Marketing for Multi-Location Healthcare Practices
A Guide for Marketing Success
We don’t have to tell you how tricky it can be to create a successful marketing plan for one medical practice, let alone several. While it can feel daunting to align messaging, websites, campaigns and more for multiple locations, it can be done!
Our medical marketing guide will walk you through the steps you need to take to take on the unique challenges that face multi-location healthcare organizations, and build a stellar marketing plan that allows you to connect with new locations, employees, and patients.
If you’re looking for additional help, be sure to sign up for Moxie Tonic’s comprehensive multi-site healthcare marketing roadmap.
Moxie Tonic’s Medical Marketing Tips
INTRO
How is Marketing for Multi-Location Healthcare Different Than Other Marketing?
In addition to the challenges that come with marketing healthcare in general, the marketing strategy for a multi-site healthcare organization brings on added layers of difficulty. Not only are you doing B2C marketing–trying to attract new customers for your practice or assisted living facilities, you’re also doing B2B marketing–attracting new practitioners, practices, and locations to add to the organization.
As such, you need to establish a two-tiered marketing approach. Starting with foundational branding and messaging work that applies to all aspects and people in your organization, you then need to apply that foundation in different ways to your distinct audiences.
We’ve found that when multi-site healthcare organizations skip the foundational work and go straight to marketing, they end up feeling like they’re herding cats. Their efforts are chaotic at best and expensively ineffective at worst. Messaging varies from location to location, customer experience ranges wildly, HIPAA violations abound, and the entire organization comes across as hasty and unprofessional.
We’ve created this guide to help market your medical organization and avoid that fate. No matter where you are in your marketing efforts, we’ve collected fantastic information and resources to help you make the most of your marketing dollars.
Before we begin, here are a few things to keep in mind:
Who is this guide meant for?
This guide was designed for marketing and business leaders working for healthcare organizations with more than one location under a united name and management.
These can include:
- A single dentist with more than one location
- A dental service organization (DSO)
- An assisted living management company
- A speciality healthcare organization with multiple locations such as:
- Dermatology
- Mental health services
- Chiropractic
- Physical therapy
- Sleep and airway
- Etc
Who is this guide not meant for?
If you are a solo owner/operator (such as a dentist with a single practice or a chiropractor with one location) this guide will be less helpful for you.
Likewise, if you are a lease operator for a healthcare organization, this guide does not speak to your specific needs, though it could be useful to your corporate marketing department.
Let’s dive in!
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Align Marketing to Your Health Organization’s Goals and Objectives
It’s likely that your organization already has clear goals for revenue, acquisitions, and more. But are they tied to your marketing strategy?
If you work in an assisted living organization, for instance, and your goal was to reach 100% capacity at all of your locations, your marketing strategy would be very different than if your goal was to add 2 new locations by the end of the year. Likewise, if your goal was to accomplish both, but your marketing only supported new resident acquisition, you would be missing important marketing opportunities to help support the goal of buying locations.
The first step for any marketing plan is to look at the goals and objectives for the organization overall, and to ensure that marketing will support those goals.
We’ve found that clearly defining your target audiences also greatly helps the process of healthcare lead generation. While many companies may have created buyer personas for their B2C customers, it is also extremely helpful to create personas for your B2B audience. Keeping your goals in mind, decide what kind of practitioners, offices, or locations you’re looking to connect with–their culture, earning potential, current client base, personal career goals, and more–and tailor your marketing to those people.
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Define Your Multi-site Healthcare Organization’s Overarching Brand
Your organization’s brand is more than just a logo or colors.
Establishing a clear brand makes your job as a marketer infinitely more simple. You have clear guidelines that will unify how the company looks, sounds, and feels, and you can replicate it easily across your channels and funnels to attract patients, residents, locations, practitioners, and more.
Our favorite method for establishing a brand and clear messaging foundation is the StoryBrand Framework. In fact, it’s the first thing we do with every client! Using the framework that positions the customer as the hero of their story, you can create a brand that attracts, engages, and delights new and existing customers both.
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Establish Your Multi-Location Healthcare Organization’s Overall Marketing Process
When thinking about what needs to go into an effective marketing plan, it helps to start with engaging your target prospects with three foundational levels of marketing that follow their buying patterns:
Attention
Interest
Commitment
Attention-Level Marketing
We love HubSpot’s clear definition of Attention-level marketing:
“Attention marketing is the concept that marketing is all about capturing and engaging your audience’s attention. This is usually done through non-invasive means, like social media. With attention marketing, you’ll focus on how to capture someone’s limited attention.”
You can use digital tools like your website and how (and when) you appear on web searches to help grab the attention of people who are looking for your services.
Microsoft found that consumers have an average attention of just 8 seconds. That’s not a lot of time to get in the information your audience needs to see. Even worse, that number is dropping. That’s why it’s so essential to have your digital assets fine-tuned to give consumers EXACTLY what they want to see.
This is where tools like a fine-tuned website, updated Google My Business profiles, targeted, search engine-friendly content, and paid search are key.
