Essential Elements of an Online Medical Marketing Plan

There are several different ways that the internet can be used for medical marketing purposes. The internet can serve as an advertising medium, a direct marketing channel, an information resource, a customer service center, and much more.
In order to succeed in online medical marketing, you must first assess internal factors such as your strengths, weaknesses, and capabilities. Then you need to size up your competition and lastly, come up with a game plan.

While planning for traditional marketing could take anywhere from six months to a year, planning for online medical marketing is much faster. What used to take weeks to implement offline only takes days online. Give yourself three to six months max to plan your online marketing strategy. This is enough time to integrate online marketing tactics into your overall marketing strategy. When getting started, your best bet is to leverage the internet through your existing marketing plan.
The ten major areas that need to be assessed for you to build an effective online medical marketing plan are the following, in no particular order:

• Goal – Determine what it is you want to accomplish with your online marketing plan. Are you providing health information? Are you building brand awareness? Are you conducting public relations activities? Are you trying to improve customer service?

• Objective – Now you must define objectives that address the goals you set for your online medical marketing plan. You can have several objectives for each goal you set. Objectives are measurable and thus allow you to determine the success of your campaign. If your goal is to generate leads for a new program, your objective can be to do so by encouraging them to visit your website and sign up for a giveaway. Set the objective of generating a specific number of leads in a specific time frame so you can measure the results of your campaign later.

• Target Audience – You need to specify who you are targeting in your online medical marketing efforts. The audience may be the same as the one you target in your traditional marketing campaign or it may be different.

• Marketing Integration – Outline which elements of your traditional marketing campaign you will be integrating into your online marketing program.

• Strategy – Outline your strategy for working towards your goals, objectives, and integration efforts. Determine what offers you will be using online, and if they will be graphically similar to your offline marketing and advertising materials or not.

• Tactics – Specify exactly what types of content you are going to develop and how you are going to deliver it, whether by email, web, download, or newsletter.

• Logistics – Determine what the technical requirements are of implementing and executing the tactics you have defined. You also need to be sure that you have the database capabilities, staffing, and competencies to go through with your marketing plan. If not, determine how you will address your shortcomings and where you can outsource. If you are running an online campaign and expect to receive emails, assign someone to answer all of those emails.

• Metrics – Measuring the success of online marketing campaigns is far easier than with other types of marketing campaigns. Determine what information you want to track, implement a tracking tool, and then collect and analyze the results. Figure out what criteria you will use to measure the success of your campaign.

• Budget – Create an overview of all the different costs associated with developing your online marketing campaign. This includes the costs of developing online content, reworking broadcast materials, and paying programmers, consultants, developers, etc.

• Timeline – When planning a timeline for your online marketing efforts, the shorter the timeline, the better. Set specific dates in your timeline for content creation, beta testing, campaign launch, etc. as milestones.
Some medical marketing campaigns focus on maximizing the potential of the current patient base whereas others focus on recruiting new patients. When you are attempting to recruit new patients, applying the fundamental marketing principle of product differentiation is useful. You must focus on the aspects of your practice that make it different from the competition. Examples of aspects of your practice that may stand out include low cost services, superior customer service, and offering services that competing practices in the area do not offer. However, given the nature of healthcare, it is not as easy for medical practices to focus on these aspects as it is for other types of businesses.

For example, Southwest Airlines may be able to cut drinks and peanuts out from their flight service in order to offer lower cost tickets. On the other hand, doctors cannot give off the impression that they would compromise operational efficiency in order to offer lower cost services. Crafting the right marketing message is very important in the medical marketing arena.