Medical marketing has evolved dramatically after the Internet revolution, this development has led to an increase in the number of marketing messages and promotional invitations that the patient receives, whether on-ground or online, the patient now finds himself in front of many physicians who provide the same medical service and it has affected his choice.
A simple experiment conducted by a store to measure the impact of the diversity of options in front of the consumer on his purchasing behavior, where the store displayed 6 types of jam in one hand, and 24 types in the other hand, and by measuring the results after 10 hours, it was found that the consumer makes a more active and effective decision when the options are less. While increasing the number of options reduces the number of actual purchases, this result is expressed as “The jam experiment”.
Perhaps the research conducted by Simon Associates Management Consultants on their clients supports this theory, as the company found that some patients are confused by the variety of health services and cannot easily make decisions.
The variety of choices in health services confuse the patient and halt his decision-making process in general.
Writer Barry Schwartz explained in his book “The Paradox of Choice” that many choices in front of an individual may be a good thing on the surface, but it makes him confused and makes him devalue the choices because of the rationale for choosing one option over another.
Likewise, the patient may be confused in choosing the best doctor or health service among all the nominations before him, and he finds himself under a new level of pressure and responsibility to make the right decision making – which is burdening. This is why some people eventually resort to postponing the decision and waiting, perhaps his health condition improves with time, but of course, this wait leads to the deterioration of his condition.
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Being online effectively makes it easy for the patient to pick your choice.
If your services are available successfully on websites and Social Media in particular – since they are the most used by the public – this may contribute to making you among the patient’s first choices when looking for a healthcare provider.
To have a good online presence, you need to grab your audience’s attention and stay in their minds as well as gain their trust to remember you.
How does this happen and when it comes to medical content, most audiences lose interest?
Carlos Machicao, CEO of Wild Pixel Media International, wrote several tips to improve the marketing medical field, including:
Emphasize the importance of psychology and emotions, and using them to write medical-marketing content:
Perhaps the challenge that marketers and health service providers face is that they present themselves and their services in a purely technical and rigid manner. They speak in an unfamiliar language to most of us because they believe that it adds value to their content, but how is the content going to be valuable when it doesn’t grab the reader’s attention? Even experienced marketers made this mistake when they first joined the field of healthcare marketing. This is the result of Creative Anxiety – the fear of failure and presenting bad ideas. As there are some limitations in medical marketing that marketers and healthcare providers must comply with, they always end up adhering to the specifications of safe and traditional content that leads to boring and monotonous online presence.
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To solve this issue, you should understand the emotional motivation of patients, and then you will be able to deliver content creatively. This is done through understanding the behavioral patterns of patients and their needs, then present your services accordingly. Awareness and understanding the way a patient makes a decision can go a long way in being memorable.
Emotions play an important role in the field of healthcare, as our health affects our psychological state, and affects our ability to integrate and interact with those around us. So, we can target these emotions and use them as a way to communicate with our audience in providing medical content simply and honestly. It is the valuable content that reaches the patient and raises his level of awareness about health issues that resonates with him.
Breaking the fourth wall:
This term is spreading in the field of theatrical art and began spreading recently in the cinema. This is to talk to the audience directly and involve them in what is presented to them and this, in turn, attracts their attention and makes them feel important and present. We can use this in medical marketing and go beyond the usual discourse between medical service providers and patients by using a method that grabs their attention – according to their target group – and providing medical content that meets their needs and answers their questions.
Patients enjoy interactive content, such as videos that feel specifically and directly made for them; where physicians speak to them and answer their inquiries or previous patients share their treatment journey.
Do not forget the comments below these videos that also attract patients’ attention because they find their experience in one of these comments, thus creating an emotional bond with this person.
The more boring and less interesting the service provided is to the audience, the harder it is to market it.
As we explained, carefully building an emotional connection with the public can make a difference no matter how monotonous this service is.
In the implementation of Carlos Machicao’s advice, we find, for example, Banque Misr’s advertisement that targeted the youth, giving them hope and the possibility of realizing their ideas, and the EG Bank’s ad that successfully grabbed the youth’s attention by establishing an emotional association with issues they face with the old generation of parents and banking services that do not consider their needs and goals; where the authoritarian father’s character, whose son does not understand metaphorically what other bank services do, broke the fourth wall and gained their attention with the phrase “We created a bank for you”.
Of course, the response will not be timely, and creating demand with the audience is not possible, but the audience will remember them and will be the first choices when they need any of their services.
Medical marketing started to implement Carlos Machicao’s advice. We found the announcement of a cholesterol medication that came to clarify that the level of blood cholesterol depends on the diet and hereditary factors, and resembled foods to family members.
In another drug company announcement about insomnia, Abraham Lincoln, former president of the United States of America, appeared with a beaver talking to a young man who turned out to be characters from his dreams who came to prescribe the medicine because he was missing him because he was unable to sleep and see them.
This is why this emotional bond can always be accessed: We are the audience in the end.