Interest-Level Marketing
After your customer discovers your services through attention-level marketing, it’s up to you to keep them engaged and interested in your company. They’ve officially entered the interest-level of your healthcare marketing strategy.
“Interest-based marketing is the multi-channel engagement of your customers with individually tailored messages and experiences, powered by big data and smart machines. It blurs the lines between customer service and marketing, combining the reach of campaigns with the personalized touch of one-to-one interaction.”
There are many ways that you can keep your audience engaged and learning about your company. From an active social media profile to customized email marketing and nurture sequences, you want to stay top-of-mind, so that when they decide to move forward with what they need, you’ll be the first provider they think of.
Commitment-Level Marketing
Once your audience takes the next step and books an appointment, they’ve moved to the next level: commitment. While it may seem like your marketing job is through, it’s really not. Why? Because just one visit is not enough. You need to nurture your relationship with the customer so that they become not just one-time visitors, but life-long customers.
While coming in and getting the services and results they want is part of the equation, your current customers are also the source of perhaps the most effective marketing strategy in healthcare: referrals.
And this goes for both tiers of your marketing–happy providers will refer other providers to your organization, just like happy patients or residents will refer their friends and family to the individual locations. That’s why client success stories and case studies are vital to this stage of marketing. (Bonus: Download our guide to Creating Client Success Stories that Convert)
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Build a Repeatable Marketing Plan and Align Locations
Once your marketing plan is established, you can create templates for marketing that each of your locations can use. This is especially helpful when onboarding new locations–clear, easy-to-follow roadmaps that will get them up to speed with the rest of the organization.
New locations may also bring with them a wealth of marketing resources and assets. That’s why it is especially helpful to perform a full marketing assessment of each location. While you will have to adjust existing assets to align with your brand, repurposing existing content can save you time and marketing dollars overall.
To round out the marketing templates for each location, it is essential that you train each location in the proper use of the organization’s brand–from colors to logos to phone scripts. Keeping a tight lid on the brand consistency will help give your organization the connective tissue it needs to come across as an effective, unified solution to the customers’ problems.
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Overcoming Challenges in Healthcare Marketing
As a multi-site healthcare organization, you already face significant challenges in your marketing. Here’s a few more that you may bump up against both internally and in the industry:
Reporting
There is a large disconnect between marketing software (CRMs) and the practice management software you use in your medical specialty. For better or worse, your practice management software is industry-specific, with few integrations for more general marketing applications. This means that there can be a drop-off with reporting when customers move from prospects to actual patients.
Training
The practitioners you work with (that first tier of customer persona) are trained providers, not marketers. This means that you need to include training to each location so they can properly follow your brand and marketing guidelines and not go rogue and muddy the waters.
Executing of Brand/Messaging
Many multi-site healthcare organizations that we’ve worked with have had pieces of their brand established, but not all. Some organizations might have the second tier of marketing–acquiring new patients–down pat, but don’t have materials for promoting themselves to new locations, or vice versa. Because you have so many different buyer personas, it’s essential that your brand and messaging strategy covers it all.
HIPAA
While government patient privacy regulations are important and essential, it can create extra hurdles in marketing. Once a prospect becomes a patient, there are suddenly intense restrictions on how you can communicate with them. We’ve found that segmenting email lists is absolutely essential: one list for opted-in prospects that focus on marketing, and one list for current patients that focuses on education.
Differentiation
Another industry-wide challenge in healthcare is that medical specialties offer essentially the same services. How do dentists, for instance, who all offer hygiene appointments, fillings, root canals, and bridges, show that they have something more to offer than their competitors? (We’ve found that the StoryBrand framework and client success stories are both excellent tools to combat this problem)
Finding Support
Whether you’re a healthcare marketing department of one or lead a team of internal marketers, getting outside support to meet your marketing goals can help you overcome challenges and move forward effectively.
Check out our articles on 5 Reasons to Hire a Marketing Agency and Navigating HIPAA Compliance Marketing for Multi-Location Healthcare Organizations
Mariam Nasseri Pelletier | Morningside House Senior Living
Want to see what a marketing agency can do for a medical organization? Check out these case studies:
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How to tell that your plan is working
Chances are, you have to justify every marketing dollar you spend to the c-suite. That’s why it’s so important to have data that backs up your efforts. Tracking your data not only proves that your plan is working, but also shows you where you need to adjust your efforts.
Important numbers to track include:
Clicks
Email list growth
Form fills
Phone calls
And numbers shouldn’t just include the customer’s first interactions with you. In addition to tracking new patient appointments, calculating your patient lifetime value (LTV) can not only help you set goals to increase their value, but also help you track and justify your Marketing ROI for management.
Finally, take a look at your patient referral network. While this can be hard to track in some software programs, it gives a clear indication about the wellbeing of your commitment-level marketing. If patients are referring their family and friends, your branding and marketing efforts are working. If those numbers are struggling, it’s time to take another look at the marketing plan.
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