4 Healthcare Marketing Myths to Ignore

We are in the health care profession, so naturally, we need to market our services to find new business. However, there are some myths about health care marketing that we would like to dispel here: 

#1 It Is Immoral To Market in Health Care

This myth comes from the belief that advertising your health care services is about influencing patients with misleading or biased information. That is what happens in some marketing campaigns in other industries. Many of those advertisers just want to sell the product and do not have the consumer’s interests at heart. 

This is not how it is or should be in health care marketing. We use marketing in our industry to have an informative conversation with potential patients. Our efforts are about providing patients with understandable answers on complex medical subjects. With effective healthcare marketing, our goal is to just inform your potential patients with highly valuable blog posts and other premium content. Once they have that information, they will then be able to make an informed choice on the best person to serve their medical needs. 

#2 Health Care Marketing Wastes Money

People with expensive healthcare costs wonder if the hospital or provider would reduce their costs, maybe the bill would be less. Many people think that the money used for marketing could be used to lower appointment costs, buy new equipment or do more clinical studies. 

This is understandable, but in reality, the Internet has driven down the costs of health care marketing a great deal. A health care practice no longer needs to devote large sums to marketing every year for new patients. 

While you can pay a lot on expensive Plastic surgery PPC campaigns, social media is mostly free. Blogging through a healthcare marketing agency is actually a very affordable way to inform potential patients and to make the first contact. 

#3 Health Care Marketing Takes too Much Time

Medical practices and hospitals do have many vital tasks each day that involve taking care of patients. Running a good marketing campaign in your office can indeed take some time, but with the many tools and services and providers now available, this time can be really minimized.

Actually, a lot of criticism of healthcare marketing involves the old-school methods of TV commercials and billboards. Modern, effective, Internet marketing in healthcare allows you to increase your patient load without much additional effort. A lot of it can be done on autopilot by you and the company that you work with. 

Your healthcare marketing agency can work with you to come up with informative posts on topics that will drive more clients to your health care practice. 

#4 I Don’t Need to Market for Patients

Referrals are an excellent way to gain new patients. However, this paradigm has changed a lot in recent years. Bigger hospitals and health systems are absorbing more primary care offices, so the referral dependence may come back to haunt you. Once practices are part of the bigger health care system in the area, all the referrals are going to stay inside that network. 

Example: If 60% of patients come from referrals from 10 other doctors, what will happen if four of them join a big health care system? This means that 40% of your patient volume will dry up.

This is why having a good health care marketing strategy online can help you to keep you appointment schedule full. 

As the health care economy continues to evolve, you will definitely want to be regularly marketing online for new patients. Just do not pay attention to the marketing myths above and you will be well ahead of the game.