to ensure that not only all your target audiences receive your message, but that you do not waste time and money reaching inappropriate audiences. Again, the internet is providing patients with the same problems (symptoms or diagnoses) to come together in the shape of patient forums, or self-help groups. These groups or patient 'communities' may be the perfect target for a product or service. As a result, Reuters reported only this week that Facebook are working with industry leaders to prepare products to help patients to form virtual communities and to allow highly targetted advertising.
Patient Informed Choice
We now have access to any level of information, as hip surgeon Mr Warwick Radford recently pointed out, "there is sufficient information on the internet to allow you to perform your own hip replacement", although he doesn't recommend it. There is a point where quantity can overcome quality and so the emphasis is increasingly on the need for trustworthy and authoritative sources of information.
