Healthcare organizations must communicate with their audiences to ensure their services are at the top of patients’ minds when they need medical care. However, as a healthcare professional in an ever-changing communications landscape, you may not know how to reach your audience. Or, you might wonder, what are the best ways for me to connect with previous, current, and potential patients?

In this guide, we’ll answer that question by discussing the best strategies for reaching your healthcare organization’s audience. With a proper communications and marketing strategy, you’ll develop thorough processes for this key component of practice management.

The Foundation of Healthcare Marketing

For most for-profit or nonprofit organizations, marketing is a way to tell the greater community they have something worth paying attention to. Businesses try to generate excitement over their products and services to convince you to buy them, and nonprofits want to boost awareness of their cause and persuade you to donate.

What makes healthcare marketing and communications different? People already know their health is important. Instead of convincing your audience to pay attention to their health, your focus should be making healthcare more accessible and empowering patients to take their medical care into their own hands. There’s even a quantifiable scale that helps you measure patient engagement in healthcare—Patient Activation Measure (PAM).

Remember this concept when developing your strategy for reaching out to your healthcare audience and drafting messages to ensure your communications resonate.

1. Understand your target audience.

The key to successful patient outreach and marketing is to create messaging that resonates with your audience. To do that, you must understand who your audience is. Use your first-party data to determine which channels to focus on and what messaging to use.

Consider key details such as:

• Age and gender. Individuals of different ages and genders may have health concerns requiring different outreach and messaging. For example, you may send annual reminders to book gynecology appointments for female patients.
• Family size. Individuals with children also have healthcare concerns that differ from other patients. For instance, parents may appreciate reminders for needed vaccinations.
• Geographic location. Most patients live close to their medical organization’s facilities. However, double-check your data to explore how you can more effectively reach patients who live farther away.
• Income level. Income level may affect a patient’s access to healthcare services. For instance, high-income individuals may seek elective procedures or specialized care, whereas low-income individuals may be more concerned about affordable options and basic medical care.
• Communications preferences. Aside from the types of messages to send, you should also consider how to send them. Once you know your audience’s communication preferences, ensure patients read your messages by sending them through the channels your audience frequents.

If you lack key information about your target audience, conduct a data append to fill in any gaps. These additional details will also help you narrow your audience, develop more precise segments, and discover more effective forms of outreach.

2. Implement a patient portal.

One of the best ways to reach your audience and boost healthcare awareness is by implementing a patient portal for your healthcare organization and encouraging patients to use it. These tools usually provide the following capabilities:

• Appointment scheduling. Patient appointment scheduling features enable your audience to book appointments with providers conveniently through the online portal.
• Access to personal health information. Patients can access their healthcare records, test results, and other personal health information anytime.
• Two-way patient-provider communication. Through the portal, patients can send quick questions about their specific healthcare conditions or care to their providers, who can then respond.
• Billing and payment management. Make it easy for patients to pay their medical fees by offering online billing through the patient portal.
• Access to health education resources. Some patient portals allow healthcare organizations to upload and provide health education resources, empowering patients to learn more about their health.

Investing in practice management tools helps you reach out to your audience and stay connected, improving their healthcare outcomes and experience with your organization. A tool with an intuitive, user-friendly interface allows your audience to take charge of their health in a simple, convenient way. These features foster a strong community, creating a more connected medical and healthcare experience.

3. Offer telehealth.

Telehealth is a way for healthcare providers to offer medical services and consultations remotely. It provides more accessible healthcare to patients, as it’s available when patients can’t physically go to the clinic. Plus, it’s generally a more cost-effective option; telehealth usually costs less than attending an in-person appointment.

Offering telehealth empowers patients to take their healthcare more seriously and seek help, especially for minor issues such as prescription renewals or confusion over lab results. It gives patients another convenient avenue to communicate with your organization and improve their health outcomes.

According to PracticeSuite, many practice management software solutions also offer telehealth capabilities. Just ensure you invest in a solution that keeps patient data safe and adheres to healthcare data governance rules.

4. Optimize marketing channels to reach your audience.

After you’ve implemented key tools that empower patients to take their healthcare into their own hands and contact you, you can focus on ways you can reach your healthcare audience. In particular, optimize your marketing channels and messages to resonate with your patients.

Here are the common marketing channels healthcare organizations use to message their audience:

• Website. Your website should serve as an all-in-one information hub for your organization, containing key pages that provide all the details patients might want to know. Focus on a clean, accessible design that makes it easy for web visitors to read through your page and navigate where they want to go.
• Emails. Use the details you obtained through audience research to personalize the emails you send to your audience. Remind them of routine tests, vaccines, and other relevant events or activities. You can also remind them you’re there if they need care.
• Text messages. Due to their short character count, healthcare text messages are best suited for short reminders of upcoming appointments. If you want to reach patients with a longer message, you can include the link to the patient portal and ask them to log in to view the message.
• Social media. Like your website, social media can reach your entire community. Use this space to position your organization as a trusted healthcare provider by featuring top physicians, offering general healthcare tips, discussing your grateful patient program, and promoting upcoming events.

When communicating with patients, adhere to HIPAA rules and data regulations. Remember that emails and text messages aren’t considered secure forms of communication, as they aren’t encrypted.

Don’t include sensitive health information in these messages; instead, direct the patient to their health portal where you can provide those details. For example, your message might say: “You have new test results from your provider. Please click the link below to log in to your healthcare portal and view the results.”

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Although outreach and marketing for healthcare organizations can be more complicated than for other businesses, they’re still a key part of business operations. You want patients to consider you a trustworthy healthcare partner so they feel reassured that their care is in capable hands. Follow an outreach strategy reinforcing that feeling and invest in tools that keep their data safe and private.