5 Marketing Mistakes You Can Fix Today

With new healthcare marketing trends rising this year, your team is going to have to make some changes to your strategy. Evolving your marketing practices will help you reach more patients as their behaviors change, leaving your non-evolving competition in the dust.  Last year, we saw a huge spike in patients turning to the internet for health information and that is a trend that is certainly not going away, so let’s take a look at some of the mistakes you might have made in regards to your internet marketing efforts so you can improve this year.

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1.     Massive Marketing Collateral

Gone are the days of successful E-books. They take far too much time to create on your end and now patients are being drawn to more bite-sized content pieces. Smith & Jones calls them “info snacks,” giving patients with decreased attention spans the opportunity to easily consume the most important information you can provide. 

TIP: Buzzfeed has become wildly popular because of their funny and topical content, but also because of the way they display their content with easily consumed lists and quizzes. 

2.     Data Overload

Last year the most consumed forms of content were videos and infographics. Due to the short attention spans of online readers, healthcare marketers have to be able to deliver important data in a concise and easily consumed way. Showcasing medical data in infographic format is proven to make it more memorable and more impactful. 

TIP: Canva has some great infographic templates which you can easily import into a simple video format.

3.    Website's That Aren't Mobile Optimization

People are using their smartphones and tablets more and more to search online for services, so if your website isn't mobile responsive you could be losing valuable leads. Your marketing team needs to focus on how your website content appears on phones and whether or not your content is driving potential patients to connect with you. You should also keep mobile optimization in mind when it comes to your email campaigns. 

TIP: Squarespace websites include free mobile optimization and you can preview and test your web pages and mobile sites with the click of a button.

4.     Unemotional Messaging

With healthcare marketing it can be scary to show too much emotion and be disruptively different, but if your marketing is too general and surface level, you'll go unnoticed. It is a huge mistake to avoid using personality in your marketing or to be too clinical. Some of the best doctors are the ones that get personal with their patients, share stories and can be seen as a shoulder to lean on; as opposed to those that are detached and unemotional. Let your content marketing reflect the kind of care you want to deliver to your patients.

TIP: Connect with patients by sharing information about your staff or physicians on your pages. Go beyond where they got their training; focus on the parts of their personalities that patients can connect with, like favorite movies or inspiration quotes.

(Read More: How to Grow Your Practice's Twitter Audience)

5.     Blah Branding

There are few industries where brand loyalty is more imperative than health care but it is often over-looked. Let your brand speak to the kind of care your organization delivers and be sure to focus on branding in your social media content, blog posts and advertising efforts. This is your chance to stand out from the competition and in medical marketing, people are often afraid to deviate from the norm. Be the one who isn't afraid to switch things up!

TIP: Run a social media campaign or contest to get your patients and community involved with your brand by asking them to come up with a new tagline for you.

Radiology in 2015

In the spirit of the New Year, we checked out Diagnostic Imaging's predictions for 2015. We thought their guesses were quite spot on, check them out below:

Lung Cancer Low Dose CT

• Resolution of details of LDCT coverage between CMS and payers, for example upper end of age limit (CMS says 74, USPSTF says 80).
• ACR will work to ensure implementation of a high quality LDCT program and that service is reimbursed at a level that will optimize access for patients

Imaging 3.0

• Continue to guide radiologists through a time of transition in health care and inform patients, other health care providers, payers and policy makers about the value that radiologists deliver
•  More non-radiology stakeholders (patients, hospital administrators, health systems) will expect radiologists to provide non-interpretive services

Decision Support

• The Medicare Demonstration project yielded fairly tepid support for the notion that decision support help referring clinicians order more appropriate imaging procedures, with the 2017 start date for required radiology order entry decision support, 2015-2016 may produce some new studies to measure the impact
• The ascendancy of imaging informatics: A big part of radiology’s foreseeable future will be about software, not hardware. Across the board – business analytics, visualization, reporting, decision support, imaging sharing – informatics will be key to achieving value, improving quality and advancing our patients’ interests.

Reimbursement:

• Continued cuts in radiology reimbursement, but rate of change will slow in the short term. Practices should use that relative reprieve as an opportunity to focus on how they will be compensated under emerging payment models.
• Declining reimbursement will result in an inappropriate emphasis on productivity, more significant turf battles, and a growing tendency to commoditize the specialty.
• Radiology advocacy will play an extremely important role in combating harsh cuts to reimbursement.

Dose:

• Decreased interest in dose reduction. The topic, which has been popular for the last several years, may have run its course. Radiologists are more interested in diagnostic quality rather than dose reduction.
• Radiologists will push for 3D mammography and dual energy CT techniques, despite the larger radiation doses.

Training and Jobs:

• The first crop of board-eligible radiology fellows will venture into the working world. It will be interesting to see how the new graduates, payors and practices adapt to the change, whether new hires will be given adequate time to prepare for the second part of their examination and how practices will adapt if the new hire doesn’t pass the exam.
• Anecdotally, it seems that the job market is picking up. This provides an opportunity for those who accepted less-than-ideal jobs to seek new employment. Because these hires will already be board-certified, it will be interesting to see if there is a lot of turnover of this particular group.
• The number of applicants for radiology residency is down again this year, which may mean that programs need to start considering cutting down on their class sizes.

Seen here: What Will Radiology Look Like in 2015?