Hello everybody and welcome to today’s Knowledge Knugget. We’re going to be talking about telehealth marketing in today’s healthcare market and how to market around telehealth brought to you by One Touch Telehealth. You’ve probably seen the news, there has been a lot of talk about Amazon getting into telehealth, they’re doing big marketing for that initiative.
Walmart has acquired a company that is going to be in the telehealth space nationwide and pretty much every market in the rural community. Best buy talked about being in this space as well as Sam’s club. So there’s a lot of marketing and big dollars being spent on telehealth and acquiring patients. If you’re a healthcare provider, a practice group, or hospital in today’s market, then you need to have a strategy and a plan around your telehealth marketing.
Breaking Down Telehealth Marketing
It’s not only marketing to your patients, but also acquiring new patients as well. Let’s break down telehealth marketing into two buckets today. The first bucket I want to talk about is existing patients. So you have existing patients today that are seeing other doctors through telehealth. They could be seeing them through a consumer-based app like a doc on demand, through their insurance carrier, or any patients that might be going to urgent care clinics. So, you have patients today, that are seeing other doctors through telehealth, and by not implementing telehealth, you’re losing revenue. In addition, you have these big players coming into the market that will be going after your patients to see with their new telehealth technology. So as you can see, you need to put together marketing and communications to your patients that tell them that these are the types of things that you can see us with retell health.
If you’re going to do after hours telehealth and if you want your patients to use you and tech instead of going to a consumer-based app, you should be sending out emails, putting that information on your website, marketing to your existing patients all while telling them which appointment types that telehealth is available for. So if they can do their prescription refills, if they can do labs, if they can do cold flu allergy type things through telehealth, that needs to be very clear top to bottom. From the front desk staff who’ll able to give patients that option, to having that marketing on your website, to sending out emails about it, and communicating all that to your internal patients. In addition, you should be looking strategically at your marketing on how you’re acquiring new patients, making sure your new patient marketing is working.
Telehealth Marketing and Convenience
A lot of your Gen X-ers that are busy professionals are picking their healthcare providers based on convenience. If they’re looking at your website, and they’re thinking of using you for themselves or their caregiver for their baby boomer parent, it may defer them to go to another provider if you don’t have anything on your website about offering the convenience of telehealth. However you’re acquiring patients today, whether it’s through referrals, whether it’s through your website, whether it’s through SEO, whether it’s through social media marketing, you need to be incorporating telehealth marketing in that and mentioning that as an opportunity. A lot of smaller healthcare providers don’t have a lot around their marketing. It’s primarily referral based things. But if you’re trying to expand beyond the physical locations, incorporating telehealth marketing allows you to expand that reach while acquiring new patients and retaining the patients that you have.
Telehelath Marketing with Huge Corporations in the Competitive Space
As I talked about at the first half of this Knowledge Knugget, these big players with big budgets are coming into telehealth, they’re going to be marketing your patients. They’re going to be hitting them over and over about the convenience and low cost of seeing them. We’re talking about for $10 a visit $5 visit, essentially minimal to no cost. So, you want to make sure you’re ahead of the curve on the telehealth marketing side and that you’re being innovative, so your patients aren’t getting poached when these bigger companies come into your market.
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