Previously on our Digital Marketing for Hospital series, we have discussed the basics required to be established prior to designing a digital marketing plan. Building a marketing plan varies depending on the very specific criteria of each hospital that may include: Kind of services provided, hospital’s history, its location, available marketing budget and different medical departments available. Today we will be talking about main points you would need to start preparing for a digital marketing plan for the hospital.

A digital marketing plan is similar to any other traditional marketing plan that requires identifying main points prior to setting execution strategy and tactics. These points would include:

Hospital Market Analysis:

You have to identify hospitals market growth and investments, evaluate different services provided by the hospital and the quality of available medical staff. You have also to analyze your competitors and their market share.

Situation Analysis:

This is a detailed analysis of the current situation of your hospital that would include:

Read also: Healthcare Marketing Strategies – Make your healthcare Organization the patients’ first Choice!

  • Strengths: That differentiates your hospital and makes it unique in the medical field
  • Weaknesses: Problems exist in hospital’s system and need to be developed
  • Opportunities: That externally surround hospital’s external environment and would help in its growth
  • Threats: Obstacles that faces hospital’s external environment and would lead to major problems within the developing process of the hospital

Setting Objectives:

We should ask ourselves an important question prior to performing any marketing process which is: “What are my objectives regarding the hospital’s marketing process?” The answer might be:

  • Hospital’s brand awareness
  • Differentiating my brand among competitors
  • Engagement with my audience and building strong relations with them
  • Increasing my sales rate

Your answer might be one of the previous answers or all of them; therefore you must set your objective(s) accurately.

Setting Hospital’s Vision:

You have to define which image you would like to set in your audience minds regarding your long end goal and what you are aiming to accomplish.

Marketing Plan Design:

Let’s first learn more about the importance of establishing a marketing plan:

Read also: Healthcare Marketing, When Doctors are the audience

Five Myths about Medical Marketing

– Creating the required strategy and tactics to achieve our objectives and goals.

– Developing of hospital’s services so as to gain maximum patients (Clients) satisfaction.

– Reaching your clients effectively and efficiently through helping them to learn about your services and aiding them to detect the reasons why they should use your offered services.

What are the main components of a marketing plan?

Every marketing plan is composed of four components:

  • Products and Services:

    You have to differentiate the hospital’s services from all others of competitors; Thus your potential customers including patients and everyone seeking high quality medical services should learn that your hospital includes an experienced and well trained staff that uses up to date treatment protocols. So you have to detect your very special features regarding your services that will make you patients’ first choice.

Read also: Do doctors really need a facebook page?

You always have to ask this question: “What is my unique selling point?”

  • Pricing:

    After you have decided which services you would present to your patients, you have to detect the price for each service.

You can estimate the prices through calculating all of your related costs added to a reasonable profit. You can set any  prices as you like but these prices should be compared to your competitors’ and they must be related to your customer’s segments regarding the purchasing power.

You have also to detect your estimated return on investment through a certain range of time and learn how to effectively measure it.

  • Sales & Distribution plan:

    This part is more concerned with presenting real products but it can be applied on hospitals through:

    • Detecting the need of the hospital to hire sales representatives that would be responsible identifying your services to certain segments of your customers. (Example: Companies)
    • Establishing sales strategy that would measure the effectiveness of sales processes.
    • Determining the need of your sales team for specific training as they are working in medical field.
    • Added to direct sales methods, what other options do you have to reach your potential customers? (Example: Digital Marketing)

  • Promotion and Advertising plan:

    This plan is concerned with the channels you are going to use to deliver your unique selling point to your patients. Patients and healthcare seekers are subjected to huge amount of different advertisements so you have to select the best channel that suits your work carefully so as to appear to your right customers within the right time at the right place.