As Covid continues to force healthcare companies to accelerate their digital transformation strategies, the consumer experience has shifted, leaving patients looking to virtually engage with their providers more than ever.
Losing those all-important face-to-face interactions, practically overnight, has forced healthcare marketers to find and expand on new channels of communication; leaning further into digital and data to meet customer needs and gather feedback.
Speaking at a recent round table on digitization in the healthcare industry since Covid, Three Whiskey CEO, Ben Myall, highlighted this fact:
“The role of many channels have changed over the course of 2020. We need to become digital advocates and enhance and extend the way we’re interacting with customers.”
“The role of many channels have changed over the course of 2020. We need to become digital advocates and enhance and extend the way we’re interacting with customers.”
“Necessity has caused us to accelerate this process, but those who embrace it and move forward are going to become the new breed [of healthcare marketer], and those who don’t may find themselves in a trickier situation.”
The truth is that marketers are going to need to adopt a more agile approach to their digital engagement strategy into 2021 and beyond, especially when it comes to customer engagement. Conscious of this shift, a number of digital tools have expanded their offerings to better facilitate the transition into digital, and in order to meet the demands of Covid-era healthcare marketing.
Here are 3 areas of healthcare marketing where technology is fast evolving in order to meet changing needs:
1. Relationship Management
Relationship Management is integral at this time, when the ability to have face to face consultations with health care providers has been significantly limited.
Research has shown that, pre-Covid, in-person consultations was still the primary way customers received information and advice. Although healthcare marketing has been slowly transitioning to digital for quite some time, the almost overnight shift to lockdown measures has sped things up considerably.
New digital tools are popping up to help companies better track, and therefore understand, their complex relationships with customers and their providers, giving a more comprehensive view of their information and allowing marketers to better tailor their interactions with them.
2. Analytics
Analytics and measurement should be a vital part of any healthcare marketer’s lockdown strategy because, without the direct feedback that comes with in-person communications, it’s become even more essential to interpret needs and patterns through digital behaviours.
Information (the more granular the better!) that’s gathered from expanded analytics tool can help at all levels of customer relationship management and content marketing strategy by providing key insight into needs and current gaps in understanding.
3. Data Management
Being able to view and manage patient populations more effectively can provide a major boost for patient experience, smoothing out many common friction points that had only been made worse by a sudden lockdown. Integrated analytics and data tools empower businesses by connecting disparate systems and leveraging data, while also reducing administrative burden.
Being able to view and manage patient populations more effectively can provide a major boost for patient experience.
Tools that provide a more secure and streamlined process for managing data are directly assisting healthcare marketers in improving patient engaging while also helping healthcare companies to make better, data-driven decisions. For example, which additional products or services to invest in, or the types of patients to target in marketing efforts.
In conclusion
It’s clear that, whatever happens next, data and information are going to be central to getting healthcare companies through lockdown and beyond.
With more digital interactions taking place, and more reliance on digital ecosystems, harnessing all this new information to feed back into the process has taken on a new importance.
The healthcare industry of the future is going to depend increasingly data-focused, streamlined and personalized elements to help push them through an uncertain time while maintaining the trust of patients and continuing to nurture their relationships with them.
Photo by Hush Naidoo on Unsplash