Every successful healthcare marketing strategy starts with a plan. If you’re here, you’ve already taken the first step.  Next, we’ll discuss why a healthcare marketing plan is essential, how you can go about crafting one, and why it’s not an undertaking you want to attempt on your own.

Luckily, your partners at Practis can help you create a custom healthcare marketing plan built around your unique vision and growth goals. With the right marketing methods, you can reach the patients who need your services the most – creating more opportunities to care for more people.

What Is a Healthcare Marketing Plan And Why Do You Need One?

A healthcare marketing plan outlines how a medical practice will promote itself, grow, and achieve its business goals.

A successful medical marketing plan should include the following elements:

• Measurable business goals that a facility wants to achieve through its marketing strategy;
• Detailed analysis of the target market and audience;
• The budget of a marketing campaign;
• Marketing activities and tools to be used for promotion.

Your healthcare marketing plan is a roadmap that helps you execute and measure your marketing efforts over a predetermined period, typically a year.

Though medical practices can technically market without a plan in place, it isn’t recommended. Absent a savvy strategy, your healthcare marketing efforts can do more harm than good, wasting valuable marketing funds or damaging your online reputation.

With a healthcare marketing plan in place, you’ll be able to assess the budget and expected results better.

Your plan will also help you overcome any obstacles, ensuring that your marketing strategy is executed as close to perfection as possible.

If you want your healthcare marketing strategy to be effective, creating a plan is necessary professional medical marketing agency can help you build a tailored strategy that makes your growth goals a reality in 2024.

How To Build a Successful Healthcare Marketing Plan: A Step-By-Step Guide

Building your healthcare marketing plan is exciting and illuminating because it offers valuable insight into your practice and helps you hone your goals. Once your plan is in place, you can market with confidence knowing your strategy is well-built.

#1 Start with a SWOT Analysis

SWOT analysis helps assess your current situation.  SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Here’s what an exemplary SWOT analysis looks like:

A SWOT analysis gives you a better overview of your current position and helps you spot opportunities for crafting a strong, successful healthcare marketing strategy.

#2 Define Your Target Audience

Next, you will define your target market. You can do this by asking the following questions:

• Who are my patients?
• What are their medical needs?
• What are their healthcare habits?
• Where do they live?
• How old are they?

While narrowing your audience might feel risky, it will actually help you reach the right patients at the right time. Knowledge of your target market is invaluable, and it ensures your marketing connects to the people who need it the most.

Best of all, building a specific customer base will help you better communicate your message and craft a more effective and personalized marketing strategy.

#3 Specify Your SMART Goals

With the primary analyses ready, it’s time to state the goals you want to achieve with your healthcare marketing strategy. We recommend using the SMART system here, which calls for objectives that are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Realistic
• Time-bound

To create each goal, start with a basic objective. For example, you might want to increase your number of patients compared to last year. Next, specify how you intend to achieve this goal. In this case, your strategy might include more and better online reviews, a targeted email marketing campaign, or an optimized medical website.

The next step is to get specific with your goal. In this instance, you might want to increase the number of patients by 25% in 2024. Next, specify what this goal can help you achieve, such as helping more people in your community while boosting profits.

Finally, determine whether the goal is realistic and whether you have the resources to pull it off. With that done, specify the timeframe. You might want to achieve a 25% increase by the end of the year, but you can observe smaller milestones along the way, like 5% growth each month.

Setting goals can be exciting, but it’s best to keep it simple. Try to pick 2-3 goals that feel challenging yet doable. Too many goals can easily lead to overwhelm but focusing on a few creates much-needed momentum.

#4 Analyze Key Healthcare Marketing Strategies

Now that you have your SWOT analysis, target audience, and goals, you’re ready to explore specific healthcare marketing strategies.

When it comes to that, there are lots of medical marketing options to choose from, including:

• Healthcare SEO
• Social media marketing
• Paid search marketing
• Email campaigns

Which strategy you choose will be mostly determined by your available resources, target audience, and goals. When considering these strategies, think about how they can help you reach your specific goals and whether they will resonate well with your audience.

Also, think about your resources and expertise. For example, if you want to base your strategy on medical content marketing, the best idea might be to hire a professional healthcare content marketing agency, such as Practis.

#5 Analyze Your Competition

Analyzing the market and studying your competitors is an important step that helps strengthen your healthcare marketing plan. Examine your competitors’ promotion strategies and explore ways to improve upon their methods, position yourself as a trusted authority, and utilize key strategies they haven’t yet adopted.

Such an analysis will help you stay ahead of the competition, ensuring you don’t miss opportunities to better promote your medical practice.

#6 Determine Your Marketing Budget

To set your marketing budget, look at the activities planned and your specific growth goals. Think about the key areas you should focus on, prioritize, and distribute your marketing budget accordingly.

Outline how much you would like to spend on what activity, leaving some wiggle room for potential adjustments.

#7 Establish KPIs

The final element of a solid healthcare marketing plan is establishing KPIs aka key performance indicators. KPIs are crucial for monitoring your marketing strategy performance, ensuring it works properly and provides expected results.

Exemplary KPIs to measure include:

• Return on investment (ROI)
• Website bounce rate
• The number of website visitors
• Social media engagement
• Website’s organic traffic
• Customer retention
• Conversion rates

Establish the KPIs you want to track and measure them from the start of your campaign.

Wrapping Up

As you can see, creating a comprehensive healthcare marketing plan requires a good deal of  time and effort. However, strategic plans are vital for building a bulletproof medical marketing strategy that drives results.

A free Practice Growth Assessment can kickstart your medical marketing plan and lay a foundation for your future strategy.

As an experienced healthcare marketing agency, we’ve established a proven record of helping medical organizations achieve their marketing goals. We will help you execute your marketing plan to perfection, ensuring your strategy drives the best results for your business.

Contact us today and elevate your medical practice through result-driven healthcare marketing solutions.