Oct 25, 2024, 16:04 by Sara Foster

This article was written by Phillip Ritchey from LIFT Healthcare. With more than 20 years of digital marketing experience, Phillip is an industry veteran who has helped transform the digital ecosystem in healthcare. Phillip helped define the “Virtuous Circle” of digital healthcare strategy and implementation that comes to life through empathy and stakeholder understanding. He equips hospitals and health systems with human understanding and leverages insights-first strategies that are profoundly impactful and important to healthcare systems today. 

In healthcare, we often act first and listen second. If we adjust our approach and first listen and understand patient needs, the focus shifts from what we want the patient to do, to what the patient needs us to do. This consumer-first orientation is essential to successfully serving our stakeholders and is why an insights-first approach is crucial to healthcare marketing for any organization or service line.

The Benefits of an Insights-First Approach

Investing budget through a more informed and measured lens leads to greater consistency and efficiency in marketing practices. It creates a cohesive thread running through interdepartmental realities and aligns external partners. And, importantly, it helps marketers receive that all-important buy-in from financial leadership.

This approach typically evolves into a new philosophy guiding your marketing practice, utilizing insights to inform a deep understanding of human needs, strategy formulation, and marketing tactics, all centered on the audience. Accountability is achieved through measurement, verifying that the chosen actions based on insights deliver the desired results.

Implementing the Insights-First Research Strategy

To implement an insights-first research strategy in healthcare marketing, we must start by deeply understanding our audience. Here are a few tips:

1. Ethnographic Research: this involves observing and interviewing patients or other stakeholders in their natural environments to understand their behaviors, needs and pain points. This type of research provides rich, detailed insights that quantitative data alone cannot offer.
2. Building Empathy: putting ourselves in the shoes of our patients and stakeholders to understand their experiences, challenges, and emotions. This can be achieved through patient journey mapping, visualizing the entire patient experience from initial contact to post-treatment follow-up.
3. Creating Personas: using the gathered insights, detailed stakeholder personas can be created, representing different audience segments, and helping to tailor messaging, content, and marketing strategies to meet specific needs and preferences.
4. Developing Insights-Driven Strategies: with a deeper understanding of the audience, marketing strategies that resonate with them on a personal level can be developed. This involves crafting messages that address their needs, fears, and motivations, and using imagery and branding that resonates with our desired audience.
5. Integrated Marketing and Communications Tactics: all marketing tactics and communications— from content creation to digital advertising— should be aligned with an insights-driven strategy. This ensures that every action taken by the marketing team is focused on engaging and resonating with an audience.
6. Measuring and Adjusting: measurement is critical in ensuring strategies are effective.

By tracking key performance indicators and analyzing the results, we can determine what is working and what needs adjustment. This continuous feedback loop allows us to refine strategies and tactics over time.

In Conclusion

In an insights-first world, healthcare marketing becomes more than just a series of campaigns and tactics. It evolves into a philosophy centered around understanding and meeting the needs of patients and stakeholders. The future of healthcare marketing lies in embracing an insights-first approach. It’s time to put our patients and stakeholders at the center of everything we do and let their needs guide our strategies and actions. Only then can we truly fulfill our promise to deliver value and improve the healthcare experience.