4 minute read.
Healthcare services in Australia have changed dramatically over the last 20 years. In today’s noisy and cluttered sector, many medical practices now market their services to attract customers and remain competitive.
If the purpose of your healthcare practice is to attract and serve patients – and remain a sustainable and evolving business — then health practice marketing should be an integral part of your business management.
Medical professionals today face increased competition — and with it, an increasing number of healthcare marketing challenges. In fact, the more options your patients have, the more marketing and reputation-building can make a difference for your practice.
Here are some of the challenges health practice marketing can address:
- Consumers are now more discerning — they want to be informed, to be listened to, and to feel confident in the track record of their healthcare providers.
- Medical professionals pay more than ever for their practices, staff, medical products, and utilities – and need to pass on those increased costs.
- Household budgets are tighter, squeezed by weak real income growth per capita.
- Consumers, especially younger people, are exiting the private health system, where annual premiums rise faster than wages.
- The Medicare rebate freeze means Medicare schedule fees are remaining fairly static.
Establish and grow your health practice through 3Ms
There are three steps to consider when marketing your health practice:
1. Market research
Consider why customers may use your services over that of your competition.
2. Brand messaging
Clarify customers’ motivations to help prepare your key messages. Key messages inform and educate customers and referrers about your practice and its services. They also provide a consistent voice to establish and reinforce your service offering, values and differential points.
3. Media
Use both offline and online touchpoints to engage your customers. These might include your front-of-house service, website, enewsletters, direct mail, brochures, information sheets, videos, social media, and so on.
Our clients
Visit some of our clients’ websites (below) for examples of our work marketing for health practices and healthcare services:
- Advanced Vascular
- Brisbane Eye Clinic
- Brisbane Immunology and Allergy Clinic
- Brisbane Knee and Shoulder Clinic
- CheckUP
- COTA Qld
- LASA Qld
- Dr Nerida Flannery
- QNI
- St Andrew’s War Memorial Hospital.
Our services
Edmonds Marketing provides a suite of health practice marketing services for clients. We help specialist health practices set up, grow and reposition their services by increasing awareness of offering, and driving patient and word-of-mouth referrals among key stakeholder groups.
We tailor the following medical practice services to your marketing needs:
- Communications audit
We review marketing communications activities and assets to assess how well they are helping your practice achieve its goals.
- Brand strategy
We determine competitive brand attributes to develop your brand strategy. This strategy will successfully strengthen your brand’s positioning and provide a robust platform for ongoing communications activities that cut through a noisy marketplace.
- Brand identity development and logo design
We develop consistent, eye-catching, quality logos and brand design materials to increase brand awareness and develop a strong visual identity across all your customer touchpoints.
- Key message development
We identify key messages to clearly communicate and position your specialty offering and engage the attention of prospective customers and referrers.
- Website development
We develop high quality, engaging websites, incorporating up-to-date features with accessible and responsive designs.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
We identify keywords and integrate these into website design, ensuring its optimisation for Google searches.
- Photography
We oversee professional photo shoots to source essential, quality images of your people. This personalises your marketing activities and supports development of your website and other marketing materials.
- Social media management
We develop and maintain an on-brand social media presence online to support quality customer relations and education.
- Collateral development
We produce professionally finished brochures and other marketing collateral.
- Campaign activity
We undertake marketing communications activities that increase your practice’s profile and grow engagement with target customer, referring and stakeholder groups.
- Review and evaluate
We develop a process to effectively evaluate marketing performance on an ongoing basis.
For more:
Find out how health practice marketing can help your business – contact Damien on damien@edmondsmarketing.com.au.
- APHRA Guidelines for advertising regulated health services
- Blog: Marketing for healthcare practices
- Past event: Understanding the marketing mix for private practice and ensuring your marketing is compliant with AHPRA guidelines
- Past event: “Into Private Practice” workshop
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GET IN TOUCH
T: 0447 147 788
E: damien@edmondsmarketing.com.au
Postal: PO Box 473,
Paddington, Queensland 4064.