Healthcare Marketing is at a turning point, and my time at the 2018 Healthcare Marketing & Physician Strategies Summit helped solidify my opinion on the matter.

Summits and conventions are great for providing a forum for conversation about how digital is shaping marketing. You have an opportunity to be exposed to experts across the industry and have a dialogue with peers to discuss how they are working on this issue at a high level. These conversations are always very exciting and highly motivating. There are a lot of issues to tackle but we’re all doing it together. We’re in a world where we constantly fight for a patient's attention, budgets are tight and mergers and acquisitions are more and more common. It all adds up to a lot of uncertainty.

If you haven’t had a recent opportunity to engage in a conversation like this, lets chat! If you are still short on time, here are a few of my key “digital” takeaways from the #HMPS18.

Healthcare Marcom teams:

• Are trying to cut the confusion for the consumer. Changes in insurance, service locations, organizational ownership—it’s all confusing. They want to make it as easy as possible for users to find what they want and need.
• Have great ideas but want help and guidance. Leveraging experts gives them the bandwidth to work internally on what they know best, allowing experts to complete the technical side of difficult pieces.
• Have expenses that average only 0.7 percent of Net Patient Revenue – well below broad industry benchmarks of 5-8 percent.
• On average, are outnumbered by total employees nearly 380:1.
• Have a Chief Marketing Officer who doesn’t want to be “sold.” The AOR is a thing of the past. They’re looking for real partners that can execute, and have experience.
• Are looking for benchmarking and value determination through new advertising methods. We’re able to determine ROI and KPIs better than ever before, and trends show digital advertising continues to grow. We can use this to show actual results that can help influence future budgets and allocation.

Relevant and authentic content is still king:

• Mobile optimized experiences and easy to read pages are still necessary—and not always in place or working as hard as they can.
• Consider prevailing search technologies (such as voice search) and using new content tagging methods.
• Teams understand the need for content and are interested in learning about leveraging social, video, AI and AR in new ways to reach consumers in an authentic and meaningful way. But they often don’t know where to start.

We’ll be taking some of these, breaking them down for you and providing solutions in later posts. It’s a lot to cover, so stay tuned.